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Comment by sowbug | Hacker News Reader

If the US wanted to end the fentanyl and xylazine and nitazene epidemic, it would legalize the controlled manufacture, sale, and usage of the drugs being adulterated. This won't happen, because the 50-year-old War on Drugs is a load-bearing pillar of the US government.

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Xylazine and fentanyl are already legally distributed in the US. I believe Xylazine is still unscheduled.

https://www.dechra-us.com/our-products/us/equine/horse/presc...

Those are the adulterants, not the drugs being adulterated such as heroin, meth, and MDMA.

For the most part, no customer wants fentanyl. The dealers like it because it's a cheap booster for cutting the drugs that their customers actually do want to buy. It just has this unfortunate side effect of making small overdoses lethal.

That's why "ending the fentanyl crisis" is a curious goal. We had a perfectly good War on Drugs going on, but fentanyl is making the illicit drug industry too dangerous. You'd think that if we wanted to stop drugs, and we knew how to do that, we'd stop drugs. Instead we're stopping fentanyl, so we can get back to the regularly scheduled version of the War on Drugs that was always intended to last forever.

Fentanyl is the drug for effect, but it's being sold as a cheap alternative to heroin, or as counterfeit heroin. Unfortunately for users, the effect is short-lasting and it is about 30x as potent, so it is difficult to for them to dose properly. The traffickers like it because many more doses fit into a small space.

I'm not sure I believe that making heroin legal and available for "recreational" use would solve the problem. People who propose it usually say that it's working in another country (such as Portugal), but then you look at that country and it's not really legal or available, it's just that they do not jail people for personal use anymore. I can agree with that, but it doesn't solve the trafficking problem. The only way to get rid of trafficking is to either allow people to easily buy it legally without onerous taxation, or to reduce demand to zero. If you do the former, you will still be stuck with lots of addicts, the associated crime and suffering, and probably many overdoses. Most likely, the number of addicts will increase, as they did with OxyContin, Actiq, etc. Worth mentioning that Actiq is fentanyl and it was in demand.

Reducing demand is a multifaceted problem with complicated solutions, many of which are politically unpopular.

Interestingly, some drugs can simply be taken off the market and the demand plummets. Quaalude is one example. Nobody stepped in to make an illicit version and the users probably just stopped using or switched to benzodiazepines and then hopefully stopped those. Unfortunately, it seems like we have a persistent demand for opioids.

I live in Seattle, decriminalizing drugs didn't turn out that way here.

"controlled" is key. Seattle decriminalized drug use. That's a tiny part of a larger solution rooted in harm reduction.

Singapore kills drug dealers. That works much better.

Idk, if the number of people executed increases over time, maybe it doesn't.

https://www.afr.com/world/asia/singapore-executions-touch-22...

This article cites Singapore saying the existing laws mostly get low-level users and not kingpins because kingpins operate outside of the country.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/singapore-drug-executions/

Decriminalization of drug use doesn't have to mean decriminalization of anything else. Thieves and murderers should be prosecuted regardless of any state induced by the voluntary ingestion chemicals.

Decriminalization without legalization is something I can't support. If it's not illegal for me to have and use a drug, them why should I be forced to buy it from criminals? Either legalize it, or go whole hog on criminalizing it. Execute the dealers and put users into mandatory rehab, or let people buy it in shops. Any of these half measures are intolerable, they exist to make sure the situation is in a constant state of tension, to nobody's benefit but the governments.

Ideally we would pick one or the other on a drug by drug basis. Executing people for selling weed isn't something I actually want, but neither do I want them simply imprisoned or fined either. But with shit like fent? Trying to find a single policy to fit both drugs is inane.

There's a significant number of people who want their life micromanaged and a significant number of people who want to micromanage other people's lives. The need to have a sense of control and therefore safety manifests itself in weird ways in various populations and can't be contained without a lot of sustained, continuous effort, just like the other base desires of humankind. I just wish the federal government didn't have a hand in it, and then all the people who want to execute weed smokers can do so in their own states and leave the other states alone.

I can’t tell if this is sarcastic or not.

Anyway: Capital punishment is an elegant solution.

If we're having a serious conversation about effective drug policies, it would be remise to not discuss Singapore. For some reason the conversation online is always about America and European countries, as if the rest of the world doesn't exist.

I think it usually doesn’t come up because Singapore is a very complicated country, perhaps the most “outlier” country on the planet. Most people in the US (even well-educated ones) don’t know nearly enough about the social, cultural, and historical dynamics to speak on it intelligently, let alone compare and contrast it to a country like the United States.

Might as well talk about drug policy in South Sudan to be honest.

Edit: I will say I do have one Singaporean expat friend who finds capital punishment for drug possession vile, and cites it as one of the reasons she no longer lives there. Along with the crushing wealth disparity between the servant class and the working class. Not that it adds much to the conversation except personal flavor.

Neighbouring countries including Thailand and Indonesia also have the death penalty for drug trafficking. It is almost impossible to visit parts of those countries without being receiving unsolicited offers of drugs...

Can you elaborate?

Do you mean that drug dependence has become more visible? That petty crime has increased?

One fun thing about harm reduction policies is that, as a result of fewer people dying, more people are on the street. So while you don’t see people in the morgue on your daily commute, you do see them down the alleyway. This side effect may be more unpleasant for you, but that’s only because you’re not personally inconvenienced by the corpse sitting in the freezer at the coroner.

Decriminalizing public intoxication didn't turn out to be a good idea.

It's like if Canada wanted to end gun smuggling and school shootings, it would legalize the controlled manufacture, sale, and usage of the guns being banned. But they won't.

If I squint gun control doesn’t look much different than legalized drugs. They’re both just a question of how restrictive the regulation is.

There are still legal ways to have a gun in Australia and many other countries that “ban guns”. They don’t have total bans, they just have more restrictive regulations than the United States.

Consider how we regulate alcohol or marijuana as examples of how legalization of drugs works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_control

I mean, prohibition works while legalization just makes more people use whatever you legalize and increases the negative externalities of its use. You see that almost universally (alcohol, drugs, sex work). The exception is it gets rid of the black markets and some (but not all) of the violence associated with them.

So if the goal is to put cartels out of business then yea, full legalization would help. If the goal is to stop overdoses and addiction then absolutely not.

Alcohol is legal. We don't have gun battles between gangs of smugglers, or between them and the cops. We also don't have people dying or going blind from trying to drink wood alcohol.

But we still have a depressingly large number of alcoholics. The campaign against drunk driving has helped reduce one set of negative side effects, but not others.

So alcohol prohibition worked at reducing alcohol consumption. The organized crime and violence are negative externalities that were real, but my point is that if you're just looking at the goal of stopping drinking, then prohibition worked.

The decline in alcohol consumed by Gen Z is interesting though. We’ll see if it holds with Gen Alpha, or if it can just be chalked up to Gen Z dealing with Covid during their formative years when other generations would have been partying quite a bit.

Maybe an unintended positive externality of marijuana legalization?

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