Hacker News Reader

Comment by QDwQ1 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah we should totally just sell heroin OTC at CVS. That would be much better for society overall

Probably?

I have given out a certain of points and bubbles in my life under harm reduction programs. These efforts (which I've worked at but not been central to) have had a measurable and positive impact on syphilis rates in rural Colorado among a number of other metrics.

While I think it's not great folks use, the worst parts of many of these things are created by states sanctioning things. People mess their lives up all kinds of ways and creating a black market pretty much just changes the incentive structures. It just makes it more likely folks will do fent because that's what they can find, but if they can't find that they'll drink hand sanitizer.

Unless you think that these folks should kill themselves off using tainted drugs (which was a policy pursued by the US government during alcohol prohibition), then legalization program makes some sense.

Introducing a government monopoly on things like heroin would have a lot of up-sides with the downsides largely being slightly skewed versions what we have right now.

I don't think that marketing heroin in social media apps the way gambling does is a sane idea, but I also don't think gambling apps should be allowed to market themselves.

Like a lot of things, I believe having a government undercut the market for things would have a positive impact, but depending on your view of the relationship between the DEA and the CIA you might think that is already happening but in the worst of all possible ways,

Harm reduction is a double edged sword and should be assessed on the actual merits of the evidence - I am skeptical that legal heroin would be net mortality reducing.

There's already causal inference evidence out there indicating that needle exchange programs reduce rates of HIV and other bloodborne infections, but increase the risk of fatal overdose. If simply making fresh needles more accessible increases overdose rates, I suspect legalizing heroin would have a much larger effect.

I would expect consistent potency to lower accidental overdoses.

Harm reduction could be mortality neutral and still be an improvement on other metrics.

But I personally am not sure what the causal relationship between access "clean needles" and "fatally overdosing" is, though I would be interesting in hearing that account.

The War on Drugs people aren't actually serious. They think too small or are kids wanting to play with toys. Fighting the supply side gets you narco subs and secret passageways and cartels. Fighting the demand side with housing and jobs and hope for the future and families and therapy and happiness just doesn't look as cool on tv as rolling up with a SWAT team with GUNS mowing down bad guys.

The Sacklers already did that (not quite OTC) with opioids

And it was bad, but it went from bad to terrible when they stopped getting their OTC opioids and had to switch to black markets.

You used to - like a century ago - be able to buy things like cocaine and methamphetamine OTC at pharmacies and they were not as big of a problem as they are today. A lot of today's problems come from things outside the drug itself. Most overdose deaths, for example, come from the drug user being wrong about the amount they're injecting because their dealer lied to them, or didn't know themselves because their dealer's dealer's dealer changed supplier, and didn't notify those downstream because reliable communication is difficult because of the police.

How do you know it wouldn't?

> hOw do You kNOw iT woUldn'T?

jfc this is just terminal contrarianism. do we really need to debate whether it's harmful for extremely addictive drugs to be widely available? the Chinese literally fought wars over this

Extremely addictive drugs are already widely available. People at the lowest rungs of our society have very little difficulty obtaining them.

If we can create a situation where those people aren't breaking into cars, stripping the wire out of buildings, or dying in the street - that would be a net positive.

Prohibition has five decades of abject failure under its belt. Try something else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com