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Comment by jkubicek | Hacker News Reader

> People think the restrictions don't work, but they absolutely do

It's wild to me that people make assertions like this. We can (and should) argue about the effectiveness of smoking restrictions on decreasing cancer and heart disease, but to make the argument that they have no effect is just silliness.

You hear the same arguments from the right whenever gun control, environmental protections or really any sort of government regulation comes up, and from the left (though to a much lesser degree) on the topic of tax rates. We should all be able to agree that any sort of regulation will have a marginal effect, and be able to have a discussion about the level of that effect.

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I was always under the impression from people here on HN that regulation stifles the free market, one of the pillars of the US. This in turn negatively affects innovation, impacting jobs and sectors across the country.

Is this no longer the case?

I can't speak for HN, but I'm of the view that some reasonable degree of regulation is necessary for a properly functioning market. Imagine if everyone engaged in drip pricing [1]. It'd be less of a market that competed on pricing and quality of product/service, and more of a market of who can trick the buyer most effectively.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_pricing

The "free market" is a corruption of the phrase "freely competitive market" coined by Adam Smith. He was quite clear about the need for legal control to keep markets competitive for them to function.

> pillars of the US

Systems without regulations ends either with monopoly or towards entropy. To keep system balanced, regulations need to adapt in time. Contrary to this, it is not uncommon in US to think that Constitution is set in stone and regulations are bad.

How about legalizing drugs? Somehow people believe that it is going to magically work.

A regulated drug market such as cigarettes can do more to reduce harmful consumption than an unregulated drug market. It also eliminates criminalisation for what is essentially a health issue.

Well we could make Tobacco illegal too, at the cost of creating a black market and increasing crime. Would we start locking people up for smoking? Would workplaces include nicotine in their mandatory drug testing?

I just think it is better for things like fentanyl to stay illegal than freely available in streets. I would be interested to see an alternative universe where tobacco was illegal. You do not necessarily lock people up but just reduce the supply as much as you can.

The big problem with fentanyl is that it is an extremely potent drug with a low therapeutic index, which, with the poor quality control of street drugs, is a perfect recipe for overdoses.

I am not saying the fentanyl should be made legal, but its criminalization is a big part of the problem. It is also why it is used so much over other, less risky opioids. Because it is so potent, only small quantities are needed, which makes trafficking easier.

This is the part I also do not understand. Why is criminalization the issue? Do you think having such drugs makes the world better in any way? We are not talking about buying eggs. These are super addictive substances.

Criminalization doesn’t make drugs go away. It just means you can throw addicts in jail. Is that a better world? Maybe. There are certainly downsides, which is where the discussion should be.

I would say that criminalization is "an" issue - when the drugs go through black markets quality suffers, it's harder to drive out bad suppliers, keep markets open, etc. This decreases the quality of the product overall, but also lowers the availability somewhat.

On the other hand, look at cigarettes - everyone agrees they are very bad for you, the packages say it, and you pay an extremely high premium for them over their costs. But no one dies from fentanyl (or whatever) in them because they're a regulated industry. We used to know less about it and let people smoke as much as they want. Now that we have good data on that we raise the social and financial cost of cigarettes to keep them as unpopular as possible.

I'd encourage you to think about this less like eggs and more like the weather. On some level, drugs exist "out there" and people will use them "sometimes." We can't change that. What we can change are the systems that make the already difficult problem of addiction worse by introducing lethal surprises.

Yeah when people have no legal pain management you get the current opioid crisis (as opposed to the previous version where people were aggressively given highly addictive substances without sufficient support or oversight).

> Would workplaces include nicotine in their mandatory drug testing?

That's already happening in USA.

https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/13807-cleveland-clinic-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5788708/

And perhaps baselessly, not just testing for tobacco, but any form of nicotine.

Legalized, regulated, taxed substances with guarantees, legal vendor liability and consumer protections are safer and better for everyone than unregulated markets with no guarantees or consumer protections and with zero vendor liability. There's no magic involved.

Legal drugs may actually be more expensive and less available than their illegal counterparts.

It's worked out that way in a lot of US states for weed -- the illegal stuff is still around and still cheaper. I read recently that in California, illegal weed is still 75% of the market.

I think you are speaking way too soon on this. We are just getting started. Plus price is not the only determinant in how widespread usage for certain drugs are.

Maybe so, but it was legalized in CA for recreational use way back in 2016, and the scheme came into force in 2018. Part of the issue is that nobody wants to permit a dispensary in their neighborhood, so coverage is poor. Another problem is that it's simply much more expensive.

If you're already happy with your friendly neighborhood plug, why change?

I found the the article I mentioned:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-22/legal-weed-...

> Under Proposition 64, legal-weed businesses must first obtain approval from local authorities, which is impossible in many parts of California.

Not exactly encouraging new businesses, but to still go from 0 to 25% that’s not too bad

It magically kept people from going to prison for possession of not legal drugs.

How many times have people smoking cigarettes been killed because somebody dosed their smokes with fentanyl?

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