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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit surprised to find someone suggesting that selling prescription pills under the counter shouldn't be illegal. Do you mind elaborating on your perspective?

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If there's a willing buyer, and a willing seller, and the goods aren't stolen, and the seller isn't lying about what the goods are, then who is the victim?

If there's no victim, there's no crime.

(And, yes, identical logic does apply equally to illegal drugs).

It depends. Most (all?) antibiotics aren't sold without recipe. If they were and people started using them without good reason, we could end up in situation where there are no longer any effective antibiotics for the species (this is already the case to some degree, but accelerating it certainly isn't ideal).

When something has negative externalities, the answer isn't to ban it, it's to tax it in proportion to the pro rata share of the negative externalities (and then maybe waive the tax if you have a prescription; but maybe not -- they seem to be overprescribed as it is, and the negative externalities don't disappear when you have a prescription).

If you want to pay $2000 for useless antibiotics, no problem. But the price will deter enough people that we don't get the scale required for widespread negative consequences, especially when insurance companies won't cover it without a prescription. Then the money can go to subsidize medicine in general so there is no net consequence for overall medical costs or insurance premiums.

And we could do the same thing for heroin with the money going to drug treatment etc. and do without all this business of SWAT teams and drug cartels.

Cigarettes are legal and people still smuggle and sell them on the black market to avoid paying taxes. Your scheme would be mostly indistinguishable from the current prohibition and would still be dominated by cartels and SWAT teams.

> Cigarettes are legal and people still smuggle and sell them on the black market to avoid paying taxes. Your scheme would be mostly indistinguishable from the current prohibition and would still be dominated by cartels and SWAT teams.

Then where are the cartels and SWAT teams in the black market for cigarettes? The difference in the level of violence is stark. And most of the cigarettes on the market are sold through legal channels.

Failing to eliminate 100% of all crime is hardly an indictment of a significant improvement from the status quo.

i would argue that if taxes are so onerous as to support a black market for a legal good, the taxes are probably much too high. for instance, consider the price of cigarettes in the state of new york. the average cost of a pack (after tax) is $12.85. the federal tax is about $1 per pack, and the state government levies an additional $4.35. without accounting for local taxes that are added in some counties/cities, that amounts to a ~70% tax on a pack of cigs. in addition to being an absurd tax from the get-go (in my opinion), it is also quite regressive, since poor people are significantly more likely to be smokers. when you add states that levy per-pack taxes of less than $1 to the mix, you basically guarantee that people are going to bootleg cigarettes.

> i would argue that if taxes are so onerous as to support a black market for a legal good, the taxes are probably much too high.

Nah, when something has large negative externalities you set the tax to the point of mostly discouraging it. That'll be pretty high. It's supposed to be.

> in addition to being an absurd tax from the get-go (in my opinion), it is also quite regressive, since poor people are significantly more likely to be smokers.

"Regressive tax" only applies to necessities. Cigarettes are a luxury item, like lottery tickets or whiskey. Nobody ever starved or froze or lost their job for lack of a cigarette.

> Nah, when something has large negative externalities you set the tax to the point of mostly discouraging it. That'll be pretty high. It's supposed to be.

you really think each pack of cigs does $5.35 worth of damage to people other than the smoker?

When their insurance premiums or taxes go up to have to cover a million dollars in claims when you get cancer or other long-term chronic health conditions, yes.

Oh okay I understand that perspective. Thanks.

> then who is the victim?

A lot of the times the drugs being sold are painkillers, opioids and such. And this doesn't happen in a vacuum where no one else is harmed. Alcohol is legal, and there's lots of victims involving its use. We're just willing to tolerate it and we tried prohibition and it didn't work. And then some yahoos decided to try Prohibition II, like drugs are really different when alcohol is a drug itself.

The whole reason drugs are illegal is because of all the social ills having 20% of the population addicted to drugs in the late 19th century caused. And it's all been knee-jerk reactions and staying the course no matter how insane or counter-productive the results are ever since.

But the law doesn't work that way, what's technically illegal is illegal. Prostitution and illegal drug use are two things in that camp.

Right, but the question was about why it should be illegal, not why it is illegal.

And assuming insurance didn't pay for the pills (this would fall under the category of "stolen" or at least "misappropriated")

Individual sovereignty.

Drug approval services provided by government are there because we want added safety - not to be told what to do.

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