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Comment by iamcurious | Hacker News Reader

It is a step in the right direction, but it still half-baked. Without decriminalizing production as well, they are maintaining a monopoly for those that works outside of the law. Which means a very profitable tax free market that has to recreate all of the state features like physical safety and insurance policies from scratch. Every nation that forbids something that is in demand, is gestating its own competition. The laws of capitalism are brutal and can not be escaped. I wonder how far we can go by following the principle that it should be easier for demand to be satisfied legally than illegally.

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It is a step in the right direction, but it still half-baked.

We all want the revolution overnight but it takes careful and calculated steps to make progress. Consider Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) when accosted by a Republican Rep who claimed the States' Rights to Medical Marijuana Act was a sly step towards the process of legalizing marijuana outright. Barney's (paraphrased) answer: Yep, you got me. That is our goal.

And of course once you've legalized the selling of marijuana, you're potentially opening the doors for other substances. But they come with their own set of problems and taboos so it will take time.

Initiatives have to start somewhere and demonstrate their utility with minimal fuss. Baby steps, but in the right direction.

"And of course once you've legalized the selling of marijuana, you're potentially openings the doors for other substances"

I agree you've got to start somewhere. I find the argument that marijuana is a door opener to other substances is flawed though. If pot didn't exist, would the same argument be made for liquor stores, tobacco sales, coffee shops, red bulls at 7/11, cough medicine at Walmart etc? Or is it just because of the stigma around marijuana?

I think the only hint of truth in gateway drug theory is that once you're consuming something that's illegal you are more likely to end up dealing with people who are also selling other illegal drugs which, if you're into that sort of thing, makes it easier to experiment with new drugs.

If alcohol was illegal and thus only sold by traffickers who also happen to stock cocaine, the same would equally apply. It's more about the markets rather than the substance.

Of course, the vast majority of pot is either homegrown or, if commercially produced, supplied into a chain of friends by someone who knows someone who knows someone. That's how I guess pot is commonly bought: "Hey, you had this friend of yours who uses pot, I wonder if he'd sell me a bit, too?"

The exposure to other drugs, for the average pot smoker, is very negligible in practice even if the original source is in the drug business that operates on the more serious side.

Tobacco and alcohol are legal and used because they were staples of the founding of the US. Tobacco was one of the chief exports of the colonies and the new US for centuries and made a lot of people rich and even more people happy.

Alcohol is legal in almost every country on Earth because you can make it out of almost everything. What might end up happening is regional fermentation variants are stigmatized.

Cannibis was persecuted and outlawed in the US because of extreme zenophobia against Mexican migrants in the US after the Mexican-American war. Heres a longer form history of it: http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/how-did-marijuana-become-ille.... Its the same bizarre backwards thinking that leads to republican frontrunner's garnering praise for wanting to build a concrete wall on the scale of the Great Wall of China to keep impoverished refugees out.

Pot got banned because it was gaining popularity and was threatening entrenched tobacco interests. The same thing happened to opium with Chinese migrant workers. The vast majority of the "controlled substances" that are not particularly life threatening (heroin and cocaine are probably the only outstandingly dangerous ones due to immediate bodily effects, the psychedelics are dangerous because of the behavioral changes usually) but were simply outlawed because they competed with US tobacco and alcohol for consumers drug addictions and habits.

So if pot did not exist, we would probably be a similar state to where we are now - migrant Mexicans would have probably used opium or tobacco, and we have already seen the reactions to both of those in the American historical psyche. We would just probably be pushing MDMA / Meth / LSD legalization instead. Meth most likely, since it also has medical applications.

MDMA and LSD also have medical applications. http://www.maps.org/

They do show some promise in the unfortunately limited research done but it is nearly impossible to conduct legal research on the medicinal potential of highly controlled substances

They're also immensely fun.

>cocaine are probably the only outstandingly dangerous ones due to immediate bodily effects

Is that true about ? I "know" that heroin ends up causing a physical addiction + all the risks with the way it's used but I was under the impression that cocaine was in the same category as speed/extasy in terms of downsides.

