alt Hacker News>Not the person you were replying to but I do not have that level of confidence in governing agencies. Money corrupts. There are still a myriad of dangerous substances in use today that are known to be harmful.
That's why I also said "at least making announcements that it's harmful". What substances do you think are actually harmful, but professional associations have refused to denounce it as such? Moreover if the claim is that it's "medical consensus" that it's harmful, how can layperson verify this, instead of relying on some guy confidently proclaiming as such on a HN comment?
There are entire communities dedicated to finding harmful substances outside of the "medical consensus". HN writes them off as quacks and I see those people on HN as trusting dogmatic scientism which to me is true quackery and why I avoid going into the weeds on such topics. If there are clues that something is bad I just get the f&$k away from it until a few hundreds years of testing have concluded which I see as common sense. It is also too difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff on HN as there are too many contrarians and people with financial conflicts of interest.