5/16/2026 at 1:09:11 AM
The ephedrine (or pseudoephedrine) synthesis is a one step using phosphorus/iodine reduction directly to methamphetamine. It’s simple and clean in that only an acid base extraction is required, and only one set of NP solvents.All these others syntheses with multiple steps up the chances of weird toxic solvents or contaminants creeping in. I think it’s a contaminant issue that’s exacerbated by the drug use.
The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance. It’s not an evil drug per se - long history before it was criminalized. Plus that would neuter the cartels and protect people’s health more than pushing it underground.
by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 2:22:04 AM
>The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performanceFamously, the US spent about 15-20 years attempting this with opioids. They were widely available to people via a pseudo-medical process, or via secondhand dealing. Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and production. The result? A shattering drug addiction crisis that at its height killed more people annually than the entire Vietnam War.
(For people saying 'no, that was illegal heroin or fentanyl that did all that damage'- the Wiki page for the opioid crisis is quite clear that at least 50% of all deaths were due to perfectly legal, regulated opioids).
When you make drugs legal & easy to get, lots & lots of people do them- who develop life-shattering addictions and OD en masse. They also build tolerance and then move on to even harder stuff. AFAIK out of the 300ish countries on the globe, there is not 1 that has decriminalized hard drugs in the modern era. And no don't say Portugal, contrary to widespread myth they forced people under threat of jail to attend drug rehab, and anyways they've recently curtailed even that.
I realize this is not going to get a lot of upvotes on HN, but yes making it difficult to do hard drugs is a reasonable public policy goal. (Which again, is why literally every country on the planet does it). There's room to argue about the exact tactics, but the broad goal is perfectly legitimate
by hash872
5/16/2026 at 9:28:17 AM
I don’t think it’s fair to say we tried letting people access it for recreational or performance use. The insurance companies and doctors became drug pushers without an explicit acknowledgment of what was happening. Easy access to drugs without being able to discuss what was really happening is worse than prohibition sure, but that’s not informed consent. Informed consent is the patient tells the supplier what they’re doing and the supplier is trained to handle that. Our doctors are not drug shamen or addiction specialists, but we could imagine a situation where these are the people providing drugs, safe drug sites, and free counseling. Otherwise the solution is men with guns and weird geopolitical shit. Also the government gets to decide what drugs people can take which I disagree with in general. There has to be a better way.by SequoiaHope
5/16/2026 at 5:05:43 PM
Doctors prescribed drugs and everyone became addicted, do you seriously think Nestle is going to pull their punches when they can sell people crack?They’ll be outside funeral homes, outside schools, offering free graduation crack. Ads on every bus, hot women handing it out in the street.
by MagicMoonlight
5/16/2026 at 11:56:22 PM
Selling it in adults-only dispensaries, along with banning advertising seems like the best idea. I'd ban tobacco, liquor, and gambling advertising too while we are at it.by amanaplanacanal
5/16/2026 at 2:31:58 AM
I think a astronomically better example would be programs in the Netherlands, Denmark or Switzerland, where people heavily addicted to heroine can get into programs that will provide them with pharmaceutical heroine. Still prescribed by doctors (although specialized ones), but not just for pulling a wisdom tooth with huge margins for the Sacklers...by KarlKode
5/16/2026 at 6:49:03 AM
The last time I looked up the Swiss program it was only servicing a small number of people. Around 1500 in a country if 9 million. It also wasn’t prescribed like a typical medication but part of a program where they received other treatment as well. There was some exception where some people could get 2 days of it at a time to take home, but it wasn’t a free for all prescription where they could just talk to a doctor and get their monthly desired supply from a pharmacy.Many countries, including the US, use methadone for maintenance. As I understand it it’s not as enjoyable as some people’s opioids of choice but it’s still an extremely powerful opioid depending on the dose (easily fatal).
So it’s not only the countries you mentioned that provide pharmaceutical opioids as maintenance treatment. The US does too, though the form is different.
by Aurornis
5/16/2026 at 8:30:03 AM
> a small number of people. Around 1500 in a country of 9 million.What is this supposed to mean?
That’s a completely nonsense statement to make because you’ve provided no data on problem opioid use in Switzerland.
Is 1500 a lot? Not many? Average? Should all nine million be on the program?
by thrownthatway
5/16/2026 at 8:53:21 AM
I'd say it is about what you expect for a country with voluntary programs. In the Netherlands the original program like the Swiss, resulted in heroïne becoming a medication for heavily addicted people usable under supervision. In the Netherlands there are about 4000 people with medical prescriptions for heroine on a 18M population.Note that it is free, supervised and voluntary so ymmv in other countries. The conclusions of the original program with methadone in the 80s was that it resulted in hardly any reduction amongst heavy and problematic users and they were likely to go back to using heroine with all the associated problems, the heroine distribution program worked but needed some tweaking, thus the program was fully legalised and put into law resulting in supervised consumption (at the distribution point) with dosage control and medical checkups and far less issues.
by consp
5/17/2026 at 5:11:35 AM
I’ve used heroin maybe 80 times.I can understand why methadone is ineffective as a treatment.
by thrownthatway
5/17/2026 at 5:27:41 AM
Wow. Can you speak more about this experience?by AlexeyBelov
5/17/2026 at 5:31:49 AM
Something like 25% of people who “try it once” will go on to be problem users. So don’t.I had to call an ambulance for one friend cos he stopped breathing in front of me.
I woke up on my kitchen floor 45 minutes after a shot. I had time to cap the needle before I passed out and had no idea I was about to go down.
Another mate died because she used at home alone while her partner was at work.
Other than that, it’s a pretty nice high :)
by thrownthatway
5/16/2026 at 5:43:36 AM
A problem LAR programs have had since the start is that although methadone is less attractive as a drug than heroin, it's still attractive, and basically the only way to figure out how much a heroin addict needs is to ask them. Leading to users asking for extra, selling the excess (to users who were not in the LAR program) and buying other drugs with the profits. For some years, more people died from methadone overdose in Norway than heroin.Sure, you could demand injection on site to reduce this problem. But that just makes the program less appealing. You could also just hand out the users' drug of choice directly (heroin) rather than the less harmful substitute, but at some point that starts counting as physician-assisted suicide, really.
by vintermann
5/16/2026 at 1:06:13 PM
methadone is not a less harmful substitute, it's just the one that makes official people money. the withdrawals are worse.by scragz
5/17/2026 at 2:49:37 AM
Don't Spain and Portugal also have fairly progressive policies/programs for drug harm reduction? I remember reading about it a while back, but it was a US source and they were trying really, really hard not to have to say "you know, this might actually be a good way to handle it".by pseudohadamard
5/16/2026 at 2:34:58 AM
Your opioid comparison is wildly apples to oranges. They were marketed and sold to consumers as safe, much more effective, and dramatically less addictive than it actually was. An industrial addiction machine ignored regulatory safeguards, built a 'pay for play' rewards structure to incentivize prescriptions, and a zillion other cartoonishly evil things .There is a world of difference between something like that and government dosed methadone, meth, etc.
The problem was not in fact opioids. It was the profit structure behind the distribution network. Remove that and the bulk of the problems go away too.
If the drug is socially stigmatized only true addicts will use it. Those are exactly the people you want to have access to it because they can be gradually tapered off on a controlled dosage, they can be targeted for interventions, and it keeps them from stabbing you and stealing your wallet to get more meth.
Its incredibly counterproductive to just outlaw a thing that people need on a level that they will do almost anything to get it.
by idiotsecant
5/16/2026 at 2:50:11 AM
I think another under-discussed factor in the opioid crisis is that opioids are cheap, but (American) healthcare to treat underlying pain is not. You might not be able to afford six weeks of physical therapy, surgery, etc., but you can probably afford $11.23 a month for a generic prescription.by cryzinger
5/16/2026 at 3:05:01 AM
My view of a lot of the opioid crisis stuff aside from physical pain is psychological trauma - people self medicating as an alternative to doing the work.That’s why I think the psychoactive legislation that’s introduced recently about psychedelics is so important because those things can rapidly accelerate processing and healing psychological trauma.
