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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

One moral risk we play is does legalizing our recreational drug (eg alcohol/cannibis) increase the harm done to addicts[0]? While I maintain that there's a logical inconsistency to having legal alcohol and illegal cannabis, I'm on the fence if the consistency should be that both are somehow controlled/illegal (though absolutely not criminal).

Another thought on the subject is how many small charges were simply because the police were fairly sure the defendant was up to some other crime, but were unable to make a court case over it (due to difficulty of evidence etc)? It may be that it was hard to prove the accused was doing X, but the bag of weed in their pocket was undeniable...

Just musings don't get too aflame over them...

[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/americas-heaviest-drinkers-consume-...

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No. Criminalization does more harm than benefit.

For the vast majority of drug users that are not addicted, this is obvious.

And for the addicts, criminalization is the last thing they need. Deterrence might prevent a few people from getting addicted, but not many. A lot of drug addiction is downstream of homelessness and mental health issues meaning the illegality is a very weak deterrent for the most vulnerable.

If we pushed even half of the money spent policing the war on drugs into homelessness support, mental health services, and addiction counseling and harm minimization like needle exchanges, we’d see a huge reduction in harm.

The current regime is not really interested in harm reduction; there is no effort to compare interventions based on objective harm metrics. Instead non-harm metrics like arrest rates and usage are chased. The policies start from Puritanism and historical racism and justify themselves claiming to care about harm after the fact.

To your second point… I think the racial discrimination baked into the history of drug enforcement should steer us away from giving police more excuses to incarcerate on their discretion. But even ignoring that, I don’t think we should support “we knew but could not provide evidence to prove guilt”, the justice system requires evidence for a reason.

> If we pushed even half of the money spent policing the war on drugs into homelessness support, mental health services, and addiction counseling and harm minimization like needle exchanges, we’d see a huge reduction in harm.

This point seems plausible, are there any sources that might prove it?

Also your point about racial discrimination might be a good utilitarian argument for it's better to let those racially discriminated against free alongside some folks who were also upto other crimes... The replies have definitely given me more food for thought.

The go-to example is Portugal, where drugs were decriminalized, and death rates went down. Not without challenges though, as they are now seeing issues with public drug taking and associated crime (which could be more about pandemic homelessness since we see that in US cities too). I think the harm reduction results are clear here but you also need to do the part where you invest more broadly in social programs (and with sufficient funding for homelessness services, taking a zero tolerance approach to public intoxication seems perfectly acceptable to me). See https://www.cato.org/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-port... on harm.

There is lots of evidence supporting needle exchanges as good for harm reduction. See Scotland, Netherlands, and many other EU countries.

Another one to watch is Oregon, where they did the decriminalization bit, but I think without the shift in funding to social services. Haven’t dug much here. (I think “reduce policing, increase social services” is the most sympathetic interpretation of what the moderate Democrats were thinking when they initially supported the “defund the police” slogan, which is now associated with more radical policies that are toxic to the center.)

There is a risk of “no true Scotsman” in the following point, but this is really an extremely radical policy proposal, at least it looked so until a couple years ago; there aren’t actually good examples end-to-end. So I think we need to employ epistemic humility and do local iterative experiments to prove it out (the advantage of the federal model in the US is a federal decriminalization would result in 50 natural experiments as states passed their own laws.) I don’t want to concede too much uncertainty though, the harms of criminalization are objectively very high, so you’d need to measure very high costs from the proposed new policy which I’m very skeptical that you’d see.

>No. Criminalization does more harm than benefit.

>For the vast majority of drug users that are not addicted, this is obvious.

I'm pretty sure a couple decades of effectively legalized oxycodone and hydrocodone use shows this view is not correct.

But recreational use of those drugs isn't legalized and the highest death toll from opiate use comes from people who move from the pharmaceutical-grade drugs to unregulated street drugs.

You can call for both legalization and high regulation… that’s literally what prescription drugs are.

Legalization & certification of quality is a good endpoint, if you can buy cheap heroin of good purity and stable dosage, no need for underground sources laced with fentanyl of variable purity.

I’m here for the FDA regulating what is on the label matching what is in the pill. But there is so an argument for optional certification; it might end up that the steady state cost for FDA compliance leaves room at the bottom end of the market for Mexican underground labs, and I’d rather have US above-ground labs filling that niche (because there are other recourses for egregious behavior like lacing oxy pills with Fentanyl if your supplier is in the US, which are not available against cartel labs in Mexico). It’s an empirical hypothesis though, you might not see prices high enough to matter with FDA compliant labs.

Another temptation to resist is taxing the drugs to pay for social services, “sin tax” in this case would again leave the door open for illegal labs. Again you can tune the parameters when you have evidence from the market.

My point is that we effectively did this for a couple decades with oxycodone and hydrocodone… the result has been disastrous.

We can probably keep more existing addicts alive by full legalization, but we pretty much invite a huge wave of new folks who will spend the rest of their lives with an opiate dependency.

