Hacker News Reader

Example 20 year old experimenting with drugs:

Going to jail for a year breaks any career chances or most of the job opportunities plus messes up his mind by staying with other convicts.

Letting him experiment with drugs, he might mess up his health but also he has still a chance to continue rather normal life.

View on HN

If he manages to get out. Gets addicted to meth, can’t work, needs more meth, what does he do?

What does a 20 year old alcoholic do? What does a 20 year old gambling addict do? It's wild that people even think of prison as an acceptable answer when there are so many analogs of things that people can abuse or get addicted to, things which we don't criminalize

Thing is - you don't need to show the likely outcomes are perfect - you just need to show they are better than what happens now.

And right now it seems to be "if you do this thing that sometimes has a really bad outcome and we catch you then we'll make that outcome much worse"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com