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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

It's always seemed to me the fix is technically quite easy even if politicians find it hard to vote for - provide safe heroin or similar to addicts for free / low cost at addiction treatment centres while at the same time keep supplying drugs on the open market illegal. That way the dealers lose most of their income and get other jobs, the addicts are at least safe and the general public don't get their stuff nicked. I don't know why it's so hard to get that implemented. It has been done in the past in the UK and it works.

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I'm generally in favour of drug legalization and I think we should carefully experiment with even legalizing heroine/opiates.

However, I don't think this is a "fix" any more than legal alcohol is a fix for alcoholism. Legal or not, there will be user and there will be addicts. Legality might be an improvement but it doesn't solve the problem.

I don't know if there is a solution. An effective treatment for addiction is the only thing I can think of. We don't even have effective treatments for eating disorders.

There is a difference: alcohol can kill you in various ways, both acute and long term. Heroin can too, but by knowing what you're getting and your own tolerance you can avoid overdoses and then the side effects are pretty mild (constipation).

A quote I like to fall back on is the one from Portugal, which no longer has (edited) criminalized substances.

"If you realize addiction is simply a symptom of a deeper underlying mental illness. Treat the illness, you solve the addiction."

But yes there will be addicts.

Recreational drug possession is decriminalized in Portugal, but still illegal. You will still be fined if caught, and if you possess over a certain amount, charged with a crime. That being said, addiction has declined since the decriminalization.

If caught consuming (under a certain amount), the drug will be apreend and you can be required to present yourself before a comitte formed by a lawyer, a doctor and a social worker. It's possible to be fined but that it's not the primary objective.

While I think it's a huge improvement to see addiction something other than a 'crime', I think assuming it's a symptom of a deeper underlying mental illness is still not ideal. It's too simple.

Consider addiction to smoking. There are plenty of people who picked up smoking for no other reason than 'fitting in' or 'curiosity'. Which I'd hardly call a mental illness. Many of these people kept smoking, and sadly probably many of them died from smoking.

Similarly, I suspect there are many alcoholics who slowly became so because they entered a culture of alcohol.

Addiction is a powerful thing in itself, and while the solution to many might be uncovering the underlying mental illness, for many it might 'just' be a matter of unlearning a powerful, destructive habit.

Of course in both cases professional help is necessary, but treating an 'underlying mental illness' in cases where there are none can also have bad consequences.

Among the many addicts and ex-addicts I've known, there have been more than a few that were actively treating a 'deeper underlying mental illness' that I suspected didn't really exist in the first place. And while that's probably better than being an addict, it's still not good.

in fact, this is one reason I have issues with the approach Alcoholics Anonymous. They seem to treat all alcoholics as sufferers of a lifelong disease, and I cannot help but wonder if being constantly reminded of a thing you don't want to do anymore is a good solution for all people. For some, sure. Some people might have the 'alcoholism gene'. But I don't think that's always the case.

There is a difference between chemical and psychological addiction you completely overlook. I was generalizing the later, as it can be dealt with, with consoling.

The former can be very nasty and serious. It didn't mean to belittle it, or people who've fallen prey to it.

There's a difference, but it's not black and white, and I find it hard to imagine that most chemical addictions we know are bad enough in themselves to cause the extreme behavior that addicts exhibit.

Regardless, I was primarily thinking about the psychological side of addiction in the above post, and I think my point still stands. There are many examples of (almost) purely psychological addictions that people suffer from, and also in those cases I think it can be an interplay of habit formation, personality characteristics, and environment, that 'maintain' it, and not always 'deeper issues' (although I suppose one could consider environment a deeper issue...).

The critical point in my suggestion above is that heroin at any rate is not legalised in general. It is only made legal for it to be supplied to support addicts at registered non profit treatment centres. This is actually pretty much the law at the moment in the UK - heroin can be prescribed legally by doctors, but there are still issues in getting it done. The alternate policy of tolerating illegal heroin use such as practiced in Amsterdam at times has many problems - you get the criminal dealers, the parks full of junkies who steal stuff to buy the drugs and so on.