As a sibling noted, I think the takeaway from oxy is a lot more complex. I don’t think many people are dying from prescription meds, I think most are dying when they go to the black market to service their addiction when they cannot get prescriptions, or cannot afford them.

For example if you want oxy, it’s very expensive on the black market, and so many end up taking fentanyl instead, which is more dangerous even if you have known purity medical grade, and is extremely dangerous when purchased on the black market with variable and unknown purity.

So in summary, I really strongly disagree that “we effectively did this”. The decriminalization program has not been seriously tried for opiates anywhere outside Portugal (where it didn’t cause an increase in usage, and did result in decreased harm).

I agree with you but there are pathways for decriminalization and legalization ala cannabis in states that have fully legalized it. There is still a difference between the "medicinal" products which require something resembling a prescription and recreational ones which are sold to anyone of age. Those recreational products still undergo testing and regulation.

What about sugar? Processed meat and fat? Carcinogenics in general? What is the extent of the control we are willing to relinquish to the government in order to control substance abuse?

And how about shifting the discussion from prohibition and control of use to the democatization of healthcare access for people to heal from addiction, if we are so interested in the welfare of addicts at this point?

I’d like governments to continue to regulate how corporations can use and productize addictive and damaging substances. Heroin in big macs would, i’m sure, sell well.

The arguments we made for drug prohibition started spreading to other areas of society. So the prohibitionist mindset was expanding, with potentially disastrous consequences for innocent people caught up in it.

Your argument about marijuana being easier to prove is a very bad scenario, regardless of how common it is/used to be. By the same logic why not make it illegal to wear socks, it would provide reason for the system to punish anybody they are 'fairly sure' is up to some other crime.

> While I maintain that there's a logical inconsistency to having legal alcohol and illegal cannabis, I'm on the fence if the consistency should be that both are somehow controlled/illegal (though absolutely not criminal).

"Illegal but not criminal" for a drug just means a very clumsily implemented tax, if you want to do that, it would strictly be better to just do a tax.

> Another thought on the subject is how many small charges were simply because the police were fairly sure the defendant was up to some other crime, but were unable to make a court case over it (due to difficulty of evidence etc)? It may be that it was hard to prove the accused was doing X, but the bag of weed in their pocket was undeniable...

Eliminating crimes whose main use is as an end-run around probable cause (for arrest) and proof beyond a reasonable doubt (for conviction) on other crimes (and thus, which exist to be selectively used to end-run due process) is an unqualified good thing.

>>> Another thought on the subject is how many small charges were simply because the police were fairly sure the defendant was up to some other crime, but were unable to make a court case over it (due to difficulty of evidence etc)? It may be that it was hard to prove the accused was doing X, but the bag of weed in their pocket was undeniable...

Then don't prosecute them. It's supposed to be hard to convict people.

That is an excellent argument in favor of legalization, not one against. What you're describing is selective enforcement and prosecution, and the use of it as a tool to arrest and convict someone because they can't be proven to have committed some other crime.

Along that line of thinking, if you prohibit alcohol and cannabis (and I assume tobacco?) to protect addicts, what about casino gambling? How about micro-transaction games that are gambling in all but name?

I mean those should actually be prohibited.

It's not logical to solve any drug problem by making it illegal.

Illegal means that we don't want people to help, it means we don't want them to do something between don't like it.

Otherwise it doesn't make sense that the result is jail as jail is for punishment (it shouldn't) and not for rehabilitation.

I support full legalization of cannabis and I agree that those are valid concerns.

Yes, the harm done to addicts will probably increase. There's always trade offs. I think people on the pro-legalization side are not doing enough to address this.

One of the problems with public discourse is that each side doesn't want to give an inch to the other side. I think a lot of people who support legalization of cannabis kinda know that harms to addicts might increase, but they're afraid that if they mention that then that will just give a talking point to the prohibitionists.

Both sides are guilty of misusing or ignoring facts and concerns that don't benefit their preferred take on the issue. However, it seems to me the prohibitionists are far more egregious when it comes making bad arguments.

No one should go to jail because the police are "fairly sure".

to be clear the kind of "fairly sure" i was referring to was the kind of undeniable first hand proof, but difficult to prove in court. Such things exist, a police officer can give testimony in court about what happened, and it's subject to a level of scrutiny, but their body cam recording confirming evidence makes it nigh impossible to argue (instead folks go for inadmissible evidence or other avenues to discredit the evidence).

> It may be that it was hard to prove the accused was doing X, but the bag of weed in their pocket was undeniable...

Your point being?

My point being that sometimes criminals get away with things not because we don't know who is doing what, but because we cannot make a court case. IANAL but my understanding is that the bar (no pun intended) is extremely high (no pun intended).

Some will say "It should be high" but in the realworld we need a pragmatic approach that balances difficulty of proof vs innocent people incarcerated. It's my assertion that the only system which has 0 chance of false positives is the one which incarcerates no one. So it's about finding a good minima / balance.

Do you have any thoughts pertaining to the legal status of products containing nicotine?

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