My view, is if this was done 20 - 30 years ago there wouldn’t be such a large demand for opiates. I take it further and say that probably some in the drug companies understand this already and were lobbying against the introduction of more curative psychedelic treatments so that they could sell subscriptions to painkillers.
by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 6:39:06 AM
Cocaine and Heroin (and LSD...) were widely available 20-30-40-50 years ago. Maybe this is a "It's the economy, stupid" thing?by flomo
5/16/2026 at 5:35:59 PM
Pretty much. Most Americans live awful miserable lives regardless of being addicted to drugs or notby mx7zysuj4xew
5/16/2026 at 3:17:20 AM
Sorry what? What does ego death have to do with healing a back injury?by jazzyjackson
5/16/2026 at 7:10:33 PM
Nothing and everything: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10....(This is a serious article by a serious researcher. There exists good work on Frontiers in….)
The 5-HT2A receptor is profoundly immunomodulatory. (Acid is arguably a more potent immunomodulator – an antiinflammatory one – than it is psychoactive.) Local inflammation is a thing in injury, "global" inflammation as well – there is strong interplay between cytokines and metabolic/anabolic/catabolic process; Interleukin-6 stimulates osteoclasts which actively break down joint tissue – and neuroinflammation also affects physiology. Muscle tone, blood flow, pulmonary function, and so on.
Ego death happens to be a phenomenon or qualia when you boop that receptor hard. I'm not sure ego death necessary for anything. It might be. Ego death is very intimately related to the individual neuronal state and memory, and inflammation is quite enmeshed with that. (Cf. cortisol.)
by AnthonBerg
5/17/2026 at 2:42:19 AM
huh. glad I asked.by jazzyjackson
5/17/2026 at 7:40:10 AM
I was quite surprised to find that paper! Thank you for… the audience?, for your consideration? It's quietly somewhat maddening that this is on the books and there's so little mention of it.Like, psychedelics? I'm not a hippie. I'm not into psychedelics. I'm into neuroinflammation, haha
by AnthonBerg
5/16/2026 at 1:13:20 PM
I did say aside from physical ailmentsby keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 4:06:22 AM
Chronic Back pain is correlated with emotional trauma. The physical body is a mere projection of the energetic and spiritual being. This is wahy meditative spiritual practices such as yoga and taiji are good for chronic pain, as the physical pain is a mere projection of a deeper trauma that needs released.by ghthor
5/16/2026 at 4:41:48 AM
how does my spiritual wellness affect the mechanical structure of my lower back?by bhotka
5/16/2026 at 5:06:43 AM
Ignoring the spiritual part, emotional state does have a well-known feedback loop with physical state. There’s a (largely incorrect) idea in pop psychology that just as happiness leads to smiling, smiling leads to happiness. It’s not nearly that simple, but there are some more straightforward examples: lots of tense emotional states (anger, anxiety) lead to tense muscles (jaw being the classic example). Relaxing your jaw can lead to a (temporary) relaxation of your emotional tenseness. I’ve never heard of a similar result for the lower back, but it’s not hard to imagine. If nothing else, they must be correlated through sedentary lifestyle.by asgraham
5/16/2026 at 7:19:18 AM
> (largely incorrect) ... just as happiness leads to smiling, smiling leads to happiness.I don't have a citation to hand and it's really old but there was academic research supporting that at some point. IIRC they used some clever request to get people to move their facial muscles in various ways without tipping them off about what was really going on and then asked them lots of questions that touch on emotional state.
by fc417fc802
5/16/2026 at 5:37:11 AM
Functional disorders are a thing, and placebo surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee works just as well as real surgery: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259I have heard psychedelics be described as the most effective placebo of all placebos.
by ulrikrasmussen
5/16/2026 at 5:05:29 AM
Setting the woo aside, there is a lot of data on disorders like central sensitization syndrome that show our psychological state has a very strong modulating effect on our perception of pain.by munificent
5/16/2026 at 11:04:13 AM
By directing your attention towards, or away from, physical phenomena that mechanically affect your lower back: overexertion, underexertion, posture, nutrient intake, crowd...by balamatom
5/16/2026 at 8:39:52 AM
I mean tons of back pain is medically unexplained. It's not like physiology has a perfect record here that can be used to dismiss alternative theories.by nswango
5/16/2026 at 4:54:33 PM
Thankfully, you don't need a perfect record to dismiss theories like "a wizard did it."by fwip
5/17/2026 at 2:45:22 AM
There's a really neat book called Gift of the Raven about an athlete with chronic knee pain that doctors couldn't figure out any plan to stop. He rowed from Alaska to Siberia and the book goes on about a shaman that performs a healing ritual (psychedelic mushrooms were involved) and he finds himself cured. So, there are times I suppose when the pain is all in your head, and maybe has a feedback loop since pain will also cause muscle contraction which can pull bones out of alignment. Relax enough and the pain stops.by jazzyjackson
5/16/2026 at 4:50:00 AM
Relieved to learn that my small peen is merely a projection of my energetic spiritual being.by TheServitor
5/16/2026 at 11:00:56 AM
[flagged]by balamatom
5/16/2026 at 8:06:30 PM
I feel like you missed a turn somewhere.by idiotsecant
5/16/2026 at 3:04:50 AM
>Those are exactly the people you want to have access to itYes but that's different from 'every random person can buy some meth at 7-11 or the government store' though. I'm fine with a controlled program for registered, hardcore addicts- the 2% who do 50% of the drugs or what have you.
>The problem was not in fact opioids. It was the profit structure behind the distribution network. Remove that and the bulk of the problems go away too
I mean, states & countries that have completely state-run liquor stores still have alcoholism and serious alcohol problems though? If 'removing the profit structure' worked magically, more countries would do it. AFAIK rates of alcoholism aren't even different between state-run and private sector models
by hash872
5/16/2026 at 3:37:16 AM
State run liquor stores in the US don’t prevent companies advertising alcohol on TV. The US is really bad at allowing drugs without then also allowing drug promotion.A better comparison is probably countries where prescription drugs can’t be advertised to the general public. But, then you’re dealing with a lot of differences in other government policies.
by Retric
5/16/2026 at 5:51:03 AM
> I mean, states & countries that have completely state-run liquor stores still have alcoholism and serious alcohol problems thoughThey have less of it. Reducing access and increasing price reduces consumption, as any economist would expect.
The main problem with government monopolies of this sort is that they usually lack democratic legitimacy (i.e. would be voted away in a single issue vote) are under constant PR attack from people who profit from the regulated product. Leading to concessions such as the Norwegian monopoly being run as a for-profit corporation.
> If 'removing the profit structure' worked magically, more countries would do it.
No they wouldn't, for the obvious reason: those who profit from it have a voice, and are better organized than the ones who suffer from it (many who are addicts and want easy access anyway).
by vintermann
5/16/2026 at 3:30:41 AM
That's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. The thing about for-profit prescriptions is that they incentivize doctors to prescribe opiates for people who don't need them, people who may not have even been interested in them. A for-profit retailer selling alcohol doesn't have that aspect at play at all; at most the for-profit aspect encourages flashy advertising and displaying alcohol more prominently, but nothing to the level of having a trusted expert in a one-on-one setting personally pushing for you to consume.Instead the pressure to consume alcohol comes at a grassroots level. Social alcohol consumption is deeply rooted in human culture, and it's generally the people around you who will push you to consume. This pressure is independent of any profit motive, so removing the profit motive does nothing to affect it.
> AFAIK rates of alcoholism aren't even different between state-run and private sector models
Looking at some 2016 WHO statistics, the US seems to have ~3x the rate of alcholism as Iceland, but I recognise these are cherrypicked examples and I'm not interested enough to do a deep dive aggregating countries. Still, it seems plausible that government intervention can reduce alcholism rates. The fact that it's not 0% means nothing; nothing in the world is 0%, outlawing murder doesn't mean murder doesn't happen, but you can strive to reduce it as much as reasonably possible.
by applfanboysbgon
5/16/2026 at 7:26:04 AM
Alcoholics (the really bad ones that we're presumably talking about here) don't consume because of social pressure. It's addiction and all the associated psychological and sociological complexity that implies.I expect any comparison of alcoholism rates will need to account for social (particularly religion) and socioeconomic factors. An awful lot of addicts are engaging in escapism.
by fc417fc802
5/16/2026 at 7:56:09 AM
Addiction doesn't start until you've first started consuming a substance. The means by which you first start consuming alcohol vs. opioids are completely different, and the former is virtually always the result of social environment.by applfanboysbgon
5/16/2026 at 8:45:15 AM
Sure, recreational social interactions tend to be the introduction since it's legal and a common pastime. But such interactions are almost never the primary driver of alcoholism except perhaps in specific college environments where you might reasonably describe the pastime as competitive drinking. That's far from the norm though.Coincidentally, aside from official prescriptions recreational social interactions are also the primary method of introduction to drugs of all sorts.
by fc417fc802
5/16/2026 at 7:44:32 AM
> Instead the pressure to consume alcohol comes at a grassroots level.Lately the trend seems to be slightly decreasing, see : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890 (of course heavy dependent on the country and the timescale selected)
> Social alcohol consumption is deeply rooted in human culture
This is actually dependent on the culture and not all are the same, interesting paper on the topic (in cultures with higher agricultural interdependency alchool was not used as a tool for social cohesion): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/404116345_On_the_Fu...
by vladms
5/16/2026 at 8:40:06 PM
>The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance. It’s not an evil drug per se>Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and production. The result? A shattering drug addiction crisis
>They were marketed and sold to consumers as safe, much more effective, and dramatically less addictive than it actually was. An industrial addiction machine ignored regulatory safeguards, built a 'pay for play' rewards structure to incentivize prescriptions, and a zillion other cartoonishly evil things
>I mean, states & countries that have completely state-run liquor stores still have alcoholism and serious alcohol problems though?
