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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

I’m very much for legalizing and regulating (almost) all drugs, but watch out with the confirmation bias of “everyone in my social circle who used recreationally turned out fine.”

I can’t find it right now but I read a great comment on legalization that pointed out that a kid experimenting with weed and cocaine in college is doing so for a radically different reason than a kid doing it escape the daily misery of his ghetto neighborhood.

This is also why you’ll often see staunch opposition to legalization in the lower socio-economic classes, with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use.

And yes, legalization and regulation would of course also allow harm reduction. But it is good to be able to take the opposition’s perspective :)

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The primary reason to legalize isn’t to make it easier to do drugs, it’s to not use the justice and court system for dealing with addiction problems.

Our goal should be to legalize use and then take the money saved from police enforcement and funnel that into programs that get people off drugs. In the US an issue is that the latter part is part of the healthcare system, and we all know that has a lot of issues in serving people who fall into the under-employed category.

Several states have tried that. Some have already repealed the laws because they were a disaster.

Not my area of expertise per se, but the counterargument that I've seen is that the states (e.g. Oregon) that tried it never got the backstops in place to help soften and support the transition (i.e. rehab centers, support programs, social programs). Instead, it was just a hard switch that went expectedly bad.

There's at least a theory that people believe will work that hasn't been correctly implemented yet, but whether or not it's feasible to implement at all, I'm not holding my breath.

When this happens the reason 90% of the time is usually not because the program wasn’t working but the opposition to the program has made sure to either gut the funding or put in measures that makes those programs not work (only hiring 2 people to handle all the work or excessive operating requirements.

Cops will fight tooth and nail against social programs because it reduces their budget when problems are solved.

Look up these programs and you will see centrists claiming the progressive program was bad, but never indicate reasons as to why.

In Portland, decriminalization was poorly planned, new treatment options were implemented badly, and the alternative penalties for possession were not meaningfully enforced. It was a failure of execution.

I don’t think it tells us much about how well an ideally functioning decriminalization or legalization effort would work. It does update us in understanding that it’s difficult to accomplish this transition successfully.

Absolutely, Americans love saying “we’ll just send the cops after them.” Because then they don’t have to do any of the hard work of understanding or funding the programs. Americans are lazy when it comes to solving actual hard problems.

Works for Portugal since forever

We really don’t know that, they had terrible data reporting on drug use before the policy was implemented so we can’t even make a before/after comparison. We also can’t parse out the extent to which changes in drug use stats reflect changes in autopsies or in cultural attitudes and candor about drug use affecting self reports.

Those states half arsed it.

They did the decriminalisation step and then never bothered with the “redirecting savings from policing into services” step.

They also fucked it in other ways.

For an example of where it does work - see Portugal.

In numerous places those efforts have been purposefully sabotaged by police who aren't happy about the loss of court revenues and the eventual cutbacks on police funding for drug prohibition. With them literally refusing to enforce some laws like public intoxication or shooting up heroin in the middle of the street because their more profitable and super easy to get arrests for drug possession laws no longer existed.

> with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use.

But isn't this a false correlation, then? Were they destroyed by drug use, or by the daily misery of their ghetto neighborhood?

The combination, which is the point of the comment above. Legalization may be fine in places where people have other support factors that make them less likely to destroy their lives with drugs and alcohol, but in areas without those protective forces, it's good that there are some controls (or at least many of the people who live there think so).

At that point it becomes important to ask (1) how much damage does the illegalization itself do; (2) how much harm does the limited access actually prevent; and (3) how much damage alcohol does, and what the tradeoff is.

If you’re going to make a harm reduction argument, you need to do your best to fully account for all the harms in play.

Spot on- so many social problems get attributed to everything but the economy and inequality. If we could make our system more equitable, then we would not have such desperation.

What happened with the tremendous social spending by the government?

Government spending is not a panacea for structural economic issues

That money is handed to the poor.

Imagine hearing someone's loved one dying to drug use and asking them, "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy.

Okay, but the person wasn't asking this of the family of a dying loved one, they were asking it in this space where ideas are discussed and examined. Yes, it would be disturbingly unempathetic to ask that question in such a circumstance, but asking it in this circumstance is neither cold, inappropriate, or a demonstration that the asker lacks empathy.

> "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy.

That's an absurd mental picture you've imagined. Using that to undermine the discussion of the reality that people use drugs to temporarily escape from desperate conditions is unsettling and lacks empathy and judgment.

You've deeply misunderstood my comment.

You've deeply misunderstood your own comment

I disagree entirely, and I have personally witnessed people lose themselves to drug use.

Anyone with a relative dying of addiction has no doubt been long exhausted in watching them circle the pit of their addiction. They are going to be under no illusions regarding the chances there were to escape it, and the choices made to remain there.

Asking if they were escaping from a miserable reality vs chasing a high isn't offensive. It's just dealing with the reality of the situation as it is. The only person I see being offended is someone in denial, blaming the drugs alone rather than allowing any blame to the person using them, trying to imagine them an innocent victim without agency in the matter.

The question is a good one. It actually looks for what caused everything to go wrong, rather than just being pointlessly offended on behalf of the imagined umbrage you think others might feel.

I disagree with your characterization of my comment and I think you greatly missed the point I was making. The OP presented a false dichotomy as if these things aren't woven in with each other in a large feedback loop.

You comment falsely assumes that I don't have familiarity or loss stemming from addiction.

You've had multiple people "misunderstand" your comment. I suggest reconsidering how you express whatever it is you are trying to say, as I and the others are responding to what you managed to actually communicate, whether that message was your intended one or no.

It has been put into consideration. But now that we've made it clear that there have been ~ misunderstandings ~, can you try to see where I'm coming from now? :)

No, I don't know what you intended to say there if not what I initially read it as. It seems a straightforward reading to me.

My point was to suggest to OP that their dichotomous reductionism goes way, way overboard to the point of unproductive callousness. People with addictions aren't just data points. Saying this as a data journalist who focuses on policing and jails.

That you used a forced analogy (even if experiential) and ethos in a policy discussion? Sure, I can see that. I can even see blaming drugs for mental health issues and addiction despite the causality really being screwy if you try to force it that way.

It's okay to be wrong, even when emotional, so long as we learn from it.

Friend, your lack of consideration that you might be wrong or that I'm wrong, absolutely-fullstop, is telling. I stand by what I said.

Telling is that you expect folks to introspect because you're failing to admit rhetorically twisting the head off the chicken of an argument.

We thus persist. Pleasant evenin' to you sir or madame.

I think poor people in the US are against legalization mostly due to the decades of “war on drugs” propaganda or other forms of conservatism (eg religion), not because they’ve seen people close to them being destroyed by drug use

These same sources also mistake causality, as many folks with mental health issues self medicate, rather than having drugs be the absolute source for mental health issues. Example: Cleon Skousen.

Citation needed on claims of poor people opposing drug legalization. I can show you stats from Oregon showing that poor people overwhelmingly support, and still support, the bulk of our legalization efforts (I.e legal shrooms and legal weed)

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