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Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

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Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#141

Post by OscarCunningham »

grondilu wrote: post #127

Imagine a old dam. It's in poor condition, with cracks here and there, letting some water through. Its maintenance is extremely expensive and seemingly useless, since for ever crack that is fixed, a new one appears. Now some guy shows up and says "this dam costs us too much and we are failing to fix it. Let's just blow it up!"

So the problem with blowing up the dam is that there's a large amount of water behind it that will flood out dangerously if they blow up the dam. I guess?

So what's the analogy here? You think there's a large amount of potential drug users who will suddenly start abusing as soon as drugs are legalised?

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#142

Post by DanBC »

shakna wrote: post #20
ars wrote: post #7

And not just recreational drugs. All drugs. We trust people to manage their own life, this includes medicine. Maybe insurance won't pay for it without a Dr, but if someone wants to self pay, that's their choice.

There's a whole class of drugs guaranteed to kill your child during pregnancy, and another where the interactions may seriously harm the child. Another where two relatively harmless drugs, when interacting, can produce the previous results. It isn't acceptable to just put the risk on the average, uneducated person, who is easily swayed by the way media portrays something. We have experts for a reason, which is to gui…

Which country are you talking about? This treatment plan for a person with borderlinePD is likely to cause harm.

> where the psychologist practices Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (as CBT is the only government-approved therapy), which has no affect

CBT is a short form therapy, normally about 8 weeks.

Do not use brief psychological interventions of less than 3 months. https://www.nice.org.uk/donotdo/do-not-use-brief-psychologic...

> Alice's psychiatrist puts her on quetiapine.

Antipsychotic drugs should not be used for the medium- and long-term treatment of borderline personality disorder. https://www.nice.org.uk/donotdo/antipsychotic-drugs-should-n...

> The psychiatrist moves her to lithium.

Drug treatment should not be used specifically for borderline personality disorder or for the individual symptoms or behaviour associated with the disorder (for example, repeated self-harm, marked emotional instability, risk-taking behaviour and transient psychotic symptoms). https://www.nice.org.uk/donotdo/drug-treatment-should-not-be...

What Alice probably needs is a long form talking therapy. Have a look at Meeting the Challenge, Making a Difference for more information: http://www.crisiscareconcordat.org.uk/inspiration/meeting-th...

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#143

Post by kobeya »

marze wrote: post #60

Bottom line is deaths from overdose. Drugs criminalized, USA: 150 deaths/million people/year Drugs legalized, Portugal: 3 deaths/million people/year

I'm more concerned with violence than overdosing. And that definitely goes down with decriminalization.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#144

Post by vidarh »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #96
lord_jim wrote: post #78

Full steam ahead with decriminalization of possession/use, and with regulated markets for psychedelic and most stimulants However after seeing how business behaves when it can sell opiates, I'm in favor of even more regulation than we currently have on some drug markets (Also, if it were up to me, I'd ban ads for drugs, including alcohol and prescriptions)

Stimulants can be pretty dangerous TBH. I don’t think class a drugs should just go on sale, but I don’t think people should be locked up for them. Baby steps.

The problem is that for a lot of these drugs the greatest harm comes from the lack quality control and regulation of sale.

Not just because it results in drugs getting cut with all kinds of shit, and people being sold the wrong thing (e.g. selling heavily cut fentanyl instead of heroin), but also because of a the race to find alternatives that slip through cracks.

A great deal of modern drugs only exists to circumvent the law, either because they're not covered for a while, or because they can more easily be produced. E.g. a number of "synthetic cannabinoids" have been manufactured, and so far indications are that at least some of them have health effects that are far worse than anything possible to tie to actual cannabis.

Without decriminalising and regulating manufacture and sale, there will still be an incentive for dealers to sell drugs like that which nobody particularly want, and that increases harm, instead of selling clean versions of the safest drugs.

E.g. for opiates, many of them are "close enough" in terms of effect that there is a lot of potential harm reduction benefit just in getting the more dangerous variants off the market by legalizing and regulating the safest ones. Unlike blanket bans that has a hope of working.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#145

Post by HarryHirsch »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #86
smallnamespace wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were just following the tradition set by the Germans in WW2: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/pilot...

Good point, don't know how I forgot that. I'm fairly convinced Hitler was on the gear too.

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Morell

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#146

Post by vidarh »

kobeya wrote: post #140
shakna wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a whole class of drugs guaranteed to kill your child during pregnancy, and another where the interactions may seriously harm the child. Another where two relatively harmless drugs, when interacting, can produce the previous results. It isn't acceptable to just put the risk on the average, uneducated person, who is easily swayed by the way media portrays something. We have experts for a reason, which is to gui…

So have prescriptions and pharmacies. That's a separate argument from decriminalizion.

Yes, but the argument made above made an argument about medicine that makes no sense if it was only talking about decriminalization.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#147

Post by simonh »

alexasmyths wrote: post #98
ekianjo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But it will increase usage. Not necessarily. When people really want something they will eventually find a way to get it anyway, it's not because you criminalize it that its usage drops. Just like IP infringement has not significantly dropped since they can put people in jail for it.

"Not necessarily. When people really want something they will eventually find a way to get it anyway," No, not true at all. Supply and Demand. The 'cost' of doing drugs in society right now is pretty dam high. Social stigma, the possibility of going to jail, various professional licences lost. The 'free market price' of synthetic heroin and other drugs would be as cheap as sugar. Walk down to the local store and buy…

Legalising drugs != Making them cheap as chips on every high street. We can legalize drugs while applying significant barriers to entry such as high taxes, regulated distribution, user registration, medical oversight, etc and still suck the profits out of the illegal market. This has been done already and it works.

Criminalising everything to do with drugs has utterly failed. That's just a flat out fact, the huge damage done to your friends demonstrates this. The damage to society has been staggering, not just the effects of the drugs themselves but the criminalisation of huge swathes of the population.

It's time to try something different.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#150

Post by jwilk »

kobeya wrote: post #134
mythrwy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every post about drugs on HN has the obligatory bit about Nixon starting the war on drugs. It's like a Shibboleth or something. Nixon probably tried to make political hay out of it sure, but the war against intoxicants has been going on probably since people started using intoxicants. No shortage of earlier historical examples. At most Nixon is a chapter in the ongoing saga. So please, for all that is holy, st…

> Shibboleth I don't know what that is. Should I?

From https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shibboleth :

1. A word, especially seen as a test, to distinguish someone as belonging to a particular nation, class, profession etc.

2. A common or longstanding belief, custom, or catchphrase associated with a particular group, especially one with little current meaning or truth.

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