I tried to draw upon the main central point of each comment to this point. This discussion felt reasonably solid until this point where I feel like you failed to refute their main point. Your counter-example is still apples and oranges. State run liquor stores don't have the strong financial incentives to push alcohol and they don't downplay the addictive potential of their wares using fake science and they don't have authority figures give their patients official recommendations to take alcohol as a treatment with that fake science and financial motivation. Obviously people can and do still get addicted to all kinds of things without that scheme in place but I feel your initial example is pretty uniquely evil and not something we can learn generalizable lessons from, other than "don't do super evil stuff". Surely if your initial point is strong enough you can still make your case using other more generalizable examples.
by itsmek
5/16/2026 at 4:05:55 AM
All Scandinavian countries except Denmark have some form of state-run monopoly on the sale of harder alcohol, and of these countries, Denmark is the country where people drink the most, in particular among the youth.It is disingenuous to claim that something doesn't work if it doesn't eliminate it completely. It is pretty well recognized that tight regulation of alcohol sales and marketing together with taxation helps reduce overall consumption. Alcohol consumption was also not eliminated during the prohibition in the US.
It's also important to recognize that making a drug legal is not the same as regulating it properly, and just making it legal can very well bring more harms than keeping it prohibited if no regulation of its sale and marketing is introduced.
by ulrikrasmussen
5/16/2026 at 6:00:00 AM
Lets not forget that in the US not only opioids get legalized, but they were given to people as a substitute for aspirins. And then retired without mercy. Did you get addicted? Well, you are on your own now, go get some fentanyl under a bridge.I live in Spain. Alcohol is not tighty regulated here, and is cheap if we compare with nordic countries. But we, overall, have a culture of knowing how to drink, low proof drinks and in low quantities. The worst drinkers here are tourists from northern countries that binge on high grade alcohol because it is cheap. I had never seen someone chugging a liter of beer like it is water, or do that thing with a can of beer where you force the whole can, or that other thing with the funnel and a tube, like you were in a hurry to get drunk. You just drink a beer whenever you want, at slow pace. Spain, overall, consumes a lot of alcohol, but the consumption is so spread among the population that you rarely see adults drunk.
Our neighbor in the south, Morocco, allows for marihuana consumption and selling, and they have way less problems with it than any european country. But they have alcohol tightly forbidden, and it is a big problem there.
I went to Finland, and there were ships going from Finland to Estonia, carrying people just to buy cheaper alcohol there. They went back to Helsinki with shopping bags full of vodka. Makes you wonder how does it look Tallin in drinking statistics. I bet something similar is going on between Sweden and Denmark or Germany, whatever trip is shorter and cheaper.
The point is that a culture of taking drugs needs time to develop.
by otherme123
5/16/2026 at 9:06:54 AM
We raised the drinking age from 16 to 18. The end result is more underage drinking but now illegal, more heavy drinking under 18, a rise in hospitalisations and a rise in problematic alcohol usage of the 18-23 group. The rise correlated strongly with the change in law. Let's see if it drops after a decade or so but I doubt it.by consp
5/16/2026 at 2:59:02 PM
> I went to Finland, and there were ships going from Finland to Estonia, carrying people just to buy cheaper alcohol there. They went back to Helsinki with shopping bags full of vodka. Makes you wonder how does it look Tallin in drinking statistics.They just need to exclude the shops in a 150 m radius from Terminal D in the Tallinn harbor to get accurate statistics, the Finns rarely go beyond that ;)
by inejge
5/16/2026 at 6:19:58 AM
Yes, the swedes take the ferry to Denmark and the danes take the car over the border to Germany.There has also been a movement to change the culture of drinking in Denmark, and the consumption has generally been going down, although it still remains high among youth. This also goes to show that there are many complex factors at play and that legal status alone cannot explain consumption patterns.
I do believe that prohibition makes it a lot harder to influence the culture around consumption compared to a legalized and regulated market.
by ulrikrasmussen
5/16/2026 at 6:16:33 AM
"the Wiki page for the opioid crisis is quite clear that at least 50% of all deaths were due to perfectly legal, regulated opioids"Are you talking about this page?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic
Could you then be more clear where exactly your claim came from? I did not find it, but rather this:
"According to medical professionals, supervised injection sites are effective in reducing overdose deaths and the transmission of infectious diseases."
by lukan
5/16/2026 at 1:54:00 PM
There's a US-specific one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_..."From 1999 to 2020, nearly 841,000 people died from drug overdoses,[7] with prescription and illicit opioids responsible for 500,000 of those deaths"
Here's a chart showing overdose deaths from all drugs in the US- yes there's definitely a large spike from 'synthetic opioids' at the end there that's probably all illegal fentanyl. But notice the blue line for 'prescription drugs' was very very steady for the entire length of the chart. That's an enormous number of deaths from completely legal, regulated drugs!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/US_timel...
by hash872
5/17/2026 at 11:14:10 PM
> with prescription and illicit opioids responsible for 500,000 of those deaths"So... it's not saying 500K deaths are from prescription drugs, it's saying 500K deaths are from opioids (some of which were prescription)
Also, in the chart you mentioned, it's not clear if the opioid deaths were from legally produced prescription opioids. Certainly fentanyl is one of the biggest killers, and fentanyl is used in medical settings, but the fentanyl killing people is usually not from legal drug manufacturers.
by pcthrowaway
5/16/2026 at 5:35:51 PM
I wonder what sort of environment and conditions contribute to large populations seeking to use opioids in the first place?Theory: this is a socioeconomic problem rather than a public health problem. Our systems care too little for people. The easiest solution then is for people to self-medicate.
It's easier to deny people a harmful salve that they feel they need than to provide them the social supports that they deserve.
by sleight42
5/17/2026 at 5:17:31 PM
100%Drugs are an alluring and easy avenue for people who have a difficult time fitting into their social expectations and dealing with pressures. Obviously this isn’t where it starts, but treatment is so difficult and the punitive effects are so harsh that it creates a system that’s incredibly difficult to get out of…so why would you?
This isn’t always the case, of course, but my own anecdote:
My best friend in high school got hooked on heroin - not sure exactly what started him on it or why, but I could tell that he knew he didn’t want to be in that place, and that he as genuinely trying to get clean but the resources were limited and often harsh.
He did get clean for a while and applied for a job at Walmart - this kid was stupid smart, we’d do EE and programming projects all the time and I always felt like he was miles ahead of my understanding of technology - but this was what he had available because of his history.
The Walmart drug test popped for the drugs he was using _to get clean_ and they denied his application. Went home, relapsed, got found dead by his mother. It’s awful.
by phatskat
5/16/2026 at 6:36:36 PM
Exactly. It's more helpful to look at this from the perspective of solving problems that push people toward unhealthy choices than from the perspective of how we can limit the freedom of adults for their own good. A few other thoughts:1. US tobacco policy is far more liberal than the War on Drugs, yet which of the two is a successful case study in curbing harmful addiction?
2. The recent opioid epidemic is far more complex than "the government tried legalizing opioids and it failed". Whatever policies did exist weren't legalization of opioids, and didn't exist in a vacuum. You can't model that policy without factoring in the wide availability of contaminated street drugs and absence of safer OTC cannabis alternatives. More importantly, the drugs weren't merely available, but actively pushed in a way that should have been legally discouraged.
