Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

No more than water does.

Even as a proponent of full legalization I know that as little as a few minutes spent in water can kill someone, and often does.

Why people are allowed to casually dive into this toxic substance is beyond me. No licenses, no regulations, practically any body of water you can find you're allowed to jump into totally unsupervised.

Most places don't even have signs warning people of the danger, and worst yet, many children practice a dangerous activity called 'swimming' in this substance often daring each other as to who can drop the highest from a rope into a potentially fatal body of water.

Also, once you start drinking it you need to find at least 4 litres of this a day to keep from going into water withdrawl, commonly known as dehydration, this can happen in as little as 3 days with out your daily fix.

View on HN

There's a difference in degree and in kind. Water does not create addiction that forces you to consume it in amounts that are seriously harmful to your health.

It's not true that areas unsafe for swimming are not marked - they are; moreover, there's both infrastructure in place to increase safety (e.g. lifeguards) and a significant amount of effort put towards educating people about the dangers of things like jumping into the water in a potentially unsafe place.

But that's all beside the point. Laws and rules do not exist in vacuum, and humans are not spherical cows of uniform density. Time and again history has proven that most people can handle exposure to water safely, while they can't handle being exposed to hard drugs. You can blame this on individual stupidity, but people don't have perfectly free will, and if this stupidity predictably touches big fractions of a population, it's time to mitigate it.

Also, can you please avoid drinking water for the next 4 days... I think you might be addicted, if you're not addicted you won't show any signs of withdrawl.

Addicts suffering from water withdrawl often drink amounts that are unsafe for their health which is why marathon runners have to be given water adulterated with mind altering metals like sodium and highly toxic chlorine to make it safe for them to drink.

It's kind of insane that water addiction would drive people to ingest water in such vast amounts that you'd have to add chlorine and sodium to make it safer.

If you think places unsafe for swimming are marked I would hazard a guess that you haven't spent much time in the outdoors.

A property of addiction includes the implicit notion that you consume much more than you need, to a point of actively harming yourself.

We talk about food addiction when people eat way too mcuh, not when people eat a proper amount to survive.

> It's not true that areas unsafe for swimming are not marked - they are; moreover, there's both infrastructure in place to increase safety (e.g. lifeguards) and a significant amount of effort put towards educating people about the dangers of things like jumping into the water in a potentially unsafe place.

It's not true that products unsafe for smoking are not marked - they are; moreover, there's both infrastructure in place to increase safety (e.g. physicians and filters) and a significant amount of effort put towards educating people about the dangers of things like using tobacco in a potentially unsafe manner.

I believe that time and history has proven that prohibition solves little, where infrastructure to increase safety and effort put towards educating people results in "less harm" -- a much better outcome for all. Some people will make a harmful choice (e.g. heavy smoking, fast food diet, sedentary lifestyle, using chainsaws alone), but society as a whole should not be punished for the choices of the few.

As far as hard drugs, Ron Paul has done excellent surveys amongst hardcore Republicans (who generally say they'd do drugs if allowed) and found that most of them would not do heroin if given the choice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9n4nwxgaQg

> There's a difference in degree and in kind. Water does not create addiction that forces you to consume it in amounts that are seriously harmful to your health.

Neither do most drugs, especially most illegal drugs.

Many legal drugs do (the most addictive of all being nicotine), but that also doesn't matter and is besides the point.

These are health issues, not criminal issues.

> No more than water does

The poster above me implied that Ulbricht's actions did not hurt anyone. Hence, harm from drugs is relevant, because Ulbricht was selling drugs.

Ulbricht was not selling water, so whether or not water is harmful is completely irrelevant to my point, which is that Ulbricht is not going to jail for "running a website".

Ah yes, the psychoactive and carcinogenic properties of water are well known!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com