No. The worst that can happen to him is that he is pulled over by a cop in the parking lot. Gets charged with possession of heroin. Goes to jail for a couple nights, then looses his job/pension/car/house/wife/kids (in whatever order) and winds up on the street. Regardless of the biological realities of heroin, the realworld criminal consequences of regular heroin possession can be worse.

And I have yet to meet any longterm drug user who hasn't on occasion sold some to a friend. Get caught "dealing" and you will face an entirely different legal regime.

Many street-level drug dealers will still separate the drug and money handovers between different people. This isn't to avoid legal issues. It is to avoid the money being seized when the cops move on the guy they see handing over bags of drugs.

It's been 45 years since it was first established that heroin CAN be used safely when accompanied by a social ritual. Part of the problem IS the mindset and stigma around addiction, and that "insanely addictive drugs" have full power over people, and there is no ability to moderate their use, which is false. People are either 100% sober or a social pariah. The response in these comments mostly confirms this sort of black or white thinking. Maybe somebody should ask if its the lack of social ritual / social controls causing the problem, not the drug. Maybe society is failing otherwise responsible drug use by making all users outcasts. Or is a spectrum and complex interaction of multiple issues, and not just drugs. "This is too dangerous of a conversation to have" puts us in danger of not having productive conversations.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183716/https://www.harva...

I think the mistake siliconvalleyites have is that they imagine everyone as intelligent and rational as they think they themselves are which leads them to encourage open discussion.

But it’s clear throughout history that all people are stupid sheep on occasion and their thinking needs to be curated in a way.

Therapeutic use for diagnosed conditions - interesting.

Safety for recreational use - interesting.

As a recreational activity - seems like we have enough fun already without adding more risk.

Just my 2cents.

Edit for more context:

Depending on the drug, substances consumed outside of working hours would still show up in a drug test. Firing someone for something they do outside of work shouldn't be acceptable.

If you can prove they consumed drugs that would impair their ability to perform their job during working hours, that'd be a valid cause for dismissal. Drug tests don't measure that precisely enough though.

Not to mention, drug tests are not infallible. They can come back positive for morphine if you eat a poppy seed bagel in the morning [1].

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/poppy-seeds-alter-drug-tes...

Here's a non-drug related one. In many places road construction companies will disallow workers from wearing headphones. This is because of the heavy machinery and you need to hear the beeps of a machine backing up. Drivers of those do not have good sight around the machinery and large trailers. Headphones on can mean not hearing a warning sound and being struck and possibly killed.

Are wearing headphones a problem? Do you want to fire someone until an accident happens?

Part of the proactive nature to this is insurance companies. If there aren't strict safety policies that are enforced than insurance companies won't cover companies. When accidents occur they have to pay out and want to avoid that.

Drug use has been proven to cause certain issues depending on the drug that can have safety impacts at work sights. This can costs lives and money.

This is why it becomes a big deal in certain fields.

I had to mummify a guy's hand because it was sliced open by glass, once. They were airlifted to the hospital because the bleeding couldn't be controlled.

Another guy was doing something unsafe with his forklift, probably because he was in a hurry, right before Christmas, it rolled over on him and he died.

That's why we couldn't keep people who were careless for any reason around. People could, and did, die for a moment of carelessness.

You're asking for more of this kind of story.

Make workers do a 30 second ability test before going on shift. Design the test to measure reaction speed, short term memory, etc.

[follow up thought] - Test must be immune to practice/muscle memory. Don't want a drunk passing the test through familiarity, then performing shit on the job.

A) when getting hired B) if you show up to work intoxicated C) after any serious accident

So other than at hiring, which the person can anticipate the timing of, the drug tests are effectively only done after failing such a test to begin with. The average factory doesn't care about hiring people with a record, either, so long as it's not too serious or likely to impact work.

Your test is one of those things that sounds like a good idea until you realize that the people who are needed for some big customer's order are too tired, but still able to work and you don't have anyone to replace them. Rolling the dice on that kind of stuff enough times until a failure happens is what gets factory floors in trouble.

That poor guy just wanted to get home to see his family for Christmas and busted ass to get one more dumpster of trash dumped even if it meant messing with the dumpster while the forklift was on too much of an incline. I don't truly know what he was thinking, but we can make an educated guess that he'd probably done that kind of thing before and doing things the right way took more time and effort than his poor, tired body had left in him at that point.

You don't appear to be aware of all the bad incentives that aren't going anywhere and are advocating something that will cause more people in more factories to roll more dice that will have more injuries. and hoping that the same tired, overworked, short-handed people will make a fuss over these rules instead of rolling the dice as they have so many times before if you just try to warn them or give them tests which they could skip to save 5 minutes they could've been working and then go home that much earlier.

Most of the ways to fix these problems require more staff and/or resources, shorter and more stable shifts, etc. all of which costs more money. Then those labor costs make them less competitive with factories in places like China where they may be trying to compete with literal slave labor in a race to the bottom. The factories already do look at incidents, as well as close calls, but there's only so much you can do when your grand ideas are paired with awful execution thereof.