3. The above analysis completely ignores the most important point raised in the top-level comment: prohibition simply redirects capital from businesses that are regulated to those that are not. Say what you will about Big Pharma, but they usually don't go around hanging mutilated bodies from bridges.
4. Even if drug prohibition were the optimal policy for reducing addiction rates, at some point protecting people from their own choices ceases to be a valid excuse for harming the rest of us. We've punished countless marijuana users who mostly aren't addicts, inflicted terror and destabilization upon our neighbors to the south, and created what at least half of America believes to be an illegal immigration crisis.
5. The claim that drug prohibition even helps the people it's ostensibly supposed to help is extremely dubious. We're subjecting addicts to more dangerous substances than the ones they're actually seeking out, and locking up the ones who survive. Maybe there's a narrow slice of people who really want narcotics but lack the motivation to navigate black markets, but otherwise who is this all for? We're hurting everyone in our confusion just to enrich a cabal of warlords.
by buu700
5/16/2026 at 6:16:24 PM
> Famously, the US spent about 15-20 years attempting this with opioids. They were widely available to people via a pseudo-medical process, or via secondhand dealing. Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and production.There is a pretty decent argument that this was still a result of pseudo-prohibition, which goes like this:
Opioids were easy to get a prescription for, but still required a prescription (and were covered by insurance), and were still highly restricted in who could manufacture them. That made the margins high, and consequently created a perverse incentive for the manufacturers to want patients taking the high margin insurance-funded opioids rather than a cheap commodity out-of-pocket NSAID or acetaminophen.
Because they still required a prescription, getting people taking them meant they had to capture the prescribing physicians, who now get their own perverse incentives. Not only marketing/kickbacks/incentives from the pharma companies, if something over the counter would work and that's what you recommend, the patients buy a bottle at Walmart for $5 whenever they need it and you never see them again, but prescribe something stronger and you get to bill their insurance again and again every time they need another appointment to re-up.
But "ask your doctor" was supposed to be the thing you do to get sound advice. Give the medical establishment a profit incentive to over-recommend the addictive thing and what do you expect?
Meanwhile if they were all available at the convenience store for the same price, nobody would have the incentive to push the addictive one, and then when you ask your doctor (or for that matter anyone else) what they recommend, they would generally tell you not to take opioids unless you really need them.
by AnthonyMouse
5/16/2026 at 9:47:42 PM
Surely both manufacturer and convenience store have incentive to push the addictive product in this scenario.In any case, drug dealers really don’t need to do any pushing, the drugs sell themselves. Have you ever taken an opioid? The idea that unfettered access would result in less addiction and death is a pretty remarkable POV
by jjfoooo4
5/18/2026 at 12:25:44 AM
> Surely both manufacturer and convenience store have incentive to push the addictive product in this scenario.In this scenario the addictive product has the margins of a generic commodity and 75 competing suppliers. Getting the customer addicted has close to zero returns because the margins are thin and the customer's future purchases are more likely than not going to a random competitor rather than you. Notice how little advertising you see for things like flour or onions. If something is completely fungible and commoditized the incentive to push it on you is minimized.
And retailers have the opposite incentive, because making a $0.05 margin on a bottle of pills once a month is worth far less to them than not having someone who is a repeat customer lose their job to addiction or die of an overdose and then stop buying all of their other products.
> In any case, drug dealers really don’t need to do any pushing, the drugs sell themselves.
If the drug dealers don't need to do any pushing then why do they spend so much time and effort on pushing? It'd have to be because pushing gets results, and therefore blunting the incentive for pushing gets results the other way.
by AnthonyMouse
5/17/2026 at 9:03:08 AM
>The idea that unfettered access would result in less addiction and death is a pretty remarkable POVIt's not that crazy, but it has to be coupled with accessible recovery programs. The classic tale (one that people in my life have gone through) is the prescribed opiates -> street heroin when the scrip runs out / when they change the oxy recipe so that it doesn't dissolve in water anymore so you can't shoot it.
This is obviously much more dangerous than getting oxy from your doctor, so the logic of "keep people from seeking heroin on the street" actually does make sense to me from a public health perspective.
by lobf
5/16/2026 at 9:36:57 AM
> When you make drugs legal & easy to get, lots & lots of people do them- who develop life-shattering addictions and OD en masse. They also build tolerance and then move on to even harder stuff.That depends on the drug. Both it's addictiveness and its destructiveness. It's likely true for meth. I doubt it's true for weed. It's demonstrably not true for many of the OTC drugs that have been easy to get for hundreds of years without the collapse of society
by autoexec
5/16/2026 at 3:28:05 PM
I'm not aware that anyone every tried to do it right.Like how about you have to do a short course which actually explains to you how a drug works, how to use it correctly, what are potential downsides, what are markers of overuse/wrong use.
And the other main issue with opioids and co: some people really have constant / chronic pain.
Do you know how exhaustive it is to constantly have pain? How annoying it is that you can't just go to bed and sleep?
But also we can't play devils advocate to say "you are not allowed to do drugs to num whatever issue you have" and also "but i don't want to take time and effort of helping you".
Oh i don't want you to kill yourself! But i don't want to spend time tomorrow afternoon either with you.
Our society is very hypcritical in this sense. Honestly i think people just don't want to see homeless people or fentapoeple. Its not about helping, its just about not being disturbed by them.
by Glohrischi
5/16/2026 at 2:57:17 AM
Are you referring to the massive opiate abuse crisis that followed World War One?by bananamogul
5/16/2026 at 5:28:02 AM
I believe the gp meant the last few decades and the crisis that culminated with the Purdue trial.by gostsamo
5/16/2026 at 3:57:24 AM
How many died because they were cut of from the supply that they had been told by doctors did not cause addiction?by tomjen3
5/16/2026 at 10:11:30 AM
WTF.This is complete nonsense.
Opioids have never been made legal for recreational purpose. They were sold as painkillers by pharma corporations lying about their addictive effects and promoted through marketing campaign targeting doctors to prescribe them.
I has nothing to do with the topic of recreational drugs.
by stymaar
5/16/2026 at 10:53:08 AM
Many opioids, including opiates, used to be OTC. I personally know someone who used to smoke paregoric (camphorated tincture of opium), which was OTC in the US until 1970.I believe 1970 was also the year when amphetamine (Benzedrine) inhalers stopped being OTC.
by Denatonium
5/17/2026 at 9:12:48 AM
Do you think opioids have been illegal for eternity?by solumunus
5/17/2026 at 9:24:33 PM
They are talking about the current opioid crisis, and they are making the story up.by stymaar
5/16/2026 at 6:26:36 AM
What if they were legal but hard to get? Say, we stop/arresting for possession or use in private, stop giving dealers and producers harsh sentences, but still give them moderate to weak sentences, stop proactively searching for dealers and producers, allow companies to produce with strict KYC, and don't allow retail sale in stores?by chadgpt3
5/16/2026 at 8:35:46 AM
In California weed is legal but highly regulated. It's easy to buy weed in the legal market but very difficult to be licensed to sell or grow it.The result is that the illegal market dwarfs the legal market. The legal suppliers simply can't compete with efficient and untaxed illegal or grey market sellers.
Note that the consumers who choose the illegal market are not in general socially excluded, habitual criminals or broken down addicts. Weed is widespread in almost all parts of society and probably less prevalent along dirt poor, mentally unwell or homeless drug users, who favour fent or meth.
People with jobs and houses choose illegal weed because it's both cheaper and easier to get hold of.
by nswango
5/18/2026 at 2:01:14 AM
> The result is that the illegal market dwarfs the legal market. The legal suppliers simply can't compete with efficient and untaxed illegal or grey market sellers.
Even with California taxes an 1/8th of flower is often less than half what I’d typically pay back in 2008 or so, even without adjusting for inflation.
Also, I suspect middle class buying preference in the last decade or so has heavily shifted to gummies/edibles and vape carts which are much sketchier in the black market vs relatively interchangeable flower.
