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Because of the damage addiction does to communities. When these laws were passed it was people in those affected communities demanding them. People forget there

Because of the damage addiction does to communities. When these laws were passed it was people in those affected communities demanding them. People forget there were huge community marches in the 80s/90s crack epidemics with locals demanding police rid their towns of crack dealers.

chimeracoder 11y ago
> People forget there were huge community marches in the 80s/90s crack epidemics with locals demanding police rid their towns of crack dealers. People also forget why those dealers were in the business in the first place. (Hint: the US government played a large role in explicitly financing the drug trade that resulted in a stead inflow of crack, predominantly to black communities[0]. Crack cocaine would not have been anywhere nearly as lucrative a business otherwise[1].) [0] https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/ https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/ [1] Which isn't to say that it's particularly lucrative either way, as has been demonstrated numerous times by economists - it just happens to be one of the few options available for many people who are trying to scrape together a living under those circumstances.
- pakled_engineer 11y ago
  A steady influx of cocaine, which became too expensive when said shady agencies stopped what they were doing and local dealers decided to boil the expensive coke into crack so it became more affordable to addicts. Now there was a $5 per point addictive drug flooding poor areas with zero law enforcement to control it. I remember big protests with black community leaders accusing the police of racism for not arresting crack dealers as their neighborhoods had become so dangerous police totally avoided them. They demanded new laws. Their newly elected reps ran on a platform of new tougher laws. The heavy hand of government then solved this by creating mandatory minimum sentencing and other laws that were blanket applied regardless of individual situation and created mass incarceration.
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    Yes. Now, let's think why white neighborhoods were not struggling with the same problems of violent crime due to the drug trade. We know that the answer is not (a) white people weren't doing drugs (b) white people were doing drugs that were less addictive because in reality, white people had (and still have) roughly the same total rates of drug use as everyone else. And in this case, white people were largely using the same drug (cocaine, in powered form) as black people (cocaine, in freebase form). I'm not saying that black people at the time weren't concerned with violent crime and calling for solutions to it. In fact, I'm usually the person who points this out whenever discussions about 80s and 90s drug law sentencing come up on HN. What I am saying instead is that it's silly to ignore the reason that black communities were concerned with problems that white communities never had to face in the first place.
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      Whites were doing less drugs per drug user, as my comment above said.
      - chimeracoder 11y ago
        No, drug usage rates among whites are not and were not substantially lower than drug usage rates for other races. (In some years, they were actually higher, though not substantially so). In fact, in the 1980s, white people were also 45% more likely to sell drugs as well[0]. The difference in the effects of drug trade on black communities and on white communities in the 1980s are emphatically not due to fundamental differences of the drugs themselves, or due to differences in the prevalence of drug trade and drug usage. [0] http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339610?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339610?seq=1#page_scan_t...
        ikeboy 11y ago
        >Hindelang, Hirshi, and Weiss (1981) compare police records on arrests to self-reports for a sample of individuals and find these to be similar, with the exception of self-reports for young black men, which appear to understate the amount of crime committed. If the fraction of drug users are equal, but blacks lie about whether they're drug users more often, then your statistics will show that whites use more. The reported difference between blacks and whites is less than the known difference in honesty between them with regard to drug questions. You also don't seem to have responded to my point at all, which is that blacks have a higher rate of reported usage within the last week. This is before taking the self-reported nature into account. See the source originally cited, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf >Among black drug users, 54% reported using drugs at least monthly and 32% reported using them weekly. Such frequent drug use was less common among white drug users. Among white users, 39% reported using drugs monthly and 20% reported using them weekly. I'll let you do the math to determine how this affects usage rates.

chimeracoder 11y ago

> People forget there were huge community marches in the 80s/90s crack epidemics with locals demanding police rid their towns of crack dealers. People also forget why those dealers were in the business in the first place. (Hint: the US government played a large role in explicitly financing the drug trade that resulted in a stead inflow of crack, predominantly to black communities[0]. Crack cocaine would not have been anywhere nearly as lucrative a business otherwise[1].) [0] https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/ https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/ [1] Which isn't to say that it's particularly lucrative either way, as has been demonstrated numerous times by economists - it just happens to be one of the few options available for many people who are trying to scrape together a living under those circumstances.

pakled_engineer 11y ago
A steady influx of cocaine, which became too expensive when said shady agencies stopped what they were doing and local dealers decided to boil the expensive coke into crack so it became more affordable to addicts. Now there was a $5 per point addictive drug flooding poor areas with zero law enforcement to control it. I remember big protests with black community leaders accusing the police of racism for not arresting crack dealers as their neighborhoods had become so dangerous police totally avoided them. They demanded new laws. Their newly elected reps ran on a platform of new tougher laws. The heavy hand of government then solved this by creating mandatory minimum sentencing and other laws that were blanket applied regardless of individual situation and created mass incarceration.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  Yes. Now, let's think why white neighborhoods were not struggling with the same problems of violent crime due to the drug trade. We know that the answer is not (a) white people weren't doing drugs (b) white people were doing drugs that were less addictive because in reality, white people had (and still have) roughly the same total rates of drug use as everyone else. And in this case, white people were largely using the same drug (cocaine, in powered form) as black people (cocaine, in freebase form). I'm not saying that black people at the time weren't concerned with violent crime and calling for solutions to it. In fact, I'm usually the person who points this out whenever discussions about 80s and 90s drug law sentencing come up on HN. What I am saying instead is that it's silly to ignore the reason that black communities were concerned with problems that white communities never had to face in the first place.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    Whites were doing less drugs per drug user, as my comment above said.
    - chimeracoder 11y ago
      No, drug usage rates among whites are not and were not substantially lower than drug usage rates for other races. (In some years, they were actually higher, though not substantially so). In fact, in the 1980s, white people were also 45% more likely to sell drugs as well[0]. The difference in the effects of drug trade on black communities and on white communities in the 1980s are emphatically not due to fundamental differences of the drugs themselves, or due to differences in the prevalence of drug trade and drug usage. [0] http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339610?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339610?seq=1#page_scan_t...
      - ikeboy 11y ago
        >Hindelang, Hirshi, and Weiss (1981) compare police records on arrests to self-reports for a sample of individuals and find these to be similar, with the exception of self-reports for young black men, which appear to understate the amount of crime committed. If the fraction of drug users are equal, but blacks lie about whether they're drug users more often, then your statistics will show that whites use more. The reported difference between blacks and whites is less than the known difference in honesty between them with regard to drug questions. You also don't seem to have responded to my point at all, which is that blacks have a higher rate of reported usage within the last week. This is before taking the self-reported nature into account. See the source originally cited, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf >Among black drug users, 54% reported using drugs at least monthly and 32% reported using them weekly. Such frequent drug use was less common among white drug users. Among white users, 39% reported using drugs monthly and 20% reported using them weekly. I'll let you do the math to determine how this affects usage rates.