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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

I challenge anybody to prove how this makes us safer.

This man has spent his 10,000 hours to know what he's doing. I have full empathy for his plight and view. However, when anyone ignorant of the true physical risk of eating the wrong mushroom, actually eats the wrong mushroom trying to get high, they will be permanently damaged. With the wrong mushroom, vital kidney function is quickly destroyed forever. If we take a hardcore Darwinist view, well OK, they did it to themselves. But I view it as more likely a lack of wisdom. When I was a teenager and young adult, I did stupid and risky things. When you are young, you don't have proper wisdom and it is only developed over time. In my view, one thing that these laws do is to serve as a guidepost. At least as a society, we tried to protect the unwise from eating the wrong mushroom, just by having laws against it.

I was waiting for this one.

If you're going to play the safety card you should charge every single person caught foraging for edible wild mushrooms. Every year I hear reports of people dying from eating the wrong mushroom.

You should be aware that these laws do not serve as guideposts but as tools of oppression. I mean that literally and not as libertarian hyperbole. If you want citations I can do the needful for the same.

Well, I can't say I really disagree with you. I own copies of Tihkal and Pihkal. It's a fascinating, underexplored, and underfunded area. It seemed like our society was moving further left on these issues, with marijuana opening up. But, with the opioid and heroin epidemic (and it is an epidemic where I am from in WV) I expect we'll soon see a hard move back to the right on all these issues.

Having lost a sibling to heroin, I'm very much emotionally invested in this topic.

The opioid epidemic has been well documented as being created by Purdue Pharma, et al. It's also clear by now that treating a medical issue as a crime only makes things tragically worse.

But this all goes back to a central question: should the state have authority over your mind? If not, why are these laws on the books?

Also lost a sibling at least in relation to opioid addiction. My 19-year old brother, he died in the street from a gunshot to the back from an 18-year old drug dealer, while trying to buy a bottle of Oxycontin on a weekday morning. I don't know how to solve these issues, but from my view, one thing that has most bothered me is, why weren't both of these able bodied young men at work? On a weekday morning? Well, there were no jobs, it was 2009 and the economy was in shock. This epidemic is a side effect of the banking catastrophe and its leaders, none of whom have beeen held accountable themselves for their own crimes, and are all multiples richer than they were at that time.

Having delusional cult leaders talking about the fractal universe and how we are all the same and how everything would be fixed if we just gave up our ego is bad for society.

It will be good for society when there is more automation.

So what?

Preventing graffiti at a state or national park doesn't make us safe either. We still prosecute those who graffiti.

Poaching rabbits doesn't make us safer. It's also illegal.

Graffiti is vandalism, i.e., a property crime. Poaching, by definition, is hunting an animal that is restricted for varying reasons, from being a protected species to herd management, etc. It's effectively taking something that doesn't belong to you.

In this case, he did break the law by picking mushrooms where it was specifically prohibited, and it would be reasonable to cite him for that fact.

But it wasn't about theft, it was about the fact that he wanted to ingest a compound which would alter his state of consciousness. That should not be a crime.

Thank you for agreeing with my point that there are more ways to judge the validity of a law than its ability to protect us.

I list more examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15052587 .

Yeah. Laws don't have to make us safer, they can have other benefits.

The U.S. Constitution might be a good place to start talking about what laws should do. It says, "...form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..."

No, it isn't. The U.S. Constitution as originally written specifically to limit federal power.

The 10th amendment says: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

It wasn't not written to be a general-purpose commentary about what laws should be.

Remember, it was also written to allow people to be property. It also says that there is freedom of religion, but that was at the federal level. Some states had official state churches for a few decades more.

it's about the safety of the mushrooms

Did you know humans are 70% mushroom?

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