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I’ve never been able to understand how the anti-weed interests have been able to rationalize the astronomical costs of enforcement and punishment for so long. E

by egwynn 9y ago

I’ve never been able to understand how the anti-weed interests have been able to rationalize the astronomical costs of enforcement and punishment for so long. Even if I went out on a limb and said, “well, it’d suck if TONS of people smoked TONS of pot ALL of the time”, then I’d still be skeptical about whether that’s a problem worth spending billions of dollars (and locking up millions of people) to address. Put another way: am I missing some sane way to do a cost-benefit-analysis for cannabis policy that winds up showing costs (or negative externalities) that are big enough to conclude that criminalization is the best answer?

throwaway93745 9y ago
> am I missing some sane way to do a cost-benefit-analysis for cannabis policy that winds up showing costs (or negative externalities) that are big enough to conclude that criminalization is the best answer? Yes, you are missing one thing: you classify "locking up millions of people" as a cost. For those who created and are perpetuating this practice, it is considered to be a benefit, not a cost. Consider private prisons, for instance: they would go bankrupt without such policies. Consider also that it is overwhelmingly black people, or hispanics, who go to jail on minor pot-related charges. A fundamental purpose of these policies is to provide the ability to lock up millions of colored people. Without this policy, the legal persecution of minorities would become more difficult. The criminalization of pot is fundamentally about institutional racism. Yes it's expensive for the taxpayers, but the racists in power consider the price tag to be worth it.
- tacoman987 9y ago
  I'm going to get downvoted to hell, but I love that we both used throwaway accounts to respond similarly at the same time.
  - ozzmotik 9y ago
    well i can't help but upvote said arguments because there's a lot of truth to them tbh. even if racism isn't inherently part of the system, it's still widely present in those that enact the rules of it!
- DanBC 9y ago
  > Without this policy, the legal persecution of minorities would become more difficult. I dunno, the traffic tickets that pay the bills for some counties seems like a good fit. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm > Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay. > This edition of Crossing Continents goes out and about in St Louis County to meet the people who say they are victims of a system which sees arrest warrants issued for relatively minor misdemeanours. Many of the victims are poor and black. The programme also takes us into the courts, and out onto the freeways with some of the County's police, who say they are upholding the law and promoting road safety. > The US government is not so sure. One of the towns in question is Ferguson where riots erupted after a white police officer shot a young black man dead last summer. In a recent report on the riots, the Department of Justice concluded that the Ferguson police had been stopping people for no good reason. It said they were putting revenue before public safety. > Claire Bolderson investigates how widespread the practice is and considers the impact on relations between citizens and the authorities that govern them.
- orangecat 9y ago
  The criminalization of pot is fundamentally about institutional racism. Women are consistently less supportive of legalization than men (e.g. http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/08/more-men-than-women-support-marijuana-legalization/ http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/08/more-men-than-women-suppor...). I've never heard claims suggesting that women are more racist than men, but this is consistent with women being more receptive to "for the children" arguments.
tacoman987 9y ago
Racism can be used to justify a lot of senseless, expensive actions...
Freak_NL 9y ago
The ban on the recreational use of marijuana isn't based on a cost/benefit analysis. It's just something that remains law, because trying to repeal it is not politically beneficial (yet), and potentially career-limiting for a politician. I suspect that the sunk-cost fallacy (or similar flaws in human reasoning) plays a role as well. Decriminalizing something after it has been highly illegal for decades means coming to terms with the fact that that policy was wrong and a waste of tax payers money — i.e., if it wasn't, why repeal those laws? That's not something policy makers like to do (consciously or otherwise), because of a fear of how it will reflect on them.
rayiner 9y ago
The "gateway drug" myth.
pmoriarty 9y ago
"I’d still be skeptical about whether that’s a problem worth spending billions of dollars (and locking up millions of people) to address." Many people are deathly afraid of illegal drugs, including marijuana. It may seem to some people today that marijuana is "obviously harmless" or much less harmful than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, but that view has only relatively recently become at all widespread. Remember fear-mongering films like Reefer Madness, government anti-drug propaganda ("Just Say No" campaign, "DARE", etc), media sensationalism, politicians equating drug use with crime, and so on -- these things really got people in to an anti-drug frenzy, and marijuana was just one of many drugs in the firing line. Such moral panic is far from over. It's still going strong against the boogyman drugs of the day: meth and heroin (or the so-called "opiod epidemic"). If you get riled up about the dangers of those drugs, you can perhaps understand how some people used to feel (and still do) about marijuana (and about alcohol, for that matter, which was also prohibited at one point before becoming legal).
- thatcat 9y ago
  >deathly afraid The difference between cannabis and every other drug is that there are 0 reported deaths, making the arguments related to physical harm far more questionable than those that appear in the current moral panic over frequent opioid deaths which are obviously harmful.
aphextron 9y ago
>I’ve never been able to understand how the anti-weed interests have been able to rationalize the astronomical costs of enforcement and punishment for so long. Even if I went out on a limb and said, “well, it’d suck if TONS of people smoked TONS of pot ALL of the time”, then I’d still be skeptical about whether that’s a problem worth spending billions of dollars (and locking up millions of people) to address. It's entirely a generational issue in the US. People were fed decades of paranoid nonsense about marijuana from the DEA and other federal agencies, and as a result it was seen as a "dangerous narcotic" like heroin or meth. People who grew up actually using it and knowing people who use it, however, saw through that. And those people are now in power and voting.

