
The Drug Revolution That No One Can Stop - ctoth
https://medium.com/matter/the-drug-revolution-that-no-one-can-stop-19f753fb15e0
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klausjensen
Just think if many recreational drugs were not illegal. You would have access
to safe(r), rated products, open testing of products, knowledge about use (and
abuse) out in the open.

You would not have to jail people for illegal drugs and destroy their lives -
usually much more than the drugs ever did. You would not be funding criminals
who own the market now. It could even be taxed.

At some point in the future, this will happen.

~~~
elcct
First you need to get rid of criminals from the government

~~~
nine_k
It does not take to be a criminal to support "war on drugs" and the like. It's
enough to be a bureaucrat.

According to Shirky Principle, "institutions will try to preserve the problem
to which they are the solution". Bureaucracy is very much about being a self-
sustained and preferable expanding body. For that, it needs that the problem
it is intended to solve to persist. If needed, it will sustain and even re-
create that problem.

This is why we have so many forbidden and controlled things: so that those who
check for compliance kept they jobs and could get a pay raise sometimes. And
their jobs are not easy!

Note that this is not "evil" per se, there's no malicious intent, and the
whole "war on drugs", much like the Prohibition 80 years before it, is
entirely driven by (outwardly) benign, even noble motives.

Rather, this is a primitive form of life and natural selection. Life needs to
self-sustain; its forms that fend off external threats better extend and
persist. Any organization that had actually solved a problem it was built to
solve has been disbanded, as something not needed any more. Any organization
that offers solutions which perpetuate the problem is kept around to continue
solving the problem.

This is (partly) why higher forms of life have a death trigger built in.
Eukaryotes have telomeres. Similarly, presidents only have limited time in
office. Problem-solving bodies should have something similar.

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sneak
Do not trust the accuracy of any article that calls Ketamine a tranquilizer.
It is not, it is an anasthetic. People who fail to do research commonly repeat
this completely inaccurate belief.

~~~
headstorm
I've always heard it called a horse tranquilizer. What makes that assertion
wrong?

The NHTSA labels it as a veterinary tranquilizer as well -
[http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/job185drugs/keta...](http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/job185drugs/ketamine.htm)

~~~
sneak
Nope, anasthetic. People without any background in medicine frequently confuse
the two.

~~~
headstorm
Repeating yourself doesn't answer my question as to what makes the statement
wrong. The more interesting question to me is why there are so many sources,
including many government documents, referring to it as a veterinary
tranquilizer going back almost 50 years if it does not have that effect.

~~~
sneak
Look two items up in that link, under "source", where it is correctly
identified as an anasthetic.

People without training conflate the two.

~~~
headstorm
I fail to see why I should believe that it is only an anesthetic (never
anasthetic, as you consistenly keep writing) and not a tranquilizer as well
when I can find thousands of documents on .gov and .edu sites supporting its
use as a tranquilizer. Surely you can come up with veterinary medicine
documents that explain why it's not usable as a tranquilizer rather than
making unsupported claims - since it's mentioned as a tranquilizer always in
veterinary and not human contexts.

~~~
sneak
iOS spellcheck has failed my pre-coffee fingers. :/

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anonymousDan
Perhaps the availability of cheap mass spectrometers could mitigate some of
the health risks involved (e.g.
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903107259/scio-your-
six...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903107259/scio-your-sixth-sense-
a-pocket-molecular-sensor-fo)).

~~~
bamie9l
I think that's a spectrophotometer

~~~
tomkinstinch
Near-IR spectroscopy can work for sample identification of organic compounds,
but there are downsides with sample prep and interference from strong
absorbers in the bands used, including water. The lenses and windows in the
insurgents are made of IR-transmissive salt (often literally NaCl), which has
to be kept dry and scratch free.

A better, and newer, option is to use Raman spectroscopy, which relies on the
intrinsic molecular vibrations of a material (phonons) to shift the wavelength
of interrogating light by a characteristic magnitude[1]. Once the Raman
spectra is obtained, sample identification is a matter of finding the spectrum
of the most similar compound in a database of known spectra. So in order to
correctly identify something, it helps if it has been seen before and is
present in the database.

Because Raman spectrometers are essentially a laser, some very narrow optical
notch filters (band rejection at the interrogating frequency), and some fairly
sensitive semiconductor detectors (often in the form of a mini
spectrophotometer), the instruments can be made quite small. Some are even
handheld and have integrated material databases[2].

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_spectroscopy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_spectroscopy)

2\.
[http://www.thermoscientific.com/content/tfs/en/product/trusc...](http://www.thermoscientific.com/content/tfs/en/product/truscan-
rm-material-verification-analyzer.html)

------
zdean
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8748467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8748467)

~~~
touristtam
Thanks, I thought it was a repost.

