Item — HN Reader

There have been countries like China in the Opium Wars period that had limited restrictions on drug consumption. It ended up with a substantial fraction of their population being addicted to opium and basically non-productive.

HN is full of smart people who (wrongly I think) assume that because they have the self-control and discipline to either avoid drugs or to use them relatively safely that the rest of the population does too. This does not seem true in my experience. I forget the exact stats but roughly 1 in 20 Americans is an alcoholic, and that's with a drug that humans have been consuming for thousands of years and that has established social rituals around consumption. It seems likely to me that increasing access to and decreasing stigma of highly addictive drugs like opioids or amphetamines will lead to substantial increases in addiction rates.

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>HN is full of smart people who (wrongly I think) assume that because they have the self-control and discipline to either avoid drugs or to use them relatively safely that the rest of the population does too. This does not seem true in my experience. I forget the exact stats but roughly 1 in 20 Americans is an alcoholic, and that's with a drug that humans have been consuming for thousands of years and that has established social rituals around consumption. It seems likely to me that increasing access to and decreasing stigma of highly addictive drugs like opioids or amphetamines will lead to substantial increases in addiction rates.

IMHO, that's a little reductive. The primary issue isn't use/abuse of such substances. Rather, it's the criminalization of use/abuse that's the biggest problem.

I say that because putting someone in jail because they have a problem with substance abuse doesn't make any sense. I'd add that providing comprehensive treatment for those who have such issues would be less than half the cost of interdiction, enforcement and incarceration.

What's more, both the substance abuse and legal issues/incarceration limits the economic potential of those who have resolved their issues due to stigmatization of those with criminal records.

I'll go even farther and say that drug prohibition (as we saw with the 18th Amendment[0]) creates black markets, and since there are no legal avenues to address disputes, and begets violence on a wide scale, further depressing economic output and social cohesion.

I don't disagree that substance abuse brings misery to many -- but penalizing those who use such substances without them negatively impacting their lives with legal issues and potential violence seems way too extreme.

If we invested USD$10-15 billion a year (as compared with ~USD$50 billion on "drug enforcement") into the resources required to provide treatment for anyone who wants/needs it, and legalize/regulate all "drugs", will save money, increase economic output and improve social cohesion.

It's a win/win/win if you ask me.

> If we invested USD$10-15 billion a year (as compared with ~USD$50 billion on "drug enforcement") into the resources required to provide treatment for anyone who wants/needs it, and legalize/regulate all "drugs", will save money, increase economic output and improve social cohesion.

I don't think there is much evidence for that (nor against it). One country that has tried something like that is Portugal and from what I can tell it has worked moderately but not spectacularly well. The problem with assuming that the US would have the same outcome is that the US shares a porous border with a part of the world heavily involved in drug trafficking and the US is a much larger country and larger consumer of narcotics, so the demand effects are hard to compare with Portugal.

> It ended up with a substantial fraction of their population being addicted to opium and basically non-productive.

Do you have any evidence of this? I don't believe this to be true from general reading, but can't back it up. My rcollection is that the workers would work hard during the day then smoke opium in the evenings.

This article claims 27% of the adult male population were addicts in 1906 (5% of total population): https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/s10571-007-9225-2.

They don't specifically mention work output but I find it hard to believe that opium addicts were particularly productive in most jobs. I don't think China was very industrialized at the time so I doubt what we would today conceptualize as a "worker" was a substantial fraction of the population at that time.

Thankls. I'm a little cautious if this as it relentlessly uses he word 'abuse' instead of 'use', as if it has made up it's mind already.

I also found this, which may disagree: https://academic.oup.com/book/32900/chapter-abstract/2766221...

The ‘Problem’ of Opium Smoking in Canton Virgil K.Y. Ho

Abstract

Both the causes of opium consumption, and the allegedly calamitous social, political, economic, and cultural impact of opium smoking on Cantonese society were greatly exaggerated in official propaganda and scholarly writings. Opium served Canton and its urban inhabitants many positive social, cultural, economic, and political purposes, making it difficult to over-simplify the phenomenon of opium smoking as nothing but pernicious.

"but I find it hard to believe that opium addicts were particularly productive in most jobs"

well maybe, but do you have any experience with this other than feeling? Same has been said of dope smokers, but many are productive. Also in china a few centuries ago there was no welfare state and for most, no work = no food = beg or starve. So as a non-productive person, you didn't live too long (edit: to be fair, this is just my assumption. I may be wrong).

Abit more, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium#Recreational_use_in_Chin... that suggests something very different:

It is important to note that "recreational use" of opium was part of a civilized and mannered ritual, akin to an East Asian tea ceremony, prior to the extensive prohibitions that came later.[50] In places of gathering, often tea shops, or a person's home servings of opium were offered as a form of greeting and politeness. [...] The image of seedy underground, destitute smokers were often generated by anti-opium narratives and became a more accurate image of opium use following the effects of large scale opium prohibition in the 1880s.[50][51]

> well maybe, but do you have any experience with this other than feeling? Same has been said of dope smokers, but many are productive. Also in china a few centuries ago there was no welfare state and for most, no work = no food = beg or starve. So as a non-productive person, you didn't live too long

Not with opium smokers but I have some familiarity with opioid users and they are generally not good workers. Of course maybe there are tons of opioid users who pass as totally functional people and so I don't recognize them, but I doubt that. Marijuana is also clearly not addictive in the same way as opioids are (perhaps it is slightly addictive and maybe more so now that it has become stronger). It seems to be more like caffeine where its use is ritualized but people don't have a very hard time with cessation if forced to. I would bet daily users of cannabis are significantly less productive than the average population, but I know a couple in high performance jobs, so it's certainly not guaranteed.

I imagine in the China of the early 1900s many of the opium users did die just as many heroin/fentanyl users today do. I have talked to addicts who expect to die of their drug addiction and openly say so.

Edit: I thought about it a bit more and I am aware of some functional addicts addicted to (legally proscribed) pain meds. So I suppose it is possible opium users/addicts were more like this group. I doubt it though because China went to extreme lengths to eradicate opium from the country after the communists came to power.

A fair and measured answer, thanks.

> and that's with a drug [...] that has established social rituals around consumption

You're missing something vital, that those social rituals are often supportive of alcohol consumption. In the UK "beer or queer" (= drink up or there's summat wrong with you"). Alcohol abuse is as much an embedded social problem as a personal one. Who hasn't tried to force another drink on someone who's clearly had too much? To my regret even I have.

On top of that, just look at alcohol advertising everywhere. It should be banned.