Comment by mattmaroon 2 days ago
This is actually why I think all recreational drugs should be legal. I know of approximately 0 people who have had the thought “I’d try heroin if it were legal”. All making it illegal does is make the supply deadly.
I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.
I don’t think that’s true of heroin to a large extent, but I do think it would be true of cocaine, psychedelics, and other drugs. But regardless, I think the overall effect would be net harm mitigation given all the downsides of making it illegal. Funding violent crime at home and abroad, stigmatizing it and deterring treatment, overdoses from unsafe supply, etc. It’s entirely possible that more people would use it and it would still result in less harm to society.
I've been saying the same thing for years. Everything should be legal, prohibition just causes more problems. We learned this lesson with alcohol already.
Making it legal we could have things sold over the counter in pharmacies with proper age checks, we could even require further checks like before you can purchase heroin you need to go through a process where it is explained how it works, what a reasonable dose is, what side effects are, how addictive it is etc.
Same with other stuff. Most drugs are quite safe and harmless if done by people who know what they're doing. Of course self destructive people and morons would still harm themselves but honestly I'm not too worried about that. They will always find ways to harm themselves.
At least drug users wouldn't be funding cartels and warlords etc.
It can be legal and tightly controlled at the same time. Here in my European country it's perfectly legal to prescribe opiates but after 3rd prescription (regardless of what opiate it was) a patient has to go for mandatory psychiatric evaluation. This has put potential opiate abuser on the radar in a meaningful way. Legalisation doesn't mean free for all just like alcohol.
You don't understand human psychology very well then.
The US literally just tried that with gambling, and we discovered that making gambling legal increased the number of addicts by so much that it shows up in "total bankruptcies" statistics.
The key difference is people view heroin as something that will ruin your life, but think gambling is a harmless pass time until it is too late. There’s nobody who doesn’t know the perils of heroin, legal gambling existed in most places in some form and had for a long time. People view it much more like alcohol than heroin.
Also we didn’t just try that with gambling (48 states have had some legal form of it forever) we just tried it with online sports books, which turn out to be a particularly virulent form of gambling. And we haven’t really begun to sensibly regulate that, a lot of harm may be reduced in the near future as we do.
> The key difference is people view heroin as something that will ruin your life,
Now they do; make it legal and in two generations it won't be viewed that way because, after all, it's legal!
It's worth noting that there's a form of gambling that's exactly the same as sports betting that has been legal for much longer, the financial markets.
Yes, I do. Heroin was widely advertised before it was banned, and I don’t see why those same commercial pressures wouldn’t lead to it being advertised now if it were legal. It’s not even a lie to say that it works as a cough suppressant!
So, you can’t make something legal, but ban advertising it? Seems like a user error.
Some countries don’t even allow advertising legal and OTC pharmaceuticals.
If you had the lobby to make it legal, surely you also have the lobby to allow advertising. Especially after there are legal companies who would benefit from that.
We also made it extremely easy to gamble. It'd be the equivalent to handing everyone a heroin replicator, so that all people had to do was press a button and heroin would instantly appear.
Gambling as in roulette, gambling as in games of skill, or gambling as in trading?
In the last case gambling is pretty much everywhere in all developed societies.
> gambling as in games of skill,
These are pure gamblimg, the skill part is thinly weiled excuse having little to do with the reality. Even if it was skilled, it would still be gambling, but for the most part it is not skilled.
> or gambling as in trading?
Yeah many small investors treat it as a pure gambling. But investing has more regulations and somewhat saner culture. The companies are not intentionally trying to identify and hook addicts deeper and deeper.
Which "sports" literally do.
> These are pure gamblimg, the skill part is thinly weiled excuse having little to do with the reality
"Games of skill" in this context essentially always refers to poker, which is demonstrably not "pure gambling".
>Yeah many small investors treat it as a pure gambling. But investing has more regulations and somewhat saner culture. The companies are not intentionally trying to identify and hook addicts deeper and deeper.
>Which "sports" literally do.
This was perhaps largely true in the pre-robinhood era, now it's hard to draw any meaningful distinction between sports gambling and daytrading.
One data point, I live in East Asia, it’s very illegal, and vanishingly few people have drug problems (often they substitute for other problems that are less illegal, like gambling or sex).
Well, that’s really nice, and I don’t know how you pull that off, but it doesn’t translate to western societies. It’s very illegal most places, but how much of a problem it is seems to vary by region.
I moved to Asia from London / NY.
I found this draconian policy jarring at first (never a drug user, but casual cocaine / pot use was everywhere in both London and NY, and the usual cocktail of whatever was fashionable too).
You get used to these policies pretty quickly, and in exchange there are no (visible) drug users and no (visible) homelessness; I don't think in the West we are willing to sacrifice the freedom to do these things, or impose the death penalty for importing drugs (we have abolished it for nearly every other crime apart from murder in most jurisdictions).
