Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

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There's also the unspoken "X has risks, and I don't want to do X, therefore X should be illegal".

I ride motorcycles. I have friends and family involved in scuba diving, paragliding, football, rock climbing, hell - even horse riding.

_All_ of those activities have "well known risks of serious injury or death" associated with them, and each of them I've heard recent stories of death in the extended circles of my family and friends.

I'm not sure whether the "designer drug" risk is anything like as high as some of those legal and "acceptable for your children" risks.

My approach is less "asking are the risks of X greater than the risks of making X illegal?", but closer to "Quantify the risks of X, work out which can be mitigated or reduced without needing to ban X, make sure participants are informed of the risks, and if needed ensure training/insurance/licencing is available if required".

Thirty thousand people a year are killed in motor vehicle accidents in the USA. We don't react by saying "Make cars illegal" - we manage, mitigate, reduce the risks (quite successfully, that 30k is down from 40k 10 years ago, and over 50k back in '79 and '80) - then we declare 30 thousand dead people a year an "acceptable cost" for the benefits of private car ownership.

Why aren't we able to be that rational about "designer drugs"?

I have one friend in his late 60's who just bought a new motorcycle. His wife was displeased with his decision though might be tempted to ride along sometimes. Another friend decided to stop riding a few years back because he felt it was too risky for him to continue.

Point is with motorcycles, cars, scuba, yes, even horses, the risks are more or less known and probability of various outcomes, including harm, can be reasoned about.

With drugs the estimation of probable outcomes is orders of magnitude more difficult to compute. To say it again, all drugs have numerous effects which vary greatly among recipients, and even for established agents most drug effects have received little or no study. However we do have a systematic track record of the AEs encountered, and after millions of cases we have a pretty good idea of how to use the agent safely.

Legal status notwithstanding, a drug with potent enough effects to be interesting is asymptotically guaranteed to have adverse effects in some members of the population of potential users. It means effects of a new and arcane product are no more than a total crap shoot.

Since even low frequencies of AEs may disqualify a drug as "safe", regulatory bodies require testing sufficiently large number of subjects under tightly controlled conditions to show evidence that it's safe enough to justify its proposed uses.

Without such study it is impossible to evaluate the use of an unvetted drug in the same way as riding a motorcycle. The information about benefits and risks is just not known. There is simply no basis for making a rational decision.

As a clinician and scientist questions of prohibition are largely beside the point. People will continue to do stupid things laws aside. However, laws/rules exist as a benchmark, and optimally serve as a statement of our communal ethical stance. Not that it's going to stop people who are determined to use a prohibited drug anyway, but maybe it supports restraint in some people who are "on the edge".

In respect to designer drugs, I'm very reluctant to say let's have no regulations at all, that anything goes, because logically lack of safety data leaves us to assume the risk of harm is significant. The burden of proof ought to be on the shoulders of those who assert use of the drugs is just harmless diversion.

I think that where this falls apart is "laws and rules exist as a benchmark". That should be true, but the conduct of the US criminal justice system suggests it isn't.

Point is with motorcycles, cars, scuba, yes, even horses, the risks are more or less known and probability of various outcomes, including harm, can be reasoned about.

Which is why we should legalize and regulate the drugs that we do understand. The risks of cannabis and LSD are also more or less known, and the (remarkably low) probability of harm (particularly compared with motorcycles, cars, etc) can be reasoned about.

The harm in making these well-understood substances criminal is far greater than the harm in regulating them. Indeed, as the GP points out, the harm in making the well-understood substances illegal is exacerbated by the harm from designer analogs.

As a clinician and scientist questions of prohibition are largely beside the point.

You're simply pulling the wool over your eyes if you believe that to be true. Prohibition is a causal factor in the danger of substance abuse.

I wish so much to hear at least a semi-coherent response to this from the pro-prohibition crowd.

The most of pro-prohibition crowds are either not-so-bright people who grab all their wisdom from TV without any proper experience whatsoever beyond alcohol & cigarettes, or law-enforcement-related people. As in many other cases, I believe following money explains it nicely. Ignoring the former redneck case, the rest has actually good bussiness case for latter. Ie legalize weed US nationwide, and many prisons (let's not forget many are private owned by investors, who want only one thign - maximize their profits by having as many inmates as possible), DEA loses maybe 90% of the success claims they have, and maybe local police can have more time dealing with serious issues. For conservative politicians, its political ammo par exellence, since if they will go hardline on drugs, there are very few risks to their career, and they can always claim all the usual stuff (drugs are destroying families and young people, we care about them etc... ever heard that?). Ask yourself - what can a politician gain vs lose bybeing pro-weed in US?

Too lazy to look it up, but if I remember correctly that one of DEA chiefs was also head of some UN panel on drugs, which then enforce rules for all UN member states (read whole world maybe except North Korea). From first glance, it might make sense. But show me one career-oriented competitive guy (and being head of such an agency, you have to be at least that, and have a lot of political games skills), who would undermine his own little kingdom, and make his own subordinates lose job by declaring that some of most popular drugs shouldn't be banned. One real example - weed & hashish have thousand years of history in hindu culture (look up shiva day when almost all india is high), yet they had to ban it after they joined UN.

So, we can thank those guys for making policies that worldwide raise crime, help supporting organized crime on massive scale (brutal mexical cartels are a fine example, out of many, ie afghanistan)

It's like thinking, that in banking/trading/brokering, it's always the client's best interest that's primary drive. Well yes of course, unless the bussiness is funded mainly by operational fees. WHat do those brokers do? Make you do as many operations as possible, of course, without being too obvious :)

(*no references here :))

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