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Comment by touchofevil | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the real problem causing the overdoses is that fentanyl and carfentinal are getting mixed into the heroin. At the minimum, the US should provide a program where heroin addicts can get heroin from government clinics, which is what they offer in the Netherlands[1] where addicts can get heroin three times a day and apparently rarely overdose presumably because the heroin is pure. But at this point, I'd rather see most drugs legalized and the tax money poured into addiction recovery programs, government clinics for supervised drug use, and drug use prevention.

[1] https://news.vice.com/article/only-in-the-netherlands-do-add...

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If morphine was legal, probably about ~10-20% of the population would be addicts. In 1900, 2-5% were morphine addicts.[0] And advertising was pretty lame back then.

0) http://www.druglibrary.org/olsen/dpf/whitebread02.html

90% of (US) men used to smoke, now 15% do...

Upside: the laxative industry would boom.

actually, they are selling something for that...

https://www.drugs.com/movantik.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naloxegol

I'm not sure where you are getting your estimate that 10-20% of the population would be addicted to morphine if most drugs were legalized in the USA today. If you look at the stats on Portugal, you'll see that drug use and drug related deaths have declined since the country legalized all drugs[1].

Also, morphine was only invented around 1818 and its addictive properties were not understood until much later[2]. For example, "...initially morphine was also marketed as a non-addictive cure for addiction to both alcohol and opium..." That was happening in 1853, nearly 40 years after the invention of morphine.

In the article you linked to, the author states that many of the morphine addicts of the 1900s were people in rural communities who were sold "elixirs" by traveling "doctors" and these potions were often 50% morphine. Which causes the author to state: "...if you look at drug addiction in 1900, what's the number one way in which it is different than drug addiction today? Answer: Almost all addiction at the turn of the century was accidental."

If drugs were legalized, consumers would not be getting accidentally addicted to morphine as they were in the 1900s, because they would be able to know for certain what drugs they were buying and ingesting.

[1] https://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decr... [2] http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/09/invented-mor...

10-20% is my estimate.

50% morphine is only about three times opium potency.

I'm talking legalized, not just decriminalized.

I doubt that there are any morphine sodas for sale in Portugal. With viral Facebook promotion featuring tunes from Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins.

I assume that the same rules that prevent cigarettes from being advertised would also apply to legalized drugs.

They don't apply very effectively to big pharma, do they?

Big pharma is allowed to run ads b/c they aren't advertising recreational drugs which is different from cigarettes and the proposed recreational drugs we are discussing.

Those ads about erectile dysfunction seem pretty recreational to me.

The idea that smoking cigarettes is a form of recreation seems comical to me. But then, as a non-smoking Australian... Have you seen our cigarette packaging?

Hey, try it, you'll like it ;)

I smoked hand-rolled Sobranie Turkish/Virginia blend when I could afford it, and whatever I could afford, otherwise. For about 20 years.

Nicotine isn't exactly recreational, but it does take the edge off that "too much coffee" feeling. Especially if you've been working more than several hours. And it does sharpen the mind, sort of orthogonal to caffeine. I've had some profound insights after coffee and a cigarette.

On the other hand, there's the fact that quitting is very hard. Harder than opiates. Harder than benzodiazepines. And the long-term health effects, of course, are horrible.

Addiction is always accidental. The first one's free, as they say.

The linked page doesn't list any sources for that claim. It seems believable, but I couldn't find any evidence from a quick google search and the article itself isn't very persuasive.

From the article: "You know as late as 1900, ... let's say you would have appendicitis, you would go into the hospital, and you would get morphine as a pain killer during the operation, you would be given morphine further after the operation, and you would come out of the hospital with no appendix but addicted to morphine."

I find that interesting, because as late as 2010 I went to the hospital with severe abdominal pain and received morphine while the cause was being determined. Before I was diagnosed with appendicitis the efficacy of the morphine decreased to the point that I was switched to dilaudid. I was educated briefly on the risk of addiction, had the surgery, left the hospital two days layer, and haven't sought either since.

I don't know if full legalization is the best option, but dismissing it with shaky historical claims is not a great argument.

That's probably roughly right, given that the WHO says alcoholism ranges from 0% to 16%. http://www.who.int/gho/substance_abuse/burden/alcohol_preval...

But there's an additional question for context; would you rather that 10-20% of opiate addicts be contributing members of society, with jobs, and homes, and who simply enjoy some opiates after work, as some enjoy a beer or wine with dinner? Or is it better to force them into the margins of society so they end up robbing convenience stores for drastically marked up and adulterated drugs with an inconsistent supply, so addicts end up alone, jobless, and homeless with little chance of ever recovering? Because we've been trying the second option for decades, and it hasn't made the problem go away. In fact, articles like this say it's worse than it's ever been.

Fun fact; alcohol, being illegal in several Middle Eastern countries, has a similar problem with black market sales leading to death there, as we have with fentanyl mixed with heroin. Bleach gets sold as liquor, victim tries to drink it to get drunk, and they die. Not because alcohol is bad for you, but because they drank fucking bleach, because the black market in the Middle East isn't regulated, just like black market heroin in the US doesn't give a shit about the FDA's regulations.

Sell heroin at Walmart, regulated by the FDA, and at a tenth of the cost, and the problem of accidentally doing life-ending amounts of fentanyl because someone said it was heroin; that problem goes away.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant.

The major problem with black market alcohol is the methanol.

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