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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

More than simply being alive, they want customers who can stay employed and so continue to pay higher prices over a greater number of years. Cocaine and pot are horrible but their users can maintain a working life for years or decades, making them more profitable drugs in the long term.

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> cocaine *and* pot

I don't think these very different drugs should be compared equivocally.

And while both drugs have the possibility of abuse; most issues stem from legality - not the chemical effects.

We should probably start saying "sugar and cocaine". Since sugar is heavily addictive it can be equivocated the same.

Maybe that will help some people see how ridiculous it is to generalise like that.

The slope of addictive drugs with negative side effects starts with alcohol, then comes nicotine, pot, cocaine, crack, fentinal .... and then all the really exotic modern stuff. It is a spectrum. Some argue that there are upsides, and there are certainly uses for all these drugs, but no sane doctor would say they have no downsides, that unrestrained use is ever a good thing.

How are you determining this scale?

Alcohol has greater negative side effects than pot, and nicotine is more addictive than cocaine or pot. I’m not sure what you mean by “exotic modern stuff,” but if it includes hallucinogens (what people usually mean by modern/exotic drugs) then they’re not really addictive at all.

I ask because the scale reads more like a morality scale than anything based on actual negative effects, either in the individual or society.

> Cocaine and pot are horrible

citation needed

>Cocaine is God's way of telling you you are making too much money. ---Robin Williams

>It made me feel like a new man. The problem was, the first thing the new man wanted was more cocaine. ---George Carlin

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/us/cannabis-marijuana-ris...

David J Nutt, Leslie A King, Lawrence D Phillips, Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis, The Lancet, 2010.

https://bigfatgenius.com/2220%20Fall%202010/Nutt%20King%20Ph...

Cocaine (in crack form) was found to be the third most harmful recreational drug overall, after alcohol and heroin. It also caused the most direct harm to users out of all drugs. Cannabis, not so much, mid-table. Non-crack cocaine was somewhere between the two.

Note that this study is now over 15 years old.

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