Just quoting wikipedia on this one, but:

Cocaine addiction occurs through accumbal ΔFosB overexpression, which arises through transcriptional regulation and epigenetic remodeling of the nucleus accumbens.

It is definitely physically addictive, and alters brain chemistry through long term use. It also causes accelerated heart rate.

I'll give its not nearly as bad as tobacco, but it is in a league above psychedelics.

The GP was comparing cocaine to (substituted) amphetamines, which as with most dopaminergic psychostimulants also cause addiction via changes to ΔFosB expression. Hence, I'd say the comparison isn't incorrect, even if the GP's appraisal of the potential harm of speed/ecstasy may have been understated.

However, ΔFosB expression is also impacted by all kinds of behaviors and substances, including palatable/calorie-dense foods, exercise, and sex. There's a lot of things that alter brain chemistry in the long term if abused.

Sure but MDMA/meth aren't psychedelics either but you made a distinction between them so I was curious why. From my high school experiences I would put them in the same league (although I know very little about the science behind them they are all recreational party drugs, former being a lot cheaper than the latter)

There's also the hemp angle. There had recently been advances in the production of hemp paper and the plant produced fibers that DuPont wanted to replace with Nylon. DuPont and Hearst (who had a lot of money invested in tree-based paper) had economic incentives to reduce/eliminate Hemp from our society.

Hearst's yellow journalism tapped into the xenophobia and racism of the average American to convince them that this Devil's weed would have Mexicans and Negroes rampaging all across the country and having sex with white women.

Couldn't agree more but I don't think it has to do with capitalism, but economics. Regardless of the system in place, if there is a high enough demand for a product, as there is drugs, there will be a supply.

An interesting example is how drug use is actually rampant in US prisons, some of the most controlled environments in the country. No ones idea of a free market capitalism, but somehow drugs are still very accessible.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/27/drugs-inside...

the one I know for sure about involved visitation.

wives and girlfriends are asked to smuggle something in for a significant other inside of themselves. a toilet trip later it gets removed and passed off, and voila. even a small amount can curry quite a bit of favor and of course cash. because of the risk involved, the price is well marked up.

seems like the guards would have to be on the take, though, because I'm not sure how the inmate is supposed to get it from the visitation room back to his cell.

I'm sure they have something figured out, anyone who can light a cigarette with an outlet is bound to be a crafty cat.

my guess is that guards turn a half blind eye, something to do with being more easier to control a prison where inmates are allowed some degree of freedom and self organizing. I'll research this later, it's an interesting subject.

some interesting stuff that came up while looking trough research material:

http://www.garysturt.free-online.co.uk/zimbardo.htm simulated prison experiment going downhilll

this one is about cigarettes and seem to support the point: http://tpj.sagepub.com/content/81/2/142.short

"This study describes how bans can transform largely benign cigarette “gray markets,” where cigarettes are used as a currency, into more problematic black markets, where cigarettes are a highly priced commodity."

I agree with you but remember that Ireland and the UK are islands, which immediately puts them in a better position to deal with smuggling compared to countries that share long land borders. I think this is why island nations are generally a bit more conservative - it's much more practical to control imports.

The Irish Navy is tiny, and there are countless inlets and bays which a smuggler could use. One popular drug smuggling route is Colombia -> up the coast of West Africa -> Ireland, and then onwards to the UK market.

There was a famous incident a few years back where a relatively small boat deployed from a 'mothership'; sank in high seas (heh), dumping its cargo of hundreds of millions of cocaine into the water. Locals were finding bales of coke worth €1.75m each on the beaches in the area.

If you look at what has been intercepted, and what must get through to the end market, then billions of Euros worth of the drug must be smuggled through Ireland/Irish waters.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/icrime/wild-coast-sinks...

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/cocaine-in-yacht-s...

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/jul/08/drugsandalcohol.dr...

Coastline is no easier to police and allows transit at any point. Cornwall practically counts pre-20th-c smuggling as a traditional heritage industry.

Although I think in practice most drugs come by air like in the rest of the world.