The idea of smoking a literal bowl to get high wouldn’t even be in the first like 5 methods among the people I know. It’s not super appealing in your 30s-40s while living in apartments/not wanting to reek of weed in the office. So buying off the black market just isn’t attractive even if possible cheaper.
by toraway
5/16/2026 at 4:11:32 PM
Isn't it illegal in the entire US? The question doesn't seem to be whether you can obtain it legally, but how many laws you'd rather break in the process, and how much trace you'd like to leave behind. I imagine the illegal vendors are less likely to leave a discoverable trace (that could affect your future background checks etc.) than the "legal" vendors, which itself is an incentive to obtain it illegally even when it's cheaper and safer and easier to obtain less-illegally right next door.Which basically means the US hasn't really tried legalizing it at all.
(Not advocating for any position here, just commenting on the facts.)
by dataflow
5/16/2026 at 3:59:59 PM
California is probably the best example going of how not to "legalize" weed.However, this also highlights the primary difference between weed and meth, opiates: ease of manufacturing. The only other common drugs that come close are things like mushrooms and fermented beverages, and I'd argue both of those are still riskier.
by Shog9
5/16/2026 at 10:20:00 AM
That’s not a feature of legalization, but convenience: illegal weed is easier to get hold of even in places where cannabis is not legalized at all.by cluckindan
5/16/2026 at 7:31:56 AM
Not every drug is an opioid. We have prohibition laws designed for opioids blindly applied to any (in the western context) nontraditional drug. The German law on drugs is literally called "the painkiller law", for instance.by tormeh
5/16/2026 at 9:00:20 AM
The Dutch law is literally called the "Opiumwet" or opiate law. [1] It involves (almost) all controlled substances.by consp
5/16/2026 at 5:38:27 PM
Yeah, but we also have the separation of "hard-" and "soft-" drugsby mx7zysuj4xew
5/16/2026 at 8:09:37 AM
It’s not, the BtmG literally means narcotics drugs act. https://www.bfarm.de/EN/Federal-Opium-Agency/Narcotic-drugs/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcotic_Drugs_Actby ck45
5/16/2026 at 8:36:23 AM
The meaning has drifted, appropriately enough. Betäubungsmittel originally meant painkillers, as you can tell from the word. It's just that now every recreational drug is labeled as such.by tormeh
5/16/2026 at 9:54:08 AM
You seem to be confusing the words "Schmerzmittel" (analgesic, pain killer) and "Betäubungsmittel" (narcotic). Those two classes of substances are not the same.by ck45
5/16/2026 at 10:21:56 AM
"Betäubung" has a similar etymology as "narcotic". Both mean to numb the senses or put to sleep (hence e.g. "narcolepsy"), and in German it's therefore also used for sedatives and anesthetic drugs. In modern use, "narcotic" has also semantically shifted to include any illegal drug, as with "Betäubungsmiddel".Interestingly, in both cases the semantic shift seems to have been caused by the enactment of laws to control drugs. The legal term these days is probably "controlled substance" in English, but "narcotic" now definitely refers to many drugs that are not medically narcotic.
by atombender
5/16/2026 at 10:05:17 AM
It can also mean anesthetics, which coincidentally would include cocaine as a strong local anesthetic, but not a narcotic in the pharmacological sense.by 0bytes
5/16/2026 at 8:45:58 PM
The US is also currently rerunning this experiment with gambling/sports betting. Also does not seem to turn out so well...by shellfishgene
5/16/2026 at 2:44:44 PM
And yet, as the DEA and other agencies tighten distribution of opioids, deaths continue to increase.by pitaj
5/16/2026 at 7:03:43 PM
People are being cut off from legitimate pharmaceutical sources and are driven to black market drugs like fentanyl and heroinby mx7zysuj4xew
5/17/2026 at 1:44:18 PM
In low doses most hard drugs that are uppers are pretty decent performance enhancing drugs. It's dumb that society can't get energy drinks and stuff with "low enough you can't realistically abuse them because you'll spend too much time going to piss" amounts of cocaine, amphetamines, etc.by cucumber3732842
5/17/2026 at 2:18:34 PM
[dead]by cindyllm
5/17/2026 at 3:07:28 AM
See also Oregon https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oregons-experiment-wit...by steve-atx-7600
5/16/2026 at 5:26:03 AM
There are 193 countries, plus the Holy See.by thrownthatway
5/16/2026 at 9:47:44 AM
Map Men: There are NOT 195 countries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nB688xBYdYby easyKL
5/16/2026 at 9:03:48 AM
As members of the United Nations. That says very little.by consp
5/16/2026 at 8:30:31 AM
Why the down votes? There aren’t 300 countries.by thrownthatway
5/16/2026 at 8:42:14 AM
Any exact number of countries is offensive to several groups of people.by nswango
5/17/2026 at 5:35:27 AM
Yeah true. I did intentionally not count the Gaza Strip.If that offends anyone, I’m good with that.
by thrownthatway
5/17/2026 at 4:09:50 AM
This is a tired trope but must be made: society has accepted that drugs can be dangerous but we won't stop people from using them -- leading with alcohol and tobacco. Yes, restrict access to youth and avoid reckless advertising, but still the people's choice.If the drugs are pure, and health problems that occur with abusing them (overdoses and addiction) are treated as health issues rather than criminal issues, then it's all a solvable problem.
Heroin being illegal didn't stop my brother from dying on it.
by pstuart
5/17/2026 at 7:27:26 PM
Look at alcohol. How many lives are negatively affected because of alcohol being freely available? By numbers alone when something is legal there are people who will participate who would otherwise never go near it if it were illegal. We're seeing this with weed right now imo.Because it's legal, people will try it. And because we live in a country where it is celebrated, encouraged, and every holiday seems to be an excuse for folks to get hammered, A LOT of people will try it. How many would never touch it if it were illegal? How many wouldn't drink and drive and kill themselves? How many innocent people in the other car, completely sober, would still be here? Because remember, booze, or drugs in general, impact more than just the user. Their families, friends, and other random people can be impacted. How many kids grow up with a drunk parent, unable to properly express or process emotions, might not have to grow up unable to maintain healthy friendships because they don't know what they look like, or won't be taken advantage of because they have a caretaker/fixer mentality because that's what they had to do as a kid.
We know making booze illegal doesn't work, and that's not what I'm suggesting here. I'm not even suggesting anything. I'm just saying, the blast radius of booze impacts a lot of people beyond the alcoholic, and statistically, a portion of those lives negatively impacted are the direct result of alcohol being legal. I can speak from firsthand experience the impact of an alcoholic single parent growing up, which would be the reason I look at this topic the way I do. Would I have been given a more healthy and "normal" childhood had booze been illegal? Idk. But some kid out there would have, which might be all that matters.
by wutwutwat
5/16/2026 at 2:49:46 AM
> A shattering drug addiction crisis that at its height killed more people annually than the entire Vietnam War.Except that you're wrong. The war-on-drugs kept drugs under control. It did not _eliminate_ them, but they also were not available on every street corner.
Once we stopped the war-on-drugs, the abuse rates skyrocketed. Not just opiods, but also meth. You can see it on the graphs in this article, the general wind-down of drug abuse policies started around 2008-2010.
by cyberax
5/16/2026 at 3:39:13 AM
I personally consider the war on drugs to be a colossal failure and there tends to be widespread agreement that the War on Drugs was somewhat effective at enabling enforcement, but ineffective or counterproductive at eliminating drugs or reducing long-term harm.What America continues to ignore, intentionally or not, is the root cause of drug addiction which tends to be a more complicated and nuanced
by thepryz
5/16/2026 at 4:46:25 AM
Well, now the war on drug is over and we see that the harms from _not_ doing it are worse. In 2023, overdoses overtook gun and traffic deaths _combined_.Surrendering to the drugs was a mistake.
Yeah, we should have changed tactics. Zero-tolerance policies were terrible nonsense, long prison terms were not helpful, and we should have clamped on prescription pills way sooner.
> but ineffective or counterproductive at eliminating drugs
It was effective in _controlling_ their level. And alternative approaches are just not working.
by cyberax
5/16/2026 at 7:38:18 AM
It seems like you've already made up your mind what to believe. In particular you've failed to critically analyze the broader context in which overdose deaths went up and I also have to question your suggestion that the war on drugs in the US ever ended.Sure, marijuana is largely accepted at this point. Most other things you still buy from gangsters on a street corner or via the darknet and will still be arrested for having, frequently losing your job as a side effect.
To overdose deaths, those largely correlate to the Sacklers (ie medical professionals inappropriately pushing product with a veneer of legitimacy) and to fentanyl. The latter is particularly deadly due to the combination of accessibility to amateurs with the inherent difficulty of safely compounding such a potent chemical as part of a clandestine operation.
by fc417fc802
5/16/2026 at 12:40:56 PM
We may be able the war on drugs has ended or not on how you define it.The nancy ragean area levels , i would say yes. Rates are down. https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-related-crime-statistic...
