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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't really address the comment. Decriminalize = production is criminal, consumption is legal. Legalize = production is legal, consumption is legal.

The parent comment was complaining that legal consumption made the environment threatening.

>maim and kill users, push users into poverty, and generate and push the externalizes of drug use onto the rest of society.

None of these appear to hinge on decriminalization vs. legalization. Alcohol, for example, maims and kills users, pushes severely addicted users into poverty, and externalizes the problems of its use onto society.

Use went down during prohibition, use went up during legalization. So in effect you're proposing we increase these problems as related to meth and other hard drugs.

(This is not an argument for prohibition of alcohol, it is merely listing the cons of legalization)

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> The parent comment was complaining that legal consumption made the environment threatening.

What the top comment is implying as far as I can see is that going soft on drugs (“philosophical”, “internet argument”) is a solution for pen-pushers.

Fucked up as his story may be, what has the war on drugs really ended up accomplishing? Do we really think amping it up will make things better?

Legalization combined with harm reduction and strictly regulated point of sales (think how Sweden treats alcohol by selling it through systembogalets) is what will ultimately pull us out of the pit. Nothing else will.

A good chunk of society wants to get high, as long as they’re not serviced legally they are financing criminal empires. Not only are you getting no tax on those sales, you have to spend buckets of money on law enforcement to fight those criminal empires. Not to mention you’ll also have to spend money on police, EMT, hospital hours etc to cope with the less stable subsect of drug users, because they are currently out of government purview and thus unmanageable.

It shouldn’t even be a partisan thing, the right could easily sell it as increasing government revenue and restoring law and order. All without it costing the regular taxpayer a penny, as you can fund the new system with the drug tax.

> what has the war on drugs really ended up accomplishing?

I haven't studied this extensively, and I know that it's widely accepted that the war on drugs was unsuccessful, but I would caution against conflating "it didn't completely solve the problem" with "it had no positive impact at all." As a parent comment mentioned, periods of prohibition are generally associated with lower consumption overall (across both legal and illegal channels).

We're not talking about a war on drugs that "didn't completely solve the problem", we're talking about one that made the problem ten times worse and fucked up society in the process.

It doesn't matter if it had any positive impact, the negative impact outweigh them so much it's a downright crime against humanity that imprisoned millions of people in a system that constitutes modern day slave labor.

"what has the war on drugs really ended up accomplishing?"

A lot of comments here have a "Portland was a lot better before decriminalization" theme. So at least some people might think the war on drugs was working out better than the current policies.

I'm not saying we should bring back the war on drugs, but the argument you are making can no longer be taken for granted.

Also you can just point to all the countries that do have a war on drugs, and have been successful, and do not have major problems with drugs as a result.

> Fucked up as his story may be, what has the war on drugs really ended up accomplishing? Do we really think amping it up will make things better?

A full-on "war on drugs" and "do noting" are both extremes. Not many people are in favour of a war on drugs, but that doesn't mean complete laissez-faire policies are the solution either.

"Drugs are illegal" and "war on drugs" are NOT the same thing.

All well and good: allow everyone to use as many legalized drugs as they want, but enforce the other laws on those people. Don’t allow anyone to camp in the street, don’t let them steal with impunity. If they want to get wasted on drugs, they should manage to not cause harm to normal citizens.

I could certainly agree with that. Just take a page out of alcohol management. Many cities across the world already have pretty strict laws against public alcohol use. And they send more police to places where drunks are more likely to congregate and cause issues, like around bars at Saturday and Sunday.

What’s an unmentioned but relevant issue to me is how things like MDMA and ketamine (users are less harmed and harmful than with alcohol) are lumped in with hardcore opioid and meth abuse. There’s “hard”drugs and then there’s HARDdrugs.

I’d rather see the really hardcore stuff not even sold in specialized stores with the other stuff, but rather directly distributed through places similar to methadone clinics. They can give whoever wants the drug the full PR on how this substance very likely will get a grip on you and demolish your life. Clinics themselves are quite grim, making the whole atmosphere around recreational use less enticing. And you can put a higher age limit like 21 or even 24 on it.

There's not enough housing, where are people supposed to sleep?

To be clear, I hate seeing people sleep on the street. It's terrible, but they don't have good options.

Maybe if they werent constantly cycling through erratic meth benders and on a constant search to steal enough to afford their next high, they might have a better chance at affording housing. Im all for housing those who need it. And housing is too expensive in cities, but the meth/fent addict who cant even manage to keep their pants on has more severe problems than the going rate on a studio apartment.

I think sometimes the point to make something illegal is not to stop it. But to make the behavior unacceptable to do in public.

Maybe we can craft better laws that just enforce them get aspect.

But if it is flat out illegal then some amount of trying to hide it will occur. As a result, maybe those two meth heads would have not been wondering around in the public where they will harm others.

Making legal and taxing it would still result in the meth head problem, and potentially increase bad behaviors associated with getting money to buy the higher taxes drug.

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