Hacker News Reader

Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

Legalize all drugs, and fill each one with literature about how damaging it is to you (similar to what some countries do on cigarette packs). If you can get heroin at CVS, you wouldn't need to go to your local drug dealer and help finance his shady/violent activities. I know it sounds crazy but we already knowingly sell stuff that can kill you (cigarettes, alcohol). The gangs/drug dealers would simply not survive if drugs were sold legally and conveniently.

View on HN

They will sit on unused SWAT teams and use them to collect unpaid parking fees and arrest suspected loiterers from yesterday. I'm exaggerating only slightly. The point is, if judges are signing no-knock raids from non-violent suspects possibly owning small amount of marijuana, they will be signing them for other petty crimes too.

End of war of drugs would just re-channel the same tactic against other targets.

And who gets to foot the bill for all of these new addicts?

The cigarette companies have been used for years for killing people. Imagine he amount of people using for ods.

Tort reform would also be need for this to ever work.

Some countries have experimented with state supply of heroin to addicts - it's actually a really cheap policy and seems to work well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment

Obviously, the taxpayer is footing the bill for this, but total spending reduces (through the reduction in drug related crime).

This is already being done in Portugal. I don't think the new addicts you're imagining would materialize. If you want to do meth, it isn't hard. Legalizing it doesn't make it that much easier. You get addicted to meth because it complements your personality, not because you have access to it.

First, I don't think we'd see a surge of new addiction like you expect. Second, we are already footing the bill for drug addiction, plus the violence it causes, plus the extra policing, plus legal costs, plus incarceration costs. Even with a surge in addiction, we'd still come out far ahead of the current situation.

http://www.theawl.com/2012/04/vancouver-supervised-drug-inje...

And yet cigarette use is in decline.

That solves nothing whatsoever. People aren't selling drugs because they believe everyone should have access to them.

They sell drugs because it makes money. Legalize drugs and they'll make money some other illegal and dangerous way.

That's ridiculous. They sell drugs because it is the Easiest way they know. Without drugs, they'd need to find some other, less easy way. Supply+Demand teaches that those other opportunities would be less available

They could go into other illegal fields, or they could move somewhere where their illegal drug expertise is useful, or they could become farmers or teachers or simply retire.

There are other countries and other states in the USA that have legalized certain drugs, have they had a comparative rise in other illegal and dangerous activity like you have claimed?

Or are you just hypothesizing one possible outcome that has no evidence or bearing on reality, "whatsoever".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com