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Comment by threepts | Hacker News Reader

They also permanently banned coke,meth and other drugs since the inception of law, guess how that turned out?

"The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated that 8.7% of people aged 16 to 59 years (around 2.9 million people) reported using any drug in the last 12 months for the year ending (YE) March 2025; there was no statistically significant change compared with YE March 2024"

I believe limiting people's liberty is an ineffective option opposed to education.

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> guess how that turned out?

My guess is that significantly fewer people use drugs than would have used drugs if they were not banned.

> "The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated that 8.7% of people aged 16 to 59 years (around 2.9 million people) reported using any drug in the last 12 months for the year ending (YE) March 2025; there was no statistically significant change compared with YE March 2024"

Are there some significant changes to policy during that time period? I don’t see how this factoid is related to whatever argument you are trying to make.

They're pointing out that 2.9 millon people take drugs (extrapolating from the people surveyed), and law says that should be zero.

This law will attempt to ban cigarettes. Estimate how many people will buy them and smoke them illegally. The number will not be zero.

The number does not have to be zero for this to still have a net positive effect on society.

How many people's lives have been ruined due to them getting caught with drugs? Your "net positive" just focuses on using force to make people not have self agency to what they do to their bodies.

You know what would really solve crime and drug abuse issues? If we just gave people lobotomies at the age of 16. They will all be nice and complacent and due what they're told by the state.

False Dilemma fallacy

Yeah, murder is illegal too, but still the number of murders is non-zero. Maybe we should just legalize it?

Sarcasm aside, if the goal is to reduce consumption, criminalization does work. Repression, though, does come with its own can of worm (an euphemism, yes). It's up to the citizenry and its representatives to decide if the trade-off is worth it.

At the cost of how many people's lives that get jailed for doing drugs/smoking and not hurting anyone? Telling people what they cannot do in the privacy of their own homes is a massive invasion of pri... Ohh, well England is par for the course when it comes to that at this point.

there is also a strong question as to whether smokers are actually a net cost to government or not. They draw decades less old age pension, have decades less medical visits, etc. I am extremely unconvinced that a large cancer related medical cost now has a higher net present value than a stream of government pension payouts, health costs, etc for decades ended with a large medical cost for some other reason. This is the correct comparable for smoking vs non smoking if you are contemplating limiting peoples freedoms and i dont think it holds water.

The net effect of smoking on healthcare and welfare costs. A cohort study. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3533014/ (Finland, 2012)

So the answer is smokers are cheaper so its stupid for the government to dump on smokers like they have been?

If your government requires its people to be dead, it is by nature a foul and evil thing.

thats one wrong way to interpret it, yes. The right way is a government choosing criteria to determine how much it should interfere in your personal choices and in that context net cost to the government is a reasonable metric to consider, although not the only metric

This gets easier to answer once you consider that, unlike an alcoholic, a smoker directly harms others around him, not just himself. And that's just on top of all the indirect damage.

And then, even as for strictly the damage he does to himself, cancer is far from the only risk.

There are less harmful ways to get addicted to nicotine that will continue to be legal for people affected by this legislation.

> guess how that turned out?

Well, I don't hear colleagues at work saying they're going for a "meth break", so... pretty well, I'd say?

You think education is effective? How much educating do they need to do about meth being bad before people stop using it?

I merely suggested that it is an better alternative as opposed to restricting people's freedom (and setting a precedent that the government can just simply choose to ignore people's rights).

Also criminalization of something always leads to its romanticization to some extent. Look at the rap scene. There is always a rebound effect.

There is, but we've tried educating people against smoking, and it hasn't worked. I agree with you that we shouldn't limit people's freedom, but I don't believe that education works better than criminalization, when we're talking strictly about effectiveness.

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