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Comment by freeone3000 | Hacker News Reader

The only reason it "caused crime" was because the drugs were illegal. Most of the negative effects of criminal drug use are the criminal aspect, not the abuse aspect. Alcoholism is terrible, but, banning alcohol made the problems much much worse, and affect many more people, and resulted in an infamous amount of organized crime. That's where drugs are today. When you could get cocaine over the counter, and opium on the street corner, the addicts needed help, but it harmed society as a whole less -- and banning the substances did not reduce the number of addicts, simply interfered with their ability to get help.

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>banning alcohol made the problems much much worse

The difference with drugs today is that a lot of them can easily kill you or create a physical dependency after the first use. Alcohol won't do that unless you're just chugging Everclear and trying to hurt yourself.

It makes no sense to have a ban on marijuana or magic mushrooms, but crap like Fentanyl and NBOMe should be illegal. They have zero potential to help and are almost certain to harm.

I suspect that if morphine and traditional psychedelics were legally available very few people would be that interested in those.

> but crap like Fentanyl and NBOMe should be illegal. They have zero potential to help and are almost certain to harm.

Fentanyl, a commonly prescribed pain-killer, has zero potential to help?

Just because misuse often overdoses the powerful drug, doesn't make it useless.

Giving people Fentanyl for pain management is almost as bad as bloodletting to cure a respiratory illness. It's a very dangerous substance, even in moderation. It needs to go the way of leaded gasoline for the sake of public safety.

The issue is not just overdoses. It's long term physical and psychological dependencies that drive people there to begin with. A lot of addicts become addicted through prescriptions, and then they doctor shop. And in some cases it has even come out that doctors received kickbacks from the pharma companies.

I'm 100% in favor of banning synthetic heroin pills. They shouldn't exist.

The limitations of this theory are playing out in the Bay Area (where enforcement is so lax drugs are in effect decriminalized) in real time. There are absolutely large negative externalities from drug addiction, independent of the enforcement regime.

Lax enforcement is not the same thing as decriminalization -- and decriminalization in a small area is not the same as legalization. If the import to that area is still under control, then you're still going to have the smuggling problems and all of its attendant apparatus, the drug concentration problems (small items are easier to smuggle, so more potent drugs are smuggled more often), the purity problems, and so on. And increasing enforcement does not actually reduce the number of addicts, it simply moves these addicts to prison, which is worse for not only the addict, but now for society that must pay for their sentence. Forty years of drug enforcement has not stopped the drug trade. Should we give it another forty, or try something else?

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