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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Just a thought...

You know, I can't help but be reminded of the movie Layer Cake ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375912/ ), where the main character, a drug dealer kingpin, points out that drugs will be legal some day, and that people like him are just ahead of the curve as far as making a business out of giving people the drugs they want.

Thinking of it from this angle, if drugs were to indeed be legalised (as in, like cigarettes - not just decriminalised), the possibilities for innovation, product development, etc, would be pretty enormous. You want to build a product that people just keep coming back to? Here it is.

Sure, eventually, this market would become like food or, at best, cigarettes - with smaller margins, and not much innovation. But it would take a while, I imagine, and in the meantime, there would be a lot of potential innovations, experimentations, etc.

Just a thought...

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That's an interesting issue.

If you take cigarettes into account, notice how much processing and additives companies add to a standard cigarette and how much engineering goes into growing the actual tobacco plant. If drugs were legalized, all that would be rolled into the `drug market'.

I don't do anything, but I still think the current drug policy is extremely sub-optimal. What worries me though, is when corporations get the green card to manufacture drugs like pot, all that untested engineering, preservatives and additives that are intended to make it more effective make their way into what people consume. If you think about it, mostly all current drug production is as 'organic' as it gets (as far as I know at least).

You don't think drug manufacturers do this already? Anything that isn't in plant form is practically guaranteed to be cut with something else.

Some fraction of pot all sold includes other drugs to alter it's effect. Still, making pot illegal when over 50% of the US population has tried it to little effect has caused many people to distrust just how dangerous other drugs are. IMO, when people distrust established "drug facts" people fall back on antidotes. If your friend has tried "X" 3 or 4 times at party's and seems fine, then it must not really be that bad...

Personally, I think pot should be legal and Cocaine / Heroin / PCP dealers should be shot. But, people tend to dump all "drugs" into the same bin and have zero understanding about how bad some of that stuff really is.

it's deeper than that. when you enforce laws that the people routinely break and come to regard as trivial you undermine the legitimacy of your enforcement of other laws. In essence you lose the ability to claim that laws are for the people's own good.

That makes sense, but surely trying to keep to an unenforceable law that clearly is being flouted (eg. pot) everywhere undermines the legal system even more.

Your argument seems a bit inconsistent. While I generally understand the spirit of what you're saying, claiming that "over 50% of the US population has tried it to little effect" doesn't seem any less anecdotal than your example of the friend trying "X" 3 or 4 times.

All these substances should be assessed scientifically for medical risk, and empirically for societal risk.

Asking for dealers to be shot on a drug-by-drug basis is a bit sensationalist. Drug dealers simply respond to demand in the market. They sell whatever people are buying -- they don't have personal agendas about which drugs to sell. Demand for drugs is notoriously inelastic.

I'd modify your last statement to say that people tend to dump all illegal drugs into one bin, and legal drugs into another. Most everyone seems to think legal drugs are safe, but people tend to be split on illegal drugs (some think they're all the worst things ever, others seem to falsely presume they are all reasonably safe).

Personally, I think there needs to be more and better education across the board. The legal/illegal distinction is rarely meaningful and detracts attention from a proper comparative analysis of drugs and their risks. For example, fentanyl is more powerful than both heroin and morphine, yet is a legally prescribed painkiller. Similarly, Adderall has a family-friendly reputation for helping kids study, yet along with its use come many of the same risks associated with speed. This is not surprising, because they are in fact the same thing -- amphetamines.

It is anecdotal.

To clarify, well over 50% of the US population has taken pot at least once. Like alcohol many people don't appear to be negatively impacted by it. But, we don't hear "Please smoke pot responsibly" instead pot and people with an alcohol problem are demonized. People see anecdotal evidence and such as the large number of entertainers that admit smoking pot and assume it's safe. They then extrapolate to the sample size of their friends when evaluating other drugs. Ecstasy does horrible things to the human brain over time, but people don't evaluate the long term medical effects they just assume they are invincible and "the man" is full of crap.

I am further suggesting that for drugs that need a large scale distribution chain, and are extremely addictive and dangerous a more effective deterrent than prison should be employed.

Sort of a tangent, but are you sure your opinion of Ecstasy isn't just a result of propaganda from "the man?"

I'm not saying it's safe, and the subject certainly warrants more scientific study. However, UK scientists did a risk-based analysis of common drugs of abuse, which resulted in MDMA being placed below alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6474053.stm

To my earlier point, I think the real solution here is education and greater availability of scientifically valid information.

Would you have the citation for the studies that have shown damage done by ecstasy? There was a minor mistake in one study that used methamphetamine instead of MDMA: http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/mdma/mdma_research2.shtml.

I haven't thought much about the effects of big business on a legal drug market. It might be beneficial though.

My views on drug policy border Libertarianism. If you want to significantly damage yourself by using hard drugs, that should be your right. If you hurt other people while high I would be in favor of very tough consequences. I'm not totally sure whether that would increase drug related crimes though, so that attitude might not work.

But I would be extremely disgusted by any person or company who decided to manufacture hard drugs like meth or cocaine. So I'm not quite sure how comfortable I would be with a multi-billion corporation selling hard drugs.

Allowing corporations to sell hard drugs might actually work out well. Right now drugs can be cut with materials such as glass and even cheaper drugs like meth. So legal hard drugs might actually be safer than the illegal version. And any corporation that successfully sells drugs would have to compete with gangs, and other violent organizations. This would mean that criminal organizations would probably lose a lot of market share.

I wonder, would Coca Cola go back to their original formula?

Probably not, because they would be crucified. But you can imagine a well-funded Big Drug company signing up Nelly as a smokesman for the Nelly Blunt (TM) and aggressively marketing it to chuckle adults of legal age who will indulge responsibly.

Remember the inner city crack epidemic? Imagine that, with less gang warfare and penetration in the population approaching that of television. There would be widespread support elsewhere in society for just writing them off totally. ("Poor people are just hopeless druggies who can't get a job because they won't stop smoking -- screw 'em").

No joke, I watched that movie (for the second time) tonight. It's a must-see. Easily the most "beautiful" crime movie I've ever seen. Every shot is just so aesthetically pleasing, yet you never lose touch with the danger and nastiness of the situations in the film.

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