However, it certainly hasn't gone to 0 and is still quite high.
by wallst07
5/16/2026 at 9:48:19 PM
The prescription pills epidemic was largely over by 2018. And yes, then fentanyl started picking up speed.> suggestion that the war on drugs in the US ever ended.
It has not happened evenly across the country, but it happened on the Pacific coast. Drug use stopped being punished, with people openly consuming drugs in front of the police. Oregon even made that official.
This is an important point. Drug enforcement operations did not stop, because no large-scale bureaucratic system can stop at once. But they became a futile theater.
Curtailing cocaine/opium traffic was hard, but not impossible. Cocaine had to flow from growers high up in the mountains, through multiple countries and transportation modes. Each step increased the price for the end-consumers. And cocaine/opiates are relatively bulky, so smugglers couldn't just do one high-risk operation, they had to build a robust supply chain.
Fentanyl upended that. It can be cooked in a lab in Mexico just outside of the US border. The precursors aren't particularly expensive either. It's also highly potent, so that one milk jug of pure fentanyl powder can supply a large-ish state in the US for a year. So high-risk high-reward one-off smuggling operations are much more feasible.
by cyberax
5/16/2026 at 7:01:57 PM
Your numbers are wrongWe're talking 48 thousand gun fatalities and 40 thousand traffic fatalities (98 thousand total) vs 80 thousand
by mx7zysuj4xew
5/16/2026 at 9:09:14 PM
They're not. In 2023 the overdose deaths were more than 100k. They have gone down a bit since then, for a very grim reason: they killed enough people to affect the statistics.by cyberax
5/16/2026 at 9:08:59 AM
This is complete rubbish. The peak years of the war on drugs had a variety of hard drugs available on street corners across all major cities.At best it kept some amount of some drugs less visible in some suburbs and communities, while making it profitable for suppliers to cross those lines.
The main effect of the war on drugs was a level of incarceration outdoing almost any society in human history. The fact that the numbers jailed for victimless and quality of life 'crimes' kept going up is testament to the fact that there was hardly any effective deterrence.
by nswango
5/16/2026 at 7:42:44 AM
To me this reads as naive because I could get most any drug on many street corners easily any time within the last 30 years once I was old enough to realize what was going on and notice.by AngryData
5/16/2026 at 3:01:02 AM
I think we're agreeing with each other?by hash872
5/16/2026 at 2:17:03 AM
> The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance.The phrase “small amount” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this statement.
The government does regulate and control amphetamine and methamphetamine (Desoxyn) as prescription drugs. The former is not all that hard to access. For a while it was as easy as signing up for a service through a TikTok ad and filling out a form, after which you were guaranteed a prescription. Those mills got shut down but it’s not hard to find a doctor willing to write a prescription in your area with some Internet searching (Side note: Lot of people get surprised when they get a prescription from some random doctor and discover that all of their other doctors know about it. Controlled substance prescriptions go to shared databases and it will be on that record for a while)
> It’s not an evil drug per se - long history before it was criminalized
Dose makes the poison, the recreational users aren’t going to be satisfied with your government regulated small amounts.
These discussions always end up with two parties talking past each other because one side wants to focus only on the ideal drug user who uses small amounts and has perfect education and self control, while ignoring that the meth users wouldn’t be stopped from seeking their larger quantities than a theoretical government regulated small amount program would allow.
I should also mention that methamphetamine appears to be quite neurotoxic at recreational doses. Maybe even smaller doses too.
We should also mention that the “long history” you speak of isn’t actually that long and was associated with small epidemics of overuse and addiction, too. It’s not like addiction is a modern phenomenon.
by Aurornis
5/16/2026 at 2:18:47 AM
Having to go through the medical system is why there's such a thriving black market. How do you propose changing things that this isn't the case?by throwaway27448
5/16/2026 at 1:20:26 PM
Well, in my proposal it would depend on case by case for each chemical, but basically follow a dispensary model with regulations and controlled access (ID swipe, nationally tracked, time-windows quotas), proportional to the dangers of over-use of the chemical.For instance, I could purchase psilocybin/mescaline/ibogaine treatment at a dispensary (obviously imagining a therapeutic commoditized future). I could also purchase mescaline/psilocybin/salvia recreationally. Some recreational access may be "psych tested", or at least "need to pass the monitored orientation session" using special assays to ensure people could handle a "solo flight".
For the chem in question, it really is a more basic case I think of purity/quality/amount/regulation. I could walk into a dispensary and do a 50mg (is that correct?) line instead of a hit of espresso. Would I do this? I'd like to try, at least. The fact that I could, and know it was high quality and safe would be very cool.
I'm probably a bit weird/sci-fi/psychedelic utopian but I love the idea of a menagerie of dispensaries dealing out all kinds of cool, useful and exploratory chemicals safely. There could even be a chain of PiHKaL/TIHKAL outlets. Perhaps affectionately named "Shulgin's Drug Store". lol :)
by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 2:57:08 AM
No, policy wise I appreciate you getting into the nuance, but I feel like you take the argument to polar extremes (with an attitude of confident, final certainty), when the expected outcome is across the middle. This smells more like ideology than practicality.> These discussions always end up …
Before your comment i wouldn’t say anyone is lacking curiosity here. Tho your comment about fixing into a stereotype, seems the example of itself. I think it’s better to listen and discuss than assume the futures settle into a mischaracterization that you’ve already decided. That doesn’t seem very useful - except for ideology…
On the toxicity side, do you have any studies to cite? I wasn’t aware of toxicity, but it’s plausible.
Big picture tho, I’m not an expert in drug policy. It just sounds like a logical way to reduce harm overall. Reduce harm overall - worth repeating; on average, create a better society.
The conceivable parties who would lose out are: government funded agencies charged with fighting drug crime because their caseload and budgets would probably decrease; and on the other side the cartels and dealers. Although what seems to happen with the latter is once something is legalized, the supply chains morph into legitimate businesses somehow.
I still think it would work. I’m not convinced by what you said. Thank you tho
by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 3:45:21 AM
> On the toxicity side, do you have any studies to cite? I wasn’t aware of toxicity, but it’s plausible.A typical therapeutic dose of amphetamines is around 20mg, topping at around 60mg for serious narcolepsy. Recreational doses can go up to around 1000mg for long-term users with 360mg as the median: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40385390/
That's the area of crazy toxic side effects just from vasoconstriction. Never mind direct effects on the brain.
by cyberax
5/16/2026 at 1:07:53 PM
Okay, I remember seeing a documentary where people were doing lines of methampheatmine. And typically people would do 2 to 3 lines and be up all night. I would consider a line a "small amount".If I could go to a regulated dispensary and do a line of methamphetamine I think I'd try it. I don't think it would be neurotoxic, but I'd be very interested to know data that supports that, obviously! If you have, please show.
The doses you are describing I think fall outside responsible recreational use and into other categories - that sound more like poisoning / overdose.
A problem of criminalization is that society seems to tend to bucket all illegal drugs into a single category of usage misrepresented by the worst doses. It is possible for people to use these substances responsibly. And with assistance on purity, and regulated access, I believe the chances are high.
The regime I am proposing should even make it easier to deal with the % of people who bucket into overdoese/poison territory.
I'm not sure how much 1 line contains, but to me it seems as if it would be 50mg?
by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 5:05:47 PM
>If I could go to a regulated dispensary and do a line of methamphetamine I think I'd try it.You can, it's called getting an ADHD diagnosis through a telehealth provider, which gets you an adderal prescription. It's not literally meth, but for all intents and purposes it's equivalent.
by gruez
5/16/2026 at 11:06:36 AM
I've bounced between viewpoints so many times in life regarding legalisation of drugs. It's a fascinating argument.Something which has always grounded my beliefs is the comparison to alcohol.
Imagine we walked into bars and were presented with unmarked bottle of clear liquid, and had to order "1 alcohol, please!", where the alcohol % and quality of the drink was totally random. It'd be fucking chaos.
I think I've settled on the "drugs should be legal" but heeavvviillyyy regulated and marked. I wouldn't mind going to a bar and ordering a very weak MDMA drink, or going to a shisha cafe with weakened opium, weed, crack, etc.