by egwynn 9y ago

throwaway93745 9y ago

> am I missing some sane way to do a cost-benefit-analysis for cannabis policy that winds up showing costs (or negative externalities) that are big enough to conclude that criminalization is the best answer? Yes, you are missing one thing: you classify "locking up millions of people" as a cost. For those who created and are perpetuating this practice, it is considered to be a benefit, not a cost. Consider private prisons, for instance: they would go bankrupt without such policies. Consider also that it is overwhelmingly black people, or hispanics, who go to jail on minor pot-related charges. A fundamental purpose of these policies is to provide the ability to lock up millions of colored people. Without this policy, the legal persecution of minorities would become more difficult. The criminalization of pot is fundamentally about institutional racism. Yes it's expensive for the taxpayers, but the racists in power consider the price tag to be worth it.

tacoman987 9y ago
I'm going to get downvoted to hell, but I love that we both used throwaway accounts to respond similarly at the same time.
- ozzmotik 9y ago
  well i can't help but upvote said arguments because there's a lot of truth to them tbh. even if racism isn't inherently part of the system, it's still widely present in those that enact the rules of it!
DanBC 9y ago
> Without this policy, the legal persecution of minorities would become more difficult. I dunno, the traffic tickets that pay the bills for some counties seems like a good fit. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm > Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay. > This edition of Crossing Continents goes out and about in St Louis County to meet the people who say they are victims of a system which sees arrest warrants issued for relatively minor misdemeanours. Many of the victims are poor and black. The programme also takes us into the courts, and out onto the freeways with some of the County's police, who say they are upholding the law and promoting road safety. > The US government is not so sure. One of the towns in question is Ferguson where riots erupted after a white police officer shot a young black man dead last summer. In a recent report on the riots, the Department of Justice concluded that the Ferguson police had been stopping people for no good reason. It said they were putting revenue before public safety. > Claire Bolderson investigates how widespread the practice is and considers the impact on relations between citizens and the authorities that govern them.
orangecat 9y ago
The criminalization of pot is fundamentally about institutional racism. Women are consistently less supportive of legalization than men (e.g. http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/08/more-men-than-women-support-marijuana-legalization/ http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/08/more-men-than-women-suppor...). I've never heard claims suggesting that women are more racist than men, but this is consistent with women being more receptive to "for the children" arguments.

tacoman987 9y ago

Racism can be used to justify a lot of senseless, expensive actions...

Freak_NL 9y ago

The ban on the recreational use of marijuana isn't based on a cost/benefit analysis. It's just something that remains law, because trying to repeal it is not politically beneficial (yet), and potentially career-limiting for a politician. I suspect that the sunk-cost fallacy (or similar flaws in human reasoning) plays a role as well. Decriminalizing something after it has been highly illegal for decades means coming to terms with the fact that that policy was wrong and a waste of tax payers money — i.e., if it wasn't, why repeal those laws? That's not something policy makers like to do (consciously or otherwise), because of a fear of how it will reflect on them.

rayiner 9y ago

The "gateway drug" myth.

pmoriarty 9y ago

"I’d still be skeptical about whether that’s a problem worth spending billions of dollars (and locking up millions of people) to address." Many people are deathly afraid of illegal drugs, including marijuana. It may seem to some people today that marijuana is "obviously harmless" or much less harmful than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, but that view has only relatively recently become at all widespread. Remember fear-mongering films like Reefer Madness, government anti-drug propaganda ("Just Say No" campaign, "DARE", etc), media sensationalism, politicians equating drug use with crime, and so on -- these things really got people in to an anti-drug frenzy, and marijuana was just one of many drugs in the firing line. Such moral panic is far from over. It's still going strong against the boogyman drugs of the day: meth and heroin (or the so-called "opiod epidemic"). If you get riled up about the dangers of those drugs, you can perhaps understand how some people used to feel (and still do) about marijuana (and about alcohol, for that matter, which was also prohibited at one point before becoming legal).

thatcat 9y ago
>deathly afraid The difference between cannabis and every other drug is that there are 0 reported deaths, making the arguments related to physical harm far more questionable than those that appear in the current moral panic over frequent opioid deaths which are obviously harmful.

aphextron 9y ago

>I’ve never been able to understand how the anti-weed interests have been able to rationalize the astronomical costs of enforcement and punishment for so long. Even if I went out on a limb and said, “well, it’d suck if TONS of people smoked TONS of pot ALL of the time”, then I’d still be skeptical about whether that’s a problem worth spending billions of dollars (and locking up millions of people) to address. It's entirely a generational issue in the US. People were fed decades of paranoid nonsense about marijuana from the DEA and other federal agencies, and as a result it was seen as a "dangerous narcotic" like heroin or meth. People who grew up actually using it and knowing people who use it, however, saw through that. And those people are now in power and voting.