Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug • Hacker News Board

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#221

Post by hutzlibu » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:27 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #119

chimeracoder wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The libertarian argument against prohibition boils down to this: The government can't stop people from doing anything, it can only punish people after they've done it. Substance abuse is something we'd really rather people didn't do I am not a libertarian, but I have worked in drug policy reform advocacy groups, and a number of my colleagues were libertarians. This is not at all an accurate description of the proto…

Yeah, the libertarian argument is basically that people ought to be able to do what they want with their own bodies, including consuming drugs, and that it's not the government's business if they endanger themselves. If drugs become legalized, the system that gets created will not fit the libertarian vision.

Well, I support an experiment to test your claims. The limited ones of decriminalizing seems to support the libertarian claims.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#222

Post by brbsix » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:34 AM UTC

The really sad thing about this is that nature has a remedy for the grip of opiate addiction, iboga, yet it is illegal as well.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#223

Post by elipsey » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:37 AM UTC

massysett wrote: post #206

elipsey wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Why should your drug use, or anyone else's, create obligations for other people to support you, treat you, and help you overcome addiction? Suposing that it doesn't, doing nothing would be a hell of lot cheaper and easier than what we are doing now. Opiodes are derived from cheap agricultural products. A tablet of herion needn't cost more than asprin. The explicit goal of federal enforcment agencies is to raise pri…

> and it's not helping anyone except the sprawling profession of drug-warriors, and the black market gangsters High prices are reducing drug usage. That's basic economics. Food is cheap, so people eat a lot and get fat. Alcohol is cheap, so people drink a lot and destroy themselves. It's not hard to deduce what cheap heroin would do.

This sounds reasonable, but is oversimplified.

OD deaths are up by a factor of three since the feds cracked down on cheap vicodin and oxy. The drug war has also killed huge numbers of people in other countries, harmed civil liberties at home, and cost a lot of actual dollars.

I think it doesn't look like agood deal unless you omit some of those costs.

Friedman addresses this point better than I can. You might enjoy this debate on drug criminalization between Friedman and the former governer Pete Wilson of CA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIznGX7sCqQ

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#224

Post by chillwaves » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:37 AM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #75

haroldp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

19,000+ dead people a year is a astounding fact, not hyperbole. If I were being hyperbolic, I'd call that "Over Six 9/11s per year".

It affects a lot of people yes. It's also a big problem. It's the juxta that's done in a fashion to get clicks. The article is also rather light on details. The juxta bothers me because Rx drugs are a necessity as judged by physicians, it's not a lark. Illegal drugs on the other hand are not prescribed, for the most part, and are a different issue altogether. They address perhaps other pains, but conflating them in t…

It seems you are not catching the point of the article. Did you read? The problem is addiction and people turning to illegal drugs after becoming addicted to legal RX.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#225

Post by ArkyBeagle » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:37 AM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #15

I've never taken an illegal drug in my life. I've smoked a cigarette about 5 times. I drank in college but lately I've cut that out of my life as well. I had a security clearance with drug testing requirements for a while and now I just don't like the feeling of a hangover from alcohol or the risk of ingesting random plants/chemicals made by shady people. In short: I'm the most vanilla, square, anti-drug person you c…

Why?

1) Racism. In the early part of the 20th Century, various drugs were made-to-be-correlated with "undesirable minorities". This very much in sync with the impulse from William Randolph Hearst ( who owned a huge ranch in the Mexican state of Chihuahua and was partially responsible for an invasion of Mexico to go after Pancho Villa ).

2) Out-of-control heroin use in Vietnam inspired Nixon to first "golden flow" test returning service(wo)men and then declare the War on Drugs.

2a) Doctors in the '60s and '70s prescribed many, many, many pills. See also Betty Ford ( the person, not the clinic ).

