Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

> Hypothetically speaking, no. In practice, all attempts at providing classifications for which drugs to ban and which to keep legal are based on purely subjective and unscientific slippery slopes. With such a variety of narcotics, it's practically inevitable to see such regressions.

What?! There's certainly some misclassifications due to political meddling with the DEA (should be rolled into the FDA, imho), but how is quantitative addictiveness measured in animal models (and in humans!) a "purely subjective and unscientific slippy slope"? Cocaine is more addictive than acetaminophen. Ignoring that fact is just as bad policy as anything you're arguing against. And yes, I agree with the Controlled Substances Act that addictiveness + medical utility is a decent litmus for the social good or lack thereof realized by access to a drug.

>> if addictive drugs were legal and fully unregulated, who do you think the majority of the profits would go to? Hint: Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, Merck...

> Oh, so you'd rather they go to Los Zetas and Sinaloa Cartel?

Honestly, faced with two evils, yes. Mexican and South American cartels don't have the option of running media advertisements or legal protections for their organizations.

If my sources are correct, Novartis has about USD$50b total revenue in 2014. A rough estimate of the total US illegal drug market is ~$100b. If the US has political trouble with existing legal contributions from drug companies, do you really want to see what our system looks like when we deregulate the market and add that money in? (Yes, revenue would decrease due to availability and competition, but use would likely increase due to legality)

>> Do you really trust them to freely market a compound that has 10%+ addiction capture rate?

We already do so for a variety of psychotropics, analgesics and so forth [...] Yet the cost of vulnerable people getting high off over-the-counter drugs is pretty negligible. It takes no effort for a teen to dose themselves off DXM in cough syrup.

DXM hasn't been found to be physically addictive.

You have no problem with wide-scale organized crime networks who engage in brutal acts of terror controlling the drug enterprise, nope. It's the evil capitalist producers exploiting the stupid proles with their advertising. Horrifying. No, the cartels don't have options of using legal protections because the illegal ones are much more effective in terms of securing obedience, and destructive.

If your only criterion of a drug's adverse effects is addictive potency, then your criteria are critically flawed and next to worthless. Something not inducing a physical dependence doesn't mean psychological addiction does not exist, though of course I oppose bans on either grounds. Addictive potential is but one factor of many.

I'm becoming convinced your opposition to legalization is not at all based on a cost-benefit analysis of the public welfare, but rather on a kneejerk fear of capitalism and voluntary association. Your use of the word "deregulate" as somehow being a scary detriment seems to corroborate this.

It's quite disgusting that you denigrate and despise voluntary association between consenting individuals so much that you'd prefer cartels slaughtering and burning villages just so mean scary capitalists with their evil advertising rays of doom don't influence the opinions of the public, whom you clearly regard as morons incapable of critical thought. It is then unsurprising you advocate what you do if that's where you come from.

I worry that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That the less you treat people as rational beings responsible for their own decisions, the less rational and responsible they will be. It might already be happening, with victimitis in American politics being one of the most visible outcomes.

You are just one of the costs of doing a freemium business. Like the alcohol industry, the game is really targeted towards the psychologically vulnerable who represent most of the revenues.

The game is boring by design. Actually its just barely interesting enough to keep the target audience playing, but not so interesting that it stops them from paying to get their psychological reward. These games are basically crack which you can legally sell to kids.

There is a great south park episode that illustrates this phenomenon. Its very well done. You should watch it.

http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s18e06-freemium-isnt-f...