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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I know a lot more people who use cryptocurrency as a tool instead of as a venue for fraud.

I also know a lot more people who use cocaine (in any form) recreationally than are addicts.

> most people eventually end up in rehab or dead from an overdose

This is factually false. I think perhaps you are going off of selection set/survivorship bias. A lot of people have smoked crack. A minority of them destroyed their lives as a result.

I'm not sure this comparison holds up.

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I think a lot of people who don’t use drugs at all and don’t associate with those who do underestimate the number of high-functioning regular members of society partake with minimal detriment to themselves. That applies even to the use of amphetamines and opioids. It should be obvious, when most drinkers manage to avoid alcoholism. I am curious if there are studies that have tried to estimate the ratio of casual users to abusers for various compounds.

I can believe that the percentage of people who tried /used drugs occasionally without visible detriments is much higher than those who got their lives destroyed.

I can also believe that the absolute numbers of a victims of using drugs, alcohol, smoking is very high and so are the direct and collateral damage costs to society.

> I can also believe that the absolute numbers of a victims of using drugs, alcohol, smoking is very high and so are the direct and collateral damage costs to society.

But is that relevant to the discussion in any way?

Rough estimates are $100 billion per year revenues for illegal drugs, compared to $350 billion per year for prescription drugs. About 50% of Americans use prescription drugs, so let's say 15% use illegal drugs.

Can you meaningfully compare revenues for an illegal class of products to a legal one? It also doesn't follow that the money spent on either class is evenly distributed across the population.

This is just anecdotal evidence vs. anecdotal evidence. Not sure how anyone can remark if this or that "holds up".

It should be obvious from the massive scale of the illicit narcotics industry that most users are not dying or becoming problem-users.

Only about 1 in 5 people who use cocaine become addicted to it [1]. It also looks like it's pretty hard to overdose from cocaine alone. Overdoses seem to happen due to impurities mixed into the drug.

[1] https://www.michiganpsychologicalassociation.org/index.php?o...

No, only about 1 in 5 mice become addicted to it. The number with humans will be far lower.

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