What's interesting is that the USA has very high rates of drug abuse, illegal and prescription drug abuse, despite having very strict laws and harsh punishments for drugs (it varies by state, but generally).

The lesson is that the harsh punishments don't solve the problem.

Drug addictions should not be blamed on the addict, there is still a huge problem here. I think they can be treated if they are accepted, the addiction approached like a mental disease, with counseling and honesty.

But legal alcohol did work to make it far less dangerous and remove the organized crime effect

This is spot on, prescribing heroin wouldn't necessarily help addicts to recover but it would go a long way to making the disease itself more bearable for individuals and society.

If misery causes drug abuse, like it seems to do, then obviously making misery more rare is the solution. Legality is one easy step towards that goal, other steps include societal acceptance (i.e. drug users not immediately being regarded as worse people) and increased wealth.

> However, I don't think this is a "fix" any more than legal alcohol is a fix for alcoholism.

Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that legal alcohol IS a fix for alcoholism, at least if you're speaking of the sort of alcoholism that might exist is a world where alcoholics are all destitute and social pariahs? I think we live in a world where many functional alcoholics exist, for better or for worse. But I would rather have more functional alcoholism and legality, than live in a society that views alcoholics as criminals and condemns them to destitution.

In the same way, while i dont necessarily want more heroin addicts, i think i want to live in society where functional heroin addicts can lead the semblance of a normal life as we coolectively sort out how to help them recover.

> Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that legal alcohol IS a fix for alcoholism, at least if you're speaking of the sort of alcoholism that might exist is a world where alcoholics are all destitute and social pariahs?

Prohibition doesn't make all addicts destitute social pariahs. There are plenty of rich & popular addicts of illegal drugs now, just as there were plenty of rich & popular people who were also alcoholics when alcohol was the subject of Prohibition.

It does make more addicts destitute social pariahs, though, and the stigmatization complicates treating addiction.

Switzerland and the Netherlands have done just that, with promising results: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595963-how-mak...

Don't forget Canada.

Australia too

Also Portugal

> It's always seemed to me the fix is technically quite easy even if politicians find it hard to vote for - provide safe heroin or similar to addicts for free / low cost at addiction treatment centres while at the same time keep supplying drugs on the open market illegal. That way the dealers lose most of their income and get other jobs, the addicts are at least safe and the general public don't get their stuff nicked.

It seems to me the whole problem stems from a misunderstanding of what needs to be prevented.

What you don't want is people addicted to drugs. Allowing heroin to be sold at Walmart for $1 would be no problem whatsoever if nobody was using it. Where the stupidity comes in is that the laws and law enforcement are targeted at sale and distribution rather than consumption, the theory apparently being that if people can't buy drugs then they can't use them.

Which, of course, doesn't work, and instead leads to the rise of organized crime and violence.

What we need is for sale and possession to be legal, which kills the drug cartels instantly, but then do everything we can to discourage usage. Make the penalty for drug use a fine and instant mandatory rehab, and make drug possession legal but probable cause for a drug test.

The idea is to make distribution legal and therefore unprofitable, and make usage as safe as possible but so inconvenient that nobody wants to do it. And then use the revenue generated from taxing it to pay to help the people who are already addicted.

I've thought similar things but came to a slightly different conclusion.

Let people buy and use heroin legally, but make the process like the DMV or a welfare office. That is to say, it takes hours, it's boring and uncomfortable, you can't play on your phone, and is so lacking in romance or mystique that it could be a synonym for mundane inanity. Plus they can only get a limited amount at a time and there is a cooldown period.

> It's always seemed to me the fix is technically quite easy

You're absolutely, 100% right in that sentence alone.

The solution to heroin addiction is technically quite easy, and it's called Iboga.

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