I say that not making a value judgement (I cherish and in some cases miss western freedoms, and believe we do all too little to defend them at home), rather observing from nearly 40 years in western society and <12 months in the East.
It's worth remembering that much of Asia went through terrible drug addiction epidemics in the 20th century [0], and they decided to take drastic action, which probably took 25 years to fully bear fruit.
I also don't believe this policy, in isolation, is the whole answer. Asia (and particularly Singapore) focuses on society, community and other values which attenuate the factors which lead to, and are exacerbated by, drug use (violence, theft, vagrancy, unemployment, under-employment).
You give up a lot of freedom, but you get order in return. For some of us, that is acceptable. For others, this is not (and that is ultimately a matter for voters in each polity).
[0] https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/bulletin/bu...
Well Singapore for example ain't democracy in western sense at all. Rather some longer-term benevolent dictatorship with some smart (and lucky) moves. Canning for what we definitely dont call severe crimes in the west, executing mentally disabled people manipulated into drug smuggling and so on.
Its also a society openly xenophobic for immigration to any ethnicity not being part of original mix of population (not race, not language but properly ethnicity, ie tamils from south india big NO, malay tamils YES). White westerners not welcomed, only toleracted for specific set of high flying positions, and only for specific time while they keep economy running.
Its a very interesting place to observe some sort of south east asian version of Switzerland (sans most freedoms), but there are hardly any lessons for the west. Sort of like what ideal China could be, but probably never will. If you want to see proper western-possible high point, that Switzerland IMHO is top spot. They have some drug addicts, but have rather sensible approach to them.
Japan is prison usually around 2 years. But the bigger effect is probably cultural/indoctrination, less than the scale of punishment.
Not every country in east Asia is Singapore, and the point I’m making is that the commenter thinking there is no way to reduce drug addiction besides extreme permissiveness has counterexamples here today. This is a failure of imagination.
> I know of approximately 0 people who have had the thought “I’d try heroin if it were legal”.
Perhaps it's because they weren't experiencing enough pain at the time. I think most people fall into drugs circumstantially, I'm not sure it often presents as a conscious lifestyle decision.
> I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.
I believe that there would be less drug use overall if our economic system wasn't as rapacious as it currently is.
In Switzerland, at the appropriate facilities, the state provides heroin to addicts.
This has a dual effect - addicts get clean drugs and take them under medical supervision, reducing deaths, helping funnel some towards programs that will eventually get them clean etc. With this sort of support it turns out that people no longer steal to get their fix either, and can usually even hold down employment pretty well.
But also the young folk get to see these tired, worn out, older people queuing outside the clinic in the morning to get their fix and realise hey, maybe that isn't so cool and edgy after all...
Seems like a good plan to me, the problem is (as ever) puritans and their politicians, it's an easy thing to screech about. All it would take to kill it dead in a lot of countries would be someone standing up to shout "The opposition party want to spend YOUR tax money giving DRUGS to filthy JUNKIES!"
> I know of approximately 0 people who have had the thought “I’d try heroin if it were legal”.
How many people do you approximately know of that have had the thought “I’d try heroin”?
> I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.
How many people do you approximately know of that have had the thought “I’d try heroin but only because I cannot buy regulated heroin”?
Also... isn't the whole opioid addiction crisis basically because people were in fact buying regulated ~heroin?
A lot of people in the early OOs got addicted to pills because doctors subscribed them liberally and they weren’t regulated that well in hospitals so medical staff who wanted to make an extra buck could easily steal and sell them. The government cracked down on this and then all of the pill poppers turned to heroin, which now is mostly fent.
Lol yes opiate addictions of all stripes for all time can be tied directly back to that oxycontin commercial from 1999
Did you have a point or are you just a troll?
The whole context was "regulated heroin would be safer", but we've had a whole crisis of overprescribed (but still regulated) opiates that very much disagrees with the notion that regulated heroin is safer.
Reading my comment as "all opioid addiction is only due to regulated drugs (and that one commercial)" is misguided, at best.
if anything it being legal would make it less cool
IME most people dont want to be addicted, theyre just in a rut or life took them a certain way and just need support to get through the other side.
People who dont use drugs are way to hysterical about drug use though to ever see real improvement.
That's a very libertarian viewpoint of which I've always tended to agree with, drugs should be legal no matter the circumstances. I remember coming to this forum in the early days of Bitcoin which is also favored by libertarians, I wonder what the majority political viewpoint of HN is. Seems like it would skew toward the libertarian viewpoints of socioeconomics and public policy
I actually think more people would use if it were legal. Maybe not immediately but over time it would become more normalized. Regular joe character in tv shows would just use heroine. It would be available at college parties next to kegs. Etc…. And heroine companies (now that it’s legal) would find ways to market their drugs even if direct advertising isn’t legal.