Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

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Considering that alcohol is, by far, the most dangerous drug and it's completely legal, I think there's something to be said for your point.

I gotta say though, it's sort of complicated when you're talking about legalizing things that are already legal as prescription drugs (like opiates and benzos). Alcohol is different because it doesn't really have any medical use outside of disinfecting things (it's fairly terrible as an anesthetic or as a tranquilizer), but there's something kind of weird about having former prescription drugs just be legal over the counter. How many people might bypass their doctor and start using strong opiates for pain that might not need it and end up in a bad spot?

I don't think you can go so far as like w/ alcohol where you just show an ID and buy whatever you want, but it does seem like there needs to be some way to ensure the product is safe. Maybe a compromise might be some sort of free testing kits, or something like narcan on hand in a safe space.

Sydney and a large number of other cities about the globe have injecting centres and decades of public reporting on crime, death, etc. in the vicinty of such centres.

They're an interesting middle ground - dedicated medical centres that allow users to inject with clean needles, test drugs for purity, and have narcan and crash carts available for complications.

You arrive, show ID, inject your drugs, chill for 20 minutes or so, and then leave.

The long term results are no increase in crime, reduction in death from overdose and dirty needle infections, HIV, etc, improvement in drug quality (now that the users can readily test quality there's more discernment in the market and a reduction in blatant over cutting bad mixes into the illegal supply).

Public drug use | shooting up is still illegal - this is reduced as there is a centre to go to, etc.

One other benefit is being able to easily and routinely survey drug users and adapt public policy to changing situations on the ground, early detection of changes in illegal supply, etc.

They cost money to run, they save money on reduction in public funds spent on the problems they reduce.

It sounds like the primary benefit is reduced ODs for the drug addicts. Does it do anything to benefit productive members of society? Do libraries go back to to being libraries? Do parks once again serve as a place to relax and recreate with family or friends? Does it clean the sidewalk and make them disability-accessible again? Does it stop the property crimes that are committed to buy drugs?

It's an absurd level of misdirected empathy to redirect such massive parts of the society's collective effort to benefit a few people who had some amount of agency in ruining their own lives.

How it worked in Amsterdam in the 90ies is that the government also started to provide the drugs (Methadon) for the heroin addicts… The addicts were responsible for lots of petty crime in order to fund their habit (stealing car radios, muggings) and this decreased. So this helped make the city a more liveable place, not just for addicts.

Alcohol is only more dangerous because so many more people use alcohol over hard drugs. When you look at the per capita rate, hard drugs kill more people.

Another poster did the math here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38608506

Alcohol withdrawal is potentially much more dangerous than withdrawal from most other substances. Withdrawal is always miserable of course, but seizures, blood pressure, elevated pulse, hallucinations, etc. can be fatal in the case of alcohol without treatment. You also have to consider that the first product that alcohol is metabolized into, acetaldehyde, is extremely toxic, attacking multiple organs and also causing lovely things like dna damage.

The thing about most (not all) illegal drugs is most of them have some sort of positive usage outside of abuse. Opiates can be effective for pain, benzodiazepines for acute anxiety, stimulants for ADHD or narcolepsy, etc. Alcohol despite its useful social role (I'm not telling you all to be tee-totallers) is basically just a poison that has a small handful of short term nice effects and a long tail of effects that are a disaster.

Anyway, I question the math in the other post about heroin because it's essentially ignoring the dangers of a bad supply. People do safely take other (prescribed) opiates safely. I imagine that alcohol would be a lot more dangerous if we were back in prohibition times with like bath tub gin.

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