3 ms·
"...illegalization doesn't meet its purpose (making drugs difficult to get)..." This is a common assumption about the purpose of drug prohibition, but historic
by betterunix2 8y ago
"...illegalization doesn't meet its purpose (making drugs difficult to get)..."
This is a common assumption about the purpose of drug prohibition, but historically things are more complicated. Racism played a much bigger role in drug prohibition and the war on drugs than genuine concerns about public health. The basic concept is that some non-white group is corrupting white youth/white women with drugs; therefore, to protect white people, the police are empowered to imprison/kill those scary drug peddlers. On some level it was about making drugs harder to get, but the assumption was that white people have no interest in drugs until some non-white person pushes it on them. The assumption was always that the impact of drug prohibition would be mostly concentrated on non-white populations.
- antt 8y agoThis does not explain the situation in Europe, South America or Asia, all of which have (or had) laws similar to the US for drugs.
- mywittyname 8y agoTo my knowledge, these are all US-imposed policies.
- kowdermeister 8y agoYou are right and it needs to stop.
- mirimir 8y agoYou don't want to piss off the US.
- musik 8y agoall US-imposed policies. In what sense? For examples China under Mao, 'cured' the opium problem using extreme repressions [1]. Have you got any evidence that Singapore or Duterte's repression was requested by the US? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_opium_in_China#Under_Mao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_opium_in_China#Unde...
- severine 8y agoAporophobia complements/substitutes racism when convenient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporophobia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporophobia
- munchhausen 8y agoWhat?? Drug laws vary wildly in the regions you mentioned. Just about the only thing that they have in common is that drugs are illegal. And it's not just a question of laws, either. Laws are one thing, and policing is another. There are countries which don't really enforce the law for personal use amounts. The US has draconian laws, and punitive policing. There's your problem. It turns out that the worse you treat your criminals, the worse your crime problem gets.
- Cactus2018 8y ago"...but historically things are more complicated. Racism played a much bigger role in drug prohibition...." Here is the quote from John Ehrlichman, counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ > At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”