3) Drug users are the perfect out group. It's possible to construct all sort a narratives out of this, so it's far too politically useful to do anything pragmatic. And people who don't know anything about drugs are then entitled to feel superior to those who do them.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#226

Post by jacobwcarlson » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:40 AM UTC

jrapdx3 wrote: post #205

It's troubling the way this article presents the issue. Treating chronic pain is an enormously complex problem that clinicians have to deal with, especially as it gets bound up with collateral pitfalls of drug dependence, politics of health care delivery systems and conflicting pressures from patients, government regulators and others. While unethical prescribers (not all are physicians) contribute significantly to r…

> Patients have told me it's become increasingly difficult to get prescriptions for quite modest doses of opioid agents they've used for years without dose escalation. The tendency to throw babies out with the bathwater is not unique to this situation, but no less problematic.

I have experienced this as well. Not only are doctors now reluctant to prescribe opioids, but you as a patient are suspected to be a drug-seeking addict by everyone in the chain: doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. People complaining that it's too easy to get pills clearly haven't had to manage a chronic pain condition in the past couple of years.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#227

Post by ArkyBeagle » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:42 AM UTC

elipsey wrote: post #148

twblalock wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should your drug use, or anyone else's, create obligations for other people to support you, treat you, and help you overcome addiction? The libertarian case for legalizing drugs falls apart if society has to take responsibility for providing support systems as a reaction to the actions of individual drug users. Frankly, most people would rather continue to ban drugs than pay for treatment for people who abuse the…

>>Why should your drug use, or anyone else's, create obligations for other people to support you, treat you, and help you overcome addiction? Suposing that it doesn't, doing nothing would be a hell of lot cheaper and easier than what we are doing now. Opiodes are derived from cheap agricultural products. A tablet of herion needn't cost more than asprin. The explicit goal of federal enforcment agencies is to raise pri…

While they may use price as a metric to try to guess if interdiction efforts are effective.... the tale is generally that interdiction efforts are not effective.

Meanwhile, don't look to closely at what has happened with the cartels in Mexico.

It's nothing more than "something must be done; this is something; this must be done." The wave of open drug use in the 1960s was pretty scary to a great many people.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#228

Post by marssaxman » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:43 AM UTC

EC1 wrote: post #211

marssaxman wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal idealism runs strongly in the opposite direction, but I would argue that the previous commenter's choice is not at all sad, for the same reason you use here! You only get one life, and it would be really sad to waste your limited, irreplaceable hours of consciousness pursuing activities you aren't interested in just because other people think you ought to.

I agree, and acid is not in that category.

Sorry, which category do you mean?

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#229

Post by andrepd » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:45 AM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #15

I've never taken an illegal drug in my life. I've smoked a cigarette about 5 times. I drank in college but lately I've cut that out of my life as well. I had a security clearance with drug testing requirements for a while and now I just don't like the feeling of a hangover from alcohol or the risk of ingesting random plants/chemicals made by shady people. In short: I'm the most vanilla, square, anti-drug person you c…

>Why can't we get political will to do something different?

Who wants to be the demon that wants to make drugs legal? The opposition would eat him alive! It would be tantamount to suicide.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#230

Post by ArkyBeagle » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:47 AM UTC

cbd1984 wrote: post #198

md224 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libertarians like free markets, right? Has anyone tried applying free market principles to drug use? Perhaps if all drugs were legal, people would be able to find less harmful drugs instead of being forced to abuse what's currently legal, and medical costs would go down. I remember reading an anecdote about a guy who stopped drinking by taking occasional painkillers. It scratched the same itch, so he didn't feel the…

> Libertarians like free markets, right? Has anyone tried applying free market principles to drug use? In a completely free market, there are no labeling laws, and no way to enforce purity until after someone has died or been harmed by a bad product and has an estate or next-of-kin capable of suing the producer. And that, of course, assumes the producer is both still in business and is going to be dissuaded from maki…

Free markets in no way preclude torts. If your ... snake-oil medicine kills somebody, that's a tort. Taken properly, this means you won't just lose one lawsuit, you'll enjoy the legal equivalent of being bombed back to the stone age.

Free markets only work if there is good and efficient law. Indeed, David Friedman has written extensively on this very subject. His "Machineries of Freedom" is excellent.