Also, it seems the way drugs are punished criminally is totally wrong. Why not lock people up for false advertising rather than 'strength'? I.e if you're heavily cutting drugs, you should be strung up for manslaughter. It would put pressure on the manufacturers to label and regulate themselves.
by gaiagraphia
5/16/2026 at 11:49:22 AM
I believe harm reduction is the answer. There are people who will be curious to try substances no matter what you do -- and no matter for what reason.Here is some of what the US has been doing ever since the "war on drugs" started:
- Ban the sale of such substances, forcing users to resort to the black market.
- Lock up anyone who uses or possesses such substances, training users that there is no help for them.
- Lock up anyone who helps or intends to help anyone else use or possess such substances, training users that there is no helping others.
- Censor information on how to reduce the risks of substance use, forcing users to put themselves in more danger. (Contrary to apparent popular belief, this does not dissuade users, only harm them.)
- Censor information on how to produce or obtain such substances, preventing the discovery of reliable sources.
- Engage in relentless fearmongering about how terrible and bad such substances are, encouraging users to entirely disregard all warnings about substance use.
In my opinion, here is what one should actually do:
- Regulate the production and sale of such substances. Don't force users to resort to the black market.
- Encourage harm reduction and responsibility towards substance use. Don't train users that there is no help for them.
- Warn only of the real risks and concerns about substance use. Don't train users to disregard very real dangers by flooding them with fake ones.
- Offer reliable sources for such substances. Don't force users to resort to dubious leads.
Recent research into psilocybin therapy, for instance, is very exciting. I've been using psychedelics at home for years, and I dream of a world where known quantities and potencies of such things can be reliably sourced over-the-counter for such use. I don't know if I'll live to see the day.
Also note that none of this prevents helping users who genuinely need it -- users with less self-control, for instance, or harmful dependency. But forcing them all into terrible shame, withdrawal and eventually an utterly preventable death, is the same kind of bullshit that looked at building more homes and then invented anti-homeless architecture instead.
by LoganDark
5/16/2026 at 5:05:22 AM
> All these others syntheses with multiple steps up the chances of weird toxic solvents or contaminants creeping in. I think it’s a contaminant issue that’s exacerbated by the drug use.The article addresses this:
> Second, the evidence we have is against the idea of contaminants in P2P meth. Almost all meth was produced using P2P since 2012, before most reports of schizophrenia. And P2P meth synthesis has changed several times in the interim, resulting in higher purity than ever before.
Not saying they're right, but the author at least believes this hypothesis is contradicted by the data.
by gwerbin
5/17/2026 at 1:13:16 AM
Yeah, I just don’t think that’s very strong. The immediate precursor may not be the issue but the residues of routes to get to that precursor and what that precursor is contaminated with etc. that’s my point.by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 3:18:01 AM
Oregon decriminalized drugs in 2020 and the experiment is widely viewed as a failure by both sides of the political spectrum. The Democratic legislature rolled it back four years later.It doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s impossible to have a legalized or decriminalized regime that works, but it is non-trivial to get right.
by yojo
5/16/2026 at 5:04:22 AM
Its meaningless to decriminalize using it, since it does not give big benefit of replacing narco terrorists producers with pure, controlled stuff from legal pharma companies.The world is obviously better of without drugs, but given that is not going to happen, the question to decide is: is the world better of with drugs from legal pharmacutical companies, or (somewhat) restricted access to drugs through an illegal system?
Decrimininalizing drug use is the worst of both worlds: you get more drug access, but it still happens through the illegal system and benefits narco terrorists.
If you don't want to put drug users in jail (you cannot reasonably fine homeless people), you can offer drug courts and diversionary programs.
You need the federal government to do what it did with Marijuana (which is still federally illegal), to be able to try the other choice.
by tomjen3
5/16/2026 at 7:47:10 AM
> The world is obviously better of without drugs,You slip such a confident assertion in there seemingly without justification. Do you think (for example) that the world would be better off without alcohol? I certainly don't. Everything has downsides; that doesn't on its own justify eliminating it. It's analogous to the adage that the most secure computer is the one encased in a block of cement so as to render it entirely unusable.
by fc417fc802
5/16/2026 at 9:06:00 AM
The world would unambiguously be better off without alcohol.by cyberpunk
5/16/2026 at 1:43:49 PM
Tell me you have/had an alcoholic parent without telling me.by CuriouslyC
5/17/2026 at 1:58:12 PM
Nope, parents didn’t drink either; but you do you.Perhaps you’d be able to cope with life better if you weren’t so dependant on self medicating with harmful intoxicants and threatened by any statements against them.
by cyberpunk
5/16/2026 at 1:54:45 PM
I believe the world would be better of without alcohol for consumption, yes.The only real benefits are not being the one outside the group, and the downsides include liver damage, social damage, massively higher risk for falling, drunk driving,...
More to the point, alcohol would never be permitted if it was invented today. Marijuana might.
by tomjen3
5/16/2026 at 3:13:33 PM
You left out the most important benefit IMO. People enjoy the effects it has. Instead you're making out like it serves no purpose.> More to the point, alcohol would never be permitted if it was invented today. Marijuana might.
Isn't that circular reasoning? We know the world is better off without it because it would run afoul of the current regulatory regime. It would run afoul of the current regulatory regime because we know the world is better off without things like that.
by fc417fc802
5/17/2026 at 6:16:37 AM
2020 was famously a period where the pandemic and the opioid crisis were causing death and despair all over the country, but somehow that became the excuse for backpedaling on decriminalization in Oregon before there could have even been effects to study, not to mention before there was time to study those effects. They even recriminalized drugs that have never been associated with overdose or addiction, like psychedelics. Basically, they did the bare minimum necessary to be able to say "we tried it and it didn't work" with a straight face. Don't fall for it.by krispyfi
5/16/2026 at 2:09:36 AM
> I think it’s a contaminant issue that’s exacerbated by the drug use.I think the various pieces of evidence presented in the article basically all point against this. Is there a reason you think the evidence in the article is flawed?
by whimsicalism
5/16/2026 at 3:00:16 AM
I don’t take the article as authoritative. It’s argument against contamination is not strong. It doesn’t present any real evidence for it. You can elaborate if you likeby keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 8:47:29 AM
The original Atlantic article, which this one is trying to refute, also doesn't present any evidence for the theory that 'new meth' has significant different effects on health.After a fact dump about different types of meth, it's literally a collection of anecdotal evidence from meth users going "for the first 5 years of smoking weekly, I had a great time partying in a relaxed way with my best buds, now that I've lost my job, partner, family and home and smoke daily my mental health is fucked up".
And people working in drug care and enforcement saying "when a few rich hedonists would spend $60 for the next level high, it didn't cause schizophrenia. Now that we have thousands of former crack and opiate addicts living in tents injecting $10 bags three times a day it seems to be contaminated with something that causes detachment from reality."
The literal two most common and evergreen things in drug culture are users claiming that the old stuff was much better and would deliver a clean high without addiction for barely any money, and cops claiming that the old users were better, gentlemen fiends who did not sell their bodies or rob and exploit their own families, never bit or stabbed you when being arrested, and did not soil themselves or set fire to their own clothes while in custody.
by nswango
5/16/2026 at 1:09:49 PM
I really appreciate your take. I think it is correct and reads as accurate. Clearly a batch problem. Also, I'm glad that the read from someone who's been in the trenches and on the ground about this issue is alignment with mine. Thanks for sharing on this threadby keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 2:29:56 PM
what? their take directly contradicts what you said and supports the original article.by whimsicalism
5/17/2026 at 1:23:51 AM
Noo, swim is saying the articles are not strong, but the street speaks in alignment with meI get why you’d take it the other way tho
by keepamovin
5/17/2026 at 3:06:00 PM
i encourage you to read it again. the “atlantic article” refers to the original article that both this post and nswango are critiquingby whimsicalism
5/16/2026 at 12:10:44 PM
I have a wild idea. Why not spend that money on providing good mental health and rehabilitation services instead?I have multiple close family members who have struggled badly with drug and alcohol abuse. Good treatment is the way, not the government handing out drugs.
by kilroy123
5/16/2026 at 2:01:01 PM
All the mental health treatment and resiliance training in the world isn't going to address root societal causesby morkalork
5/16/2026 at 1:02:25 PM
Except when psychedelics are a part of the good treatment.by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 3:53:38 AM
Government does sorta regulate it. Desoxyn is (rarely) prescribed for ADHD when other meds aren't effective enough.The difference between most amphetamines and Desoxyn is that extra methyl group. That methyl group helps it cross the blood-brain barrier a little faster but the chemical that reaches the brain is the same in both cases.
by culi
5/17/2026 at 1:28:19 AM
[dead]by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 3:35:32 AM
> The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance.The thing is, drugs are addictive. ESPECIALLY meth. How would you prevent people from just getting as much as they want and then becoming drug zombies? Fentanyl is similar. Cartels perfected its production, so now it's pure and widely available.