It's doable, but it's not that easy. If coastline allowed transit at any point then we wouldn't rely so heavily on harbors...but I don't want to bore you with maritime stories. Put it this way, if you want to smuggle onto an island you need to do at least a bit of advance planning and figure out who you're going to have to pay, or how much risk you will tolerate if you own a boat or a plane. The same is true of smuggling by car or truck on a continent, but that's a journey you can generally undertake a lot more casually than a boat or plane trip.

That's a very broad conclusion to draw!

True, that's why I qualified it as an opinion - it's just a hunch of mine.

Oddly, I was talking to a man in Amsterdam about half-baked laws such as that. Making as much of the process transparent as possible means there is more likely to be "safe" products, comparatively, and legalisation with controls seems to be the way to go so far.

I disagree that it's half-baked, in fact this is a huge victory. A step in the right direction, indeed. Now, if only we can keep from going two steps back.

Far from half baked (theres a pun here if I look hard enough), Portugal stepped up and did the experiment already. And it worked.

The OP's point is that decriminalization leaves the market, the money and the tax revenue with the criminals. As a taxpayer, I want a fair proportion of the money to go to the government, and only full legalization and regulation does that.

But first we have to mollify the masses that the decades of War-On-Drugs FUD is untrue. Show them that drug users are fellow humans, and easier access to the tools they use to generate happiness isn't going to cause rioting on the streets.

Exactly. One person's idea of a half-baked measure is another's idea of incremental progress. When you can demonstrate that some of what reactionaries believe is flatly wrong it gets a lot easier to chip away at the rest of the errors they've managed to enshrine in law.

And yet another's idea of a slippery slope, sliding towards chaos and the downfall of society. I personally think this is a good idea, but it's pretty clear to me that that's not a universally-held opinion.

It's pretty close to universally held among decent, intelligent people who aren't personally invested in the drug war. As time goes by, and more governments successfully turn their backs on the drug warriors, support for the drug war will become a badge of corruption, idiocy, or worse.

Fully agreed. I support fairly high taxes on it, but full legalisation. And it is true that people still need convinced, but different places are starting experiments now. I've heard the US puts anti-drug language in contracts and stuff - if true, the faster the US loosens up, the more quickly change can be possible.

> Which means a very profitable tax free market

That's totally untrue. Drug lords still have to contend with law enforcement raids and busts or bribing govt officials for their goods and products to "reach the consumer" constituting in effect a tax on their operations.

That's only a tax in the very narrow sense that it keeps prison officers and policemen in jobs. I want the money to go towards general taxation. In Britain some £6bn is spent on cannabis each year. Taking a third of that in tax raises enough to reverse half of the chancellor's very controversial recent cuts to tax credits.

Where does the £6b number come from? It seems very high to me.

A 2014 survey has the following numbers: 31% have ever used illegal drugs, 21% still take illegal drugs "even if only occasionally". 93% of people who have tried illegal drugs have tried weed. [1]

Let's say the UK population is 65 million, that makes 13.65m "occasional or more often" illegal drug users, and if we assume that all of the 93% of those who have tried weed still smoke weed, that's 12,694,500 weed smokers. So with that number, to hit a total spend of £6B they would be spending an average of £472 each, or £9/week - I guess that's about 0.5-1g/week. I could believe that amount as an average among "weed smokers", but given the number includes people who say they do it "only occasionally", I suspect the long-tail means that £6b is unrealistically high.

That said, if you have a source for that I'd be interested to see more info.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/05/-sp-drug-use-...

I tracked this down eventually (took a while, sorry!) The number comes from a Home Office report:

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110220105210/rds...

However that's up to 6.6 billion for the whole illegal drugs market (not just cannabis). So the figure for cannabis would be much lower (see also that report).

Thanks - and OK, for all drugs makes a lot more sense to me.

Why would you need more tax revenues from this economic activity? To fund addiction treatment programs?

Socialist revolutions happen overnight but capitalist changes need to happen over time. In case of India it took 50 years for the government to realize that it is nonsensical to restrict how many nut bolts a factory could produce.

As opposed to, say, capitalist revolutions that happen overnight and socialist changes that happen over time? What's the point of adding "emotional" qualifiers to truisms?

What is that a reference to?

USSR and the Eastern Bloc fell quickly.

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