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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

I am an unapologetic proponent of legalizing all drugs, however, I'm not sure what the best way is to sell them.

The freedom to conduct business runs into the moral responsibility of selling compounds that can serious have potential for abuse. Should advertising be allowed at all?

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Allow them to be sold but disallow advertising and discounting. This is already done with tobacco.

The UK has a pretty bad problem with alcohol. More people are dying of alcohol related illnesses, especially young people. Liver disease which used to be rare among young people is rising. Alcohol costs A&E units about £1bn per year. (1 ambulance is called every 14 seconds to deal with an alcohol related problem.) Alcohol costs hospitals about £2.3bn per year. We have 'drunk buses' - paramedic vehicles that only deal with alcohol related illnesses in city centres at night times. Some hospitals have set up "drunk tanks" to ease the pressure on A&E units by giving drunks a cot to sober up on, with mild supervision, without taking up the resources of a real A&E bed.

We only have about 70m people in the country.

I strongly support legalising all drugs, but we failed pretty hard with alcohol.

This is where "disallow advertising" comes in.

So that's about £47 per person. What percentage of alcohol spending is that?

(I'm don't really mean to suggest that a low percentage would justify wanton drunkenness or invalidate what you are saying about doing a poor job, more that comparing the adverse consequences to the consumption is probably more useful than examining the big totals)

If we take the recently publicized Rat Park addiction study as a guide, the problem isn't so much with the alcohol as with the social environment. If these people are abusing alcohol to seek refuge from excessive stress in their daily lives then it won't really matter all that much how the drugs are sold - we'll need to address the root problem of so many people feeling like "rats in a cage."

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130910-drug-addiction-the-...

The social environment in the UK has evolved to create "vertical drinking environments".

You take tables and chairs out, so that you can get more people in. This also means that people are holding their drinks, which makes them drink quicker.

You play loud music. It's hard to talk. So people drink quicker.

You offer drink promotions, and stay open for long hours. This means that people drink more.

Sounds like hell, but people drink lots.

The rat park studies were made in the late 70s, not recently.

The culture promotes it - EastEnders and Coronation Street alone show people's lives revolving around pubs and "having a pint". Roy Cropper is the only one shown not drinking alcohol, and he's hardly held up as a status symbol on the show :)

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