The best ideas come when you understand their job and help them do things in a better, safer and, ideally, easier way.

I think the better solution is to abstract out the judgement into a formula that the pilot must follow, so not courting "gethereitis"

At least pilots mostly actually do their paperwork and checklists, even if they sometimes fall prey to things like neglecting to land their helicopter when they end up in IFR conditions while, say, transporting Kobe to a game.

A pre-shift only needs to fail once and you have a co-workers recklessness injuring another worker.

I wonder what unions think of drug tests? As a union member I might prefer that my coworkers were tested to be honest if I worked closely with them around heavy machinery.

Many software developers working for companies have agreements that they can't compete with their current employer on what they do while employed there. It's something employees give up while employed somewhere.

In the name of safety, many jobs with safety issues have to give up certain things (i.e. drugs) while employed there.

This same logic would also apply to lack of sleep, and is often glorified as part of the culture (doctors).

First, I'm attempting to describe how the system works rather than give my opinion on how it should be.

Second, the headphones situation is meant to illustrate how safety plays in. This isn't a "what if" example. People on job sites wearing headphones have died because they missed the warning tones. I am aware of one case, personally.

Safety is a big deal. It plays into the insurance companies who drive much of the policies and practices. They are driving the things they do to keep their costs down. Insurance companies often try to be pretty methodical in what they do to keep costs down. It's not just random ideas but looking at cause/effect relationships.

Third, many drugs have effects outside of the time they are used. It's not just the impact of the drug while one is on it but how it affects them in the time they are not on it, as well. From a safety perspective that cannot be discounted.

From the standpoint of the companies and the people involved, if you want to do drugs than work elsewhere. Safety is a higher priority.

I proposed my catch-all solution for this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26183297

My ideal is we just ensure competence - guy who smoked weed last night may be more competent than a clean guy getting divorced. Test the competence

It would be great if there was a way to test for competence. Some drugs cause long term issues with decision making and being able to see what's likely to happen. This reminds me of a job I had years ago framing houses. I remember some of the work men firing nails from a nail gun into a nearby woods. An area where neighborhood kids happen to play.

That's poor decision making and a liability. How do you test for complex things like that?

Film the worksite or send surprise inspectors to catch workers too lazy/reckless about their nail gunning. Maybe show them videos of nail gun injuries!

Improper nailgunning I think is more related to ingrained attitude than ephemeral competence degraders (drugs)

Did you know eating a poppyseed bagel will cause a positive for heroin for upto 60 hours afterwards while doing a small amount of heroin will not show up on that same test.

Airline pilots, I believe, have a no-drink-within-X-hours rule. I'm not sure whether X is 12, 24, or more. So even one drink the night before a morning flight would be prohibited, even though logically a single drink with dinner the night before should be a non-issue.

Years ago I was an office manager at a battery supply warehouse (car batteries not AA’s). We had an employee that had started working for us for about 6 months when it became vary apparent that he had a drug problem. Because his brother also worked there we knew that he had suffered a major car accident, was in crippling debt from the medical bills, and developed a pain pill habit as a result. He was only 19 at the time.

The issues that involved the work place were things like being consistently late, taking 2-3 hour lunch breaks and coming back high. So high, that he could not perform basic job tasks like counting a pallet of battery cores. My biggest concern was that he was licensed to use our fork lifts and so I had our warehouse manager do his best to keep him off the forklifts.

At this point I recommended to my boss that we fire him for the repeated offenses, as well as recommend that he seek drug consoling. I felt bad for him. He had a problem. He needed help. But he did not need to be working at that job for his and others safety. My boss and my boss’ boss, on the other hand, decided it was best to send to him to a “random” drug test, so that when the fired him they could do so with indisputable cause. This did not work, he disappeared for many hours, despite the drug testing facility being just down the street, and the results came back clean. I know that people have many ways of faking drug tests. I suggested again that he be fired for the offenses and not the drug test. Again my bosses disagreed and sent him to two more “random” tests each week after that.

The employee in question got wise to this. He knew what they were trying to do. So he went to a therapist and got a declaration of temporary disability. My company then had to pay him his full wages for 6 months with out him needed to come to work.

And I sat back and laughed at my bosses, as the unemployment claim would have be nominal by comparison.

edit: not sure why this would be down-voted. It is just a real story, relevant to the thread. I was only suggested that waiting for test results when possible danger lurks was not the right course of action. i forgot to add the employee did come back after his psychological disability ran out. And of course they sent him to take a drug test again. He failed that one and was fired.

Social contagion can have significant effects on social issues like this.

Nowadays I have a pretty big nicotine consumption and probably extremely marginal nootropic effects.

Did you get addicted to the gum or the patch?

That's something important to consider when reading about experiences on the internet. There are people who are relatively resistant to addiction. When they talk about their experiences, they make it sound like it's no big deal, and it's not to them. But that's not how it is for everyone.

(I was turned onto this after listening to an interview with Dr. Peter Attia [haven't yet made up my mind on whether he is a huckster])

To quit, I switched to vaping for a few weeks, then tapered the nicotine concentration to zero over the course of a month or two. Cigarettes have MAOIs which make it more addictive which is why I switched.

I was irritable for weeks and still get the urge to smoke sometimes(it's been over 5 years since I quit). I don't recommend starting.

I've listened to him off and on, and think he's ok. He tests on himself pretty relentlessly, and still sees patients (though it's a boutique practice). He also appears open to new ideas as new research presents itself. And while crazy people can come from anywhere, he also has all the proper credentials.

There's this guy who hates him lol: https://www.libertariannews.org/2016/03/07/dr-peter-attia-re...

Finally, if you haven't already, you should find the podcast episode where he talks about Theranos. Pretty wild that he was asked to join and turned Holmes down.

You are right. I ended up with easily maintained hypertension and the urge to smoke that probably will never go away.(While on it, I also had significantly worse anxiety, decreased sleep quality, and bubbly urine. I definitely don't recommend trying it)

But the social dynamics between it and heroin are the same. If we normalize its use and downplay its risks, more people will use it. And the physical and social harms from heroin use are far worse than nicotine.

You can't just lie to people and tell them that everything is deadly or they're gonna question everything else you've said. That's basically what DARE was.

I know a chainsaw is dangerous. But listening to every Youtuber lecture me about how I have lock out tag out to change a lightbulb my own home and every Redditor jump at the opportunity to engage in a monologue about how I should wear safety classes when I use a screwdriver sure lends a lot of legitimacy to the people who say their dad never wore PPE and retired with all his limbs so it must be fine.

How many people are going to storm a national capitol because of what they see online?

It all sounds farcical and easy to dismiss until you actually put some thought into it.

Most people that fall into heavy addiction are probably driven there more by chaotic circumstances than intellectual considerations.

The issues is "drug decriminalization" people treating addictions like it's not a real problem for many people.

Many of these folks want it to get to a point where you can quite easily buy heroin and suffer no legal consequences.

I'm not saying our drug laws are just or can't be reformed but the fact that heroin is illegal prevents a LOT of people from using it. How many people will then use, aided by these pronouncements that "Heroin isn't actually that addictive!" and ruin their lives?

We already have an opioid epidemic in this country that has destroyed communities.

There's a middle ground between our terrible war on drugs and the naive "make it all legal and experiment with heroin!"

Do you know a lot of people who have expressed to you that they would use heroin recreationally if only it were legal? My gut is that the number isn’t large.

My impression of the evidence from places that have tried decriminalization (eg Portugal) is that the number of people who use and then are able to get their lives back on the rails is higher than the extra people who use because it’s decriminalized.

What if people tell them it's not addictive? And now it's not illegal?

Also, my understanding of most drug legalization is that the intent is to legalize usage/possession, not distribution. This is done with the intent to make it easier/safer to gain treatment and decrease addiction.

What illegal does is make it far more likely to die from using heroin.

Lack of access (or not knowing how to access it) comes to mind, among many other reasons.

I don’t know if you read it, but it also talks about how many deaths are from bad education (not understanding drug interactions, i.e. between two depressants), and bad drugs (i.e. lacing heroin with fentanyl) with no easy way for users to test their drugs.

It further goes on to discuss that addiction treatment in the US is terrible precisely because it focuses on the drugs as a pathology and does not consider the holistic person or helping the person solve their underlying problems.

Progressive drug policy isn’t “legalize it all”, it is “prevent needless deaths and treat addiction properly”. It has been for some time. Here are garden variety articles I found about these policies being implemented in the wild:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/04/allow-festiv...

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/statemen...

I wholeheartedly agree. a couple google searches showed buying alcohol for a minor was a $1000 fine, but heroin possession for personal use is $20000 and a year in jail.

I think there's room to scale back the penalties and still be a deterrent. I think there's room to scale up addiction recovery.

Hell, keep the horrible penalties, but waive them if the accused, with counseling and whatever other support makes sense, can stay clean for a year.

So much of the system is about papering over problems rather than fixing the root cause.

The middle ground you seek is already defined clearly. Are you sure your perspective here is as informed as it could be?

> Hart reports that more than 70 percent of drug users—whether they use alcohol, cocaine, prescription medications, or heroin—do not meet the health criteria for drug addiction

> “My heroin use is as rational as my alcohol use,” Carl Hart writes

> Let’s just talk about alcohol first. When you’re at a wedding reception, alcohol serves as a social lubricant. People are more gregarious. They talk, they interact. The same is true with cocaine at parties, heroin among friends, or opium among friends, NDMA among lovers.

> It’s just like with alcohol. Most people drink alcohol on a regular basis, but they don’t become physically dependent

> I don’t know a term. I simply mean people who take drugs, like alcohol users, somebody who may have a glass of wine or two every night for dinner, whereas somebody else may only drink on the weekend. It’s a wide range. And the same can be true with cocaine or heroin

> Why do you use heroin? > That’s like saying, “Why do you use alcohol?”

Although realistically, alcohol is probably one of the worst from a work safety perspective.