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America Has Become a Digital Narco-State - Paul Krugman
(paulkrugman.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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I read the first paragraph of this article and I already think it sucks. If heroin was fully legalized, zero restrictions, we’d be much better off than the current situation we have right now with the war on drugs, fentanyl analogs, and xylazine. Full stop.
Second paragraph:
This is already happening. Who is this author and why is he so ignorant of the past few decades of opiate problems in the US? There is not a significant fundamental difference between heroin and any other opiate/opioid. I say this as someone who has experimented with many types of them.
Based on this I’m not gonna read the rest of the article because he’s already demonstrated a head-up-ass perspective.
Paul Krugman is a nobel-prize winning economist who used to have a column in the NY Times. He has a relatively impressive record of predicting terrible things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
And while I certainly don't want to push back on the difference between heroin and other opium derivatives, it's worth noting that legally speaking they're both exactly as illegal when not used as prescribed for the treatment of pain or disease.
It's not a blog post about heroin or opiates, though, so quibbling over the imperfections of his analogy is kinda missing the point. Please give it another read if you have a few minutes; the analogy is fairly apt, though very depressing as an American.
Aka totally discredited.
The "nobel in econ" is as much of a fraud as econ in general.
Anybody who knows this goofball knows not to listen to his crap.
An ad hominum attack and a distinction without a difference is a hell of a response to "who is this guy".
Do you want to show the class where on your wallet the Keynesian model of economics touched you? (Or do you perhaps have a "Krugman sucks and you shouldn't listen to him" link you'd like to share?)
Since you went for an Appeal to Authority as the very first paragraph of your comment, a response that trashes that person's authoritative credentials is logic in the very context you created and thus not an Ad Hominum.
Without that first paragraph on your post you would've been right to claim Ad Hominum.
You didnt attack any of his actual credentials, though. You just said that he should be dismissed because he wrote for a particular newspaper and the award he was given by the Swiss government was not one of the awards given by the Swiss government funded by the gift of a 19th century arms merchant.
If you want to rebut my statement that Krugman "has a pretty good track record", please do so! But you didn't, and haven't, and instead asserted your own biases as fact.
Which is obviously your right to do but, again, is a really weird response to a "who is this guy" post.
You do know that the entire rest of the article never mentions drugs ever again and you're getting needlessly spun-up about a metaphor for social media and you're just trolling, right?
No, I’m not trolling. Why would I believe this person to know what they’re talking about in a subject I don’t understand well, when I know they’re wrong about a subject I do understand well?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Sackler heroin? ... Only if Bayer gives up the patent!
The author is Paul Krugman, a little known economist, writes for the papers I think.
Sorry if I'm getting whooshed, but Krugman is an infamous economist. He takes really big swings and is sometimes incredibly wrong.
I’ve heard the name before but I’m not super tuned into this area. The analogy just really struck out for me in the first two paragraphs, monumentally so. If he writes with this amount of conviction about something he clearly has no idea about, I’m not likely to trust anything else that he writes in the same article. It’s important to know your limitations.
Yeah because the tobacco, pain reliever, and social media industries clearly show how great and non predatory totally legal heroin would be.
Has this dude never heard of the tobacco, alcohol or gun Industry ?
He's talking about commercial heroin like it's some outlandish and unthinkable idea that a harmful thing would become a billion dollar industry
He's deliberately making the point accessible because he's writing for all levels of readers, including Americans.
He won the nobel prize for economics and was one of the few sane voices during the great recession.