It's even worse than meth in some regards. Once you start using fentanyl, you're going to become a hardened addict. And there will be almost no hope of recovery, the success rate of drug rehab treatments is in single-digit percentages.
I guess the idea is that people will just keep using "safer" drugs like cocaine instead? I'm not sure it's working, we legalized cannabis and it made zero difference.
by cyberax
5/16/2026 at 10:32:00 AM
The main idea indeed is usually "channeling consumption" to less harmful substances, dosages/concentrations and outlets.A prime example is alcohol, where prohibition led to bad outcomes. This led to the regulated legalization model.
E.g. in some Nordic countries hard liquor is still only available in government stores and licensed restaurants, with exactly this logic. Not long ago bars could serve only one "unit" of alcohol at a time. Longer ago there were limits to how much alcohol one could buy in a week.
> I guess the idea is that people will just keep using "safer" drugs like cocaine instead? I'm not sure it's working, we legalized cannabis and it made zero difference.
Cannabis and cocaine are very different kinds of substances with very different uses and audiences. Expecting legalized cannabis to substantially reduce cocaine use is like expecting banning of coffee would substantially increase alcohol consumption. There can be some minor effects due to multiple illegal substances tending to have the same outlets, but this is likely a subtle at best.
Also how much more "safe" cocaine is from methamphetamine is not that clear. Probably the largest effect is from very different demographics of methamphetamine vs cocaine users.
by jampekka
5/16/2026 at 9:21:42 PM
> A prime example is alcohol, where prohibition led to bad outcomes. This led to the regulated legalization model.The problem is that addicts are not going to be satisfied. Canada tried "safe supply" programs, where addicts are provided with medical opiates. Some addicts ended up selling pills because they were too weak and buying stronger street drugs.
It also apparently failed to improve long-term outcomes, although it's a bit early to tell that for certain.
> Expecting legalized cannabis to substantially reduce cocaine use is like expecting banning of coffee would substantially increase alcohol consumption.
Well, it did not reduce opiate consumption either.
by cyberax
5/16/2026 at 9:24:19 AM
Drugs are not addictive in a sense that they make person to go out and buy more. The only thing about drugs is that they are the best thing in that person’s life at the moment. Blaming drugs is as outdated as blaming npm package for vulnerability that some bad actor pushed into it.by dostick
5/16/2026 at 9:29:50 AM
Have you ever been an addict?I have, and the argument that everyone addicted had some other issue going on is pretty pointless imho. Yes, they had some other issue, and now before fixing that issue they also have to deal with being a drug addict.
by nswango
5/16/2026 at 9:46:50 AM
> Drugs are not addictive in a sense that they make person to go out and buy more.Some are. Your life could be better than it's ever been but if you've got a physiological dependence on a drug and don't have enough of it in your system you're going to have a very very bad time until you get more. Some drugs will even kill you if you fail to get more and you need to be carefully weaned off them before you can stop taking it.
by autoexec
5/16/2026 at 8:34:18 PM
Regular amphetamine (speed) is relatively okay as long as you’re not one of the people who’s wired to absolutely love it and develop a problem with it.Meth on the other hand really is quite nasty, it’s directly neurotoxic to dopamine neurons in a way that regular speed isn’t
by ifwinterco
5/17/2026 at 1:26:31 AM
Interesting. Any studies that slam dunk it?by keepamovin
5/17/2026 at 1:44:57 AM
Yes, i majored in chemistry.by keepamovin
5/17/2026 at 12:09:19 AM
Do you have any memories that you cannot let go of? That play back in your head incessantly every single day without fail? That obsess nearly every waking moment? For addicts, that memory is the dopamine release of being high, and it definitely can happen after a single use. It doesn’t impress everyone in the same way, but for those who are vulnerable to it, it becomes nearly the only thought they can have until they scratch that itch. I used to think just like you, but after dealing with and truly understanding addiction in people close to me, I can never support legalization of certain super-addictive drugs. There is no one deserving of the torment that addicts are cursed with. We should try to ensure less people, not more, are ever introduced to it.by IAmGraydon
5/17/2026 at 1:34:20 AM
Hmm, i get why you’d reach that conclusion with your experience, but i dispute that given the same experience only that conclusion is valid.The “super addict edge case” is a problem but the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. Don’t discard, but manage. I believe access to drugs should be psych/(genetic if reliable)/“allergy type”/behavior tested. I won’t give you salvia if you will flip out per tests, but if you’re okay, you’re green.
The advantage of state controlled access is that you can actually achieve that, in theory. Promoting the thing you’re against rn might actually help reduce the harm you want to remove.
by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 6:21:33 AM
It's a pretty bad drug, I can see only disadvantages over plain amphetamine.If amphetamine isn't strong enough, you already have a serious problem.
I'm not saying that criminalization is the right way, just that I don't see a responsible recreational/performance use for methamphetamine. It's too strong and too toxic. The regulation should permit only use for addiction management imho.
Also, the long history is not exactly in its favor, given how the Nazis extensively used it and Hitler was probably a serious meth-junkie.
by jona-f
5/16/2026 at 11:01:56 AM
> It's a pretty bad drug, I can see only disadvantages over plain amphetamine.The main "advantage" is probably the smoking RoA of methamphetamine. The RoA difference is likely a larger factor in methamphetamine vs plain amphetamine effects than the pharmacology of the molecule.
by jampekka
5/17/2026 at 1:36:39 AM
Not saying the risk profiles are the same, but some of the perception of different danger might be psychosocial normative informed by the differing criminalization. Plausible at least no? Important to keep that in mind.by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 9:35:23 AM
Does history record whether Hitler was using the good ol' giggles-and-joy pseudoephedrine meth or the evil psychosis-inducing P2P biker meth?by nswango
5/16/2026 at 9:53:04 AM
I think they were using the racemate. But your "giggles-and-joy" framing of meth is bullshit. Not sleeping for 3 days is psychosis-inducing no matter how you achieve that and methamphetamine is much more neurotoxic than amphetamine no matter which enantiomere.by jona-f
5/16/2026 at 2:47:41 AM
Except that you fail to mention that amphetamine abuse is strongly associated with Parkinson's and other neurological diseases, which are serious public health burdens, and likely contribute to the phenomena of high personal tax regions like the EU.by DivingForGold
5/16/2026 at 2:49:38 AM
Yeah i didn’t know that. I guess tho with regulated supply we have more chance to handle abuse and addiction.The craziness of so many legal things being pretty bad for health is also something worth addressing (alcohol, cigarettes).
by keepamovin
5/16/2026 at 1:32:33 AM
Check out the book “The Fort Bragg Cartel” if you’re wondering why drugs are illegal even if legalization makes more sense from a harm reduction standpoint. The highest levels of the military are involved in drug trafficking. Use of drugs by clandestine colonial states goes all the way back to the opium wars. US is nothing new. The deep state funds off the books operations with drug money and possibly human trafficking as well.by therobots927
5/16/2026 at 1:40:54 AM
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "Go read this book" ain't it.by fwipsy
5/16/2026 at 1:52:34 AM
'extraordinary claims' is laughable.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...
by serf
5/16/2026 at 6:48:43 PM
Point, but the claim that this is driving civilian drug policy is still extraordinary.by fwipsy
5/16/2026 at 1:51:33 AM
“I don’t feel like reading a book” isn’t a counter argument. That’s just a tidbit about how your day is goingby jrflowers
5/16/2026 at 1:25:05 PM
I've not refuted anything, but I still don't believe it. I'm just informing them of that.by fwipsy
5/16/2026 at 10:25:28 PM
I think gp might’ve suggested the book because they weren’t expecting the claim to be accepted out of hand.I’m not convinced either, the book looks interesting though. I might watch the hbo adaptation whenever that comes out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/fort-b...
by jrflowers
5/16/2026 at 9:37:34 AM
[dead]by nswango