16 ms·

After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

• a2tech 5y ago
  Its still doing the most important things--lining the pockets of some, criminalizing large groups of people that the government wants to marginalize, and acting as a cornerstone of restrictive laws that are imposed upon the citizenry.
  • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
    > large groups of people that the government wants to marginalize Who does the government want to marginalize? I thought the government (and the rest of the world, really) was all about equality and inclusion as of late.
    • rektide 5y ago
      > Who does the government want to marginalize? I thought the government (and the rest of the world, really) was all about equality and inclusion as of late. Only the moral & good parts of the government. There's plenty of politicians & forces out there whose campaign message & activities are rather the opposite.
      • bumby 5y ago
        I think the problem with this statement is that, if not read generously, it can be an easy way to demonize any opposition. “If you don’t agree with X govt policy intended to combat inequality, you are immoral.” It’s possible to agree with the moral intent but also disagree with the policy. (Not saying this was your frame of argument, just thought it an important distinction). Edit: downvotes are fine but please add to the discussion. Maybe you’ll change someone’s mind.
    • a2tech 5y ago
      To borrow the quote from another post on this thread (which is still very valid): "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." — John Ehrlichman, to Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971.
      • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
        I'm not trying to stir the pot when I ask this: How is a quote about how the Nixon administration having "black people as the enemy" around 1968-1971 still relevant in 2021 when the current administration's messaging is one of inclusion and equality?
        • csours 5y ago
          There are multiple jurisdictions in the United States. Many of those are still directly attacking inclusion and equality, for instance by tightening voting laws without also funding efforts for voting access. Additionally, many people do not agree with the current administration. Politics is not just about the big guy in charge, it's about how everyone approaches the matter at hand.
        • cdstyh 5y ago
          Watch this https://mobile.twitter.com/thehill/status/1405219989712424966 https://mobile.twitter.com/thehill/status/140521998971242496... Then read website until you get bored of example after example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27518459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27518459
        • vel0city 5y ago
          Its not like every time there's a new president every single person in the government is fired and new people are rehired. Its also not like every policy/law gets shredded and entirely new policies get created overnight. Having a new president is like a new captain giving orders on an incredibly massive ship. There's a ton of inertia going on, there's a lot of people below the captain that are still the people with the hands on the controls operating the boat. Plus, usually when you're in the middle of trying to steer the boat to port the captain gets replaced and starts commanding the boat turn to starboard. Coupled this with the idea that its not really just a single ship, its a fleet of 50+ ships each with that same concept of a ton of inertia at play and not really a strict chain of command between the captains of each ship and the admiral of the fleet (imperium in imperio).
    • banannaise 5y ago
      > I thought the government (and the rest of the world, really) was all about equality and inclusion as of late. They're certainly all about talking about it. They don't really take a lot of actions to back it up.
      • bun_at_work 5y ago
        > They don't really take a lot of actions to back it up. Is this why more groups have been added to the list of protected classes? Is this why our current administration is one of the most diverse to ever exist? I get the twitter outrage is fun, but when you look at data, our government has become more and more about equality and inclusion in meaningful ways. The US government isn't perfect, but it can't be perfect, there will always be room to grow. It does take time, but looking at data and trends shows equity ticking up over time. Lets have more nuanced views.
        • tetranomiga 5y ago
          Diversity of skin color is not meaningful change in the slightest if all the policies stay the same. They're just hiring different faces to say the same things.
          • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
            Are you trying to say there are existing racist policies in 2021? Can you list some examples?
            • slacktide 5y ago
              The existence of the Electoral College, which was specifically designed to give slaveholding states an advantage when selecting the President. The gerrymandering of electoral districts to maximize the concentration of white voting power.
              • jjeaff 5y ago
• pope_meat 5y ago
  Created a lot of jobs in the industry of arresting and detaining humans. Being number 1 per capita in prison population isn't a lean operation, a lot of people's lives depend on the system continuing. I think the solution is to rent bulldozers, armor them, and just level a bunch of them. Too many prison beds, too many laws, it's all gotten very dumb.
  • tyingq 5y ago
    It's pretty hard to get info on the industry as well. Jpay, for example, is a subsidiary of a private company, and does the "fund a prisoners commissary account" as well as "send a prisoner a email" type services. Here's their fees for money transfers for the Texas Prisoners: $ 0.00 - 9.99 $2.45 $ 10.00 - 19.99 $3.45 $ 20.00 - 49.99 $6.45 $ 50.00 - 99.99 $8.45 $ 100.00 - 199.99 $10.45 $ 200.00 - 300.00 $12.45 They also charge it as a cash advance, which can result in additional charges from your bank. Ouch.
  • 20after4 5y ago
    killdozer style?
    • pope_meat 5y ago
      Yes, and soon before all the heavy machinery has kill switches mandated in them. xD I suspect that weakness will be shored up as we internet of things every car truck and pogo stick.
      • kbenson 5y ago
        But all that's just what those machines are waiting for. Did we learn nothing from Maximum Overdrive?
  • ppeetteerr 5y ago
    And so many episodes of Brooklyn Nine-nine
    • 5y ago
• cdstyh 5y ago
  Giving poor Columbia farmers cancer by indiscriminately dumping herbicides directly on them. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/03/20/biden-pushes-colombia-restart-glyphosate-spraying-program https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/03/20/biden-pushes-co...
  • pseingatl 5y ago
    Colombia.
• vmception 5y ago
  Imagine a better interstate commerce use of power where the supply chain was regulated by the federal government
• ElViajero 5y ago
  > "The war on drugs was an absolute miscalculation of human behavior," said Kassandra Frederique, who heads the Drug Policy Alliance, a national group that advocates for total drug decriminalization. For me it would be incredibly interesting to know how much it was a miscalculation or actually it was very well calculated. The "War on Drugs" have failed to make USA safer, healthier or any other positive metric. But, it has provided many with an excuse to pass restrictive laws, to win elections, to gain contracts with the government. I am sure that many believed, even believe today in the "War on Drugs". But, it would be very interesting to know the reasoning to start it. And how much the people that started it failed to understand human behavior, or it is just that their goals had nothing to do fight drugs problems.
  • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
    > a national group that advocates for total drug decriminalization. Will this ever be achieved in the US in the next... 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?
    • sokoloff 5y ago
      I tend to expect a federal decriminalization of marijuana in the next 10 years. I doubt we'll see a decriminalization of crystal meth in the next 50 years.
      • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
        What drug would be next to target on the list of "good candidates for decriminalization" after marijuana?
        • sokoloff 5y ago
          I don't know enough to judge and I would hope that we'd look to the science, medicine, and what other countries have done with success to make that determination. Psilocybin is the first possible candidate that comes to my mind, but I'd rather have us use a sound framework of harm-minimization than to favor/disfavor any particular drug.
• BitwiseFool 5y ago
  This is one of those weird things about American Democracy where everyone I speak to thinks the Drug War was a terrible thing and should be stopped. And yet, our politicians never substantially do anything to change the status quo.
  • sjwalter 5y ago
    Are you kidding me? The "war" on drugs today is nothing like it was at all in the 90s. For the most obvious example, marijuana is legal to purchase for recreational use in dozens of states, with more coming.
    • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
      What do we need to do next that would have the biggest effect, decriminalize cocaine/crack cocaine?
      • dcolkitt 5y ago
        Legal and purity regulated heroin would have by far the biggest impact, because of the scourge of fentanyl deaths. If I had to choose between legal cannabis and legal heroin, I’d choose the latter on utilitarian grounds. (Although obviously I support both wholeheartedly.)
        • camjohnson26 5y ago
          Given how addictive heroin is how do people supporting decriminalization suggest dealing with hard core addicts that can’t afford the drug? Giving it away for free in a clinic, hospitalizing hardcore users, letting legal dealers take on the risks directly?
          • samatman 5y ago
            A one-sentence summary of my policy goal is "make sure all addicts get heroin, from a place where they have access to help in quitting if they can". So any dispensary would have addiction specialists on hand, anyone getting heroin would have a card and a database. "Casual" and light users would pay, a known hard-case addict with limited means would get it subsidized or free. The goal is primarily to kick the bottom out of the black market, with a close second being keeping addicts healthy and alive, where quitting heroin is the best case scenario.
• logicslave 5y ago
  what has fighting crime done for us? we still have crime right? well yes, but it would be much worse without it
• LordKano 5y ago
  It's helping law enforcement maintain high budgets. The drug war fuels the violence of the drug trade and that violence requires the police be well equipped to handle it.
  • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
    What's a realistic alternative? What's it going to take for the US to mimic a legality stance towards drugs like Portugal's overnight?
    • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
      A revolution. Our government hasn't listened to us for decades: https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem They're been no sign of that changing since I've been alive.
    • LordKano 5y ago
      We could decriminalize marijuana today and watch what happens. That would free up over 80% of the DEA's budget to go after meth and heroin.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > It's helping law enforcement maintain high budgets. And not just in the obvious, direct ways of pointing out drug crime and asking for funding. E.g., I recall studies of DARE’s impacts showing that it had no measurable impacts on drug use, drug abuse, or drug-related crime among students directly participating or communities, but did have a measurable positive impact on participating students attitudes toward law enforcement.
• pwned1 5y ago
  The war on drugs is the single government program that has created far more damage to individual rights than any other. In law school it seems like every case that whittles away the fourth amendment just a little bit more is a drug case. I'd say the income tax is in second place in terms of destruction of individual rights.
• ppeetteerr 5y ago
  All I got was this DARE t-shirt
• tetranomiga 5y ago
  > On Tuesday, two House Democrats introduced legislation that would decriminalize all drugs in the U.S., shifting the national response to a public health model. The measure appears to have zero chance of passage. If that isn't just the perfect description of politics in the US, I don't know what is. I don't know what your political ideology has to be to think the War on Drugs is a good thing, after all the money wasted, all the lives lost, all the people pointlessly locked up for things half the country can now do openly and legally. The most common-sense things don't even have a chance at passing because our government is barely hiding that they're all either corporate stooges or obstructionist trolls anymore.
  • vkou 5y ago
    > If that isn't just the perfect description of politics in the US Yes, but not in the way that you say. Political change happens step by tiny step. You have to hammer the same point for decades to get somewhere. You hammer it by winning elections, by having better candidates win your primaries, by getting the news media, large corporations, and celebrities to virtue signal, by rallies, by protests, by sabotaging the system from within. No single one of these things moves the needle on its own, but push on all of them, and your grandchildren may have a chance to live in a better world. And yes, anywhere between a third to half the country will dig their heels in, and fight you on it, every step on the way on it.
    • cmendel 5y ago
      The problem is that our system is broken. Wildly popular policies can't pass because of republican obstructionism in the senate. Worse, the senate is hugely anti-democratic. It's not 1/3-1/2 of the population; its the reps of 4/25. ""The 25 most populous states contain nearly 84 percent of the 50 states’ total population. So 16 percent of the country controls half of the seats in the United States Senate (and that’s not accounting for the fact that DC, Puerto Rico, and several other US territories have no representation at all in Congress).""[1] Source to [1]: https://www.vox.com/2021/1/6/22215728/senate-anti-democratic-one-number-raphael-warnock-jon-ossoff-georgia-runoffs https://www.vox.com/2021/1/6/22215728/senate-anti-democratic... I actually highly recommend reading the above. I found it insightful.
• president 5y ago
  For someone who hasn't followed closely, what exactly is meant by "War on Drugs" in the article? Is it a specific policy they are referring to or do they mean combatting illegal drugs in general? I think we can all agree that illicit drugs can cause damage to societies. Even the article mentions it in regards to the opioid crisis, which continues to decimate Americans across the nation. Maybe it would be wiser to call out the failure of the strategy and execution by the US government and not the original premise.
  • setpatchaddress 5y ago
    "War on Drugs" refers specifically to the series of laws and actions and attitudes that began with the Nixon administration, the publicly stated intent of which was to combat illegal drug use. The actual intent was to demonize the perceived political enemies of the Nixon administration. Despite that, this is still the core of America's drug policy today. > I think we can all agree that illicit drugs can cause damage to societies Can we? So what's the root cause of illicit drug use? We have one major suspect with correlation but not causation established: https://www.addictionhope.com/blog/child-abuse-substance-abuse/ https://www.addictionhope.com/blog/child-abuse-substance-abu... > Research shows almost two-thirds of all patients in treatment for substance abuse report physical, sexual or emotional abuse during childhood. “The sheer weight of the many reports over the years certainly implicates child abuse as a possible factor in drug abuse for many people,” said Dr. Cora Lee Wetherington, NIDA’s Women’s Health Coordinator. “But we lack hard data that clearly establish and describe the role of child ‘abuse in the subsequent development of drug abuse. Is child abuse indeed a cause of drug abuse, or is child abuse a marker for other unidentified factors?”
  • whydoineedthis 5y ago
    You will need to exit the internet if you want a civil conversation that goes beyond punishing buzz word narratives and could possibly lead to useful changes in policy. But to answer your question, by "war on drugs" they mean the heavy handed nature of police enforcement of drug related laws. Petty drug crimes become life ruining felonies and leave poor families struggling even more than they already were. There is some very legitimate police activity stopping major drug dealers though, and there are many criminals whom can't be convicted of the crime they committed because of lack of evidence, but can be nailed to the wall for possession of drugs. Overall, the landscape of how to treat drug offenders becomes very muddled.
• the_economist 5y ago
  Counterpoint: The war on drugs has been progressively ramped down since the late 90s. NYTimes wrote a long story about how during the feds quit using tactics such as convicted drug dealers to flip on their bosses, etc. We aren't putting as many drug dealers in jail and we aren't putting many drug users in jail. What you get is an epic rise in opioid deaths over the past 30 years and chaos on the streets of our cities. Given what LA/SF/Portland streets look like with this eased-back war on drugs, it is possible the war was doing a lot.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >Given what LA/SF/Portland streets look like with this eased-back war on drugs, it is possible the war was doing a lot. You don't need to run a war on drugs to enforce existing laws about petty property crime and laws that criminalize the most abrasive of homeless behavior.
  • setpatchaddress 5y ago
    you might google Fentanyl
  • gedy 5y ago
    When I was younger drugs (meth) ruined a lot of friends and some family. While I believe in personal responsibility, availability was a big factor and drug pushers are a thing. I don't mind if they were incarcerated to stop or slow the damage they caused/exacerbated
  • LorenPechtel 5y ago
    You realize the opioid deaths are because a certain drug maker encouraged docs to overprescribe? That left a lot of people hooked for no good reason. Now they've flipped and are underprescribing, leaving a lot of patients turning to the street for their pain control.
    • iammisc 5y ago
      Doctors are professionals. Part of the reason they're allowed to prescribe is that they have supposedly taken courses and proven themselves to be of such sound judgement and knowledge that we can trust them to gatekeep extremely technical poisons. If you're telling me they can be so easily swayed by corporate messaging, and have been this way for a decade or longer, then we should scrap the apparently worthless MD degree and just let any old fart practice medicine because most people excel at internalizing the corporate branding that is supposedly the driving force behind modern medicine. I mean that honestly. If the marketing dept of these companies are really running the shows and medical degrees count for nothing, then the sheer number of successfully treated patients shows that anyone who can listen to a pharma corp can prescribe drugs. We can still have degrees for surgery and other hard skills.
• Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  The simple slogan of "defund the police" in fact leads to vociferous disagreement among individual activists and organizations about what that means, i.e. whether simply refusing the police military hardware and funding levels, or ending the existence of police outright and replacing them with an unarmed, locally organized neighborhood patrol. "The war on drugs has been a failure and should end" seems like a similar can of worms. Should the state take the approach of decriminalizing drugs but still aiming to reduce their use by allowing addicts only recourse to medical treatment in special centers? Or should things take a libertarian path and allow citizens to put whatever they want into their own bodies whenever they want?
  • jkestner 5y ago
    Perhaps the point is to move the Overton Window, so that a compromise can settle to the left of empty gesture, for a change.
• fosk 5y ago
  Besides the controversial political agenda behind the "War on Drugs", I guess we all agree that drugs are obviously bad for society as a whole. But it's kinda hard to do a war on drugs without - you know - arresting the drug dealers on known corners. Looking at you San Francisco. Drugs enable misery, poverty, overdoses and homicides. Especially the ones that create physical addiction (opioids, meth, fentanyl, etc). But most importantly, they enable lower social economical classes into thinking that selling drugs is a viable and alternative way to level up in life (wealth), instead of allowing them to focus on real career paths. It's a false shortcut that distracts people from being able to focus on their real future. It also encourages illegal immigration. Why aren't