4 ms·

The War on Drugs is the mechanism through which an enormous amount of the bad laws and precedents have been created and permitted. Add Mandatory Minimums and T

The War on Drugs is the mechanism through which an enormous amount of the bad laws and precedents have been created and permitted. Add Mandatory Minimums and Three-Strike Laws to your list of reasons to hate it.

nobody9999 6y ago
>The War on Drugs is the mechanism through which an enormous amount of the bad laws and precedents have been created and permitted. >Add Mandatory Minimums and Three-Strike Laws to your list of reasons to hate it. But don't forget the economic impact either: 1. We spend Billions on "interdiction" and "enforcement", even though the vast majority of folks who do use drugs that are currently illegal don't have a dependency problem, and treatment on demand for the small number that do would be significantly less expensive; 2. Putting someone in prison costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, and that person isn't contributing to the local economy where they lived, a double negative impact on the economy; 3. The stigma of a felony conviction usually makes most better paying jobs unavailable to folks convicted, further reducing economic output; 4. Building ever larger prisons and hiring more and more prison guards, administrators, etc. takes money away from other, more productive endeavors, often limiting economic growth due to lack of infrastructure, better quality of education and a host of other factors.
- labster 6y ago
  The goal isn’t prevention or increasing economic output, it’s to punish people for breaking social norms. And that goes triple for people of color. It promotes the power of the powerful, who can always make an exception for their friends while claiming with certitude that all other addicts are morally deficient. So people can make arguments all day long that the War on Drugs is expensive and ineffective and unwinnable, but some people aren’t going to care, because it’s a long-running culture war that empowers the powerful.

nobody9999 6y ago

>The War on Drugs is the mechanism through which an enormous amount of the bad laws and precedents have been created and permitted. >Add Mandatory Minimums and Three-Strike Laws to your list of reasons to hate it. But don't forget the economic impact either: 1. We spend Billions on "interdiction" and "enforcement", even though the vast majority of folks who do use drugs that are currently illegal don't have a dependency problem, and treatment on demand for the small number that do would be significantly less expensive; 2. Putting someone in prison costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, and that person isn't contributing to the local economy where they lived, a double negative impact on the economy; 3. The stigma of a felony conviction usually makes most better paying jobs unavailable to folks convicted, further reducing economic output; 4. Building ever larger prisons and hiring more and more prison guards, administrators, etc. takes money away from other, more productive endeavors, often limiting economic growth due to lack of infrastructure, better quality of education and a host of other factors.

labster 6y ago
The goal isn’t prevention or increasing economic output, it’s to punish people for breaking social norms. And that goes triple for people of color. It promotes the power of the powerful, who can always make an exception for their friends while claiming with certitude that all other addicts are morally deficient. So people can make arguments all day long that the War on Drugs is expensive and ineffective and unwinnable, but some people aren’t going to care, because it’s a long-running culture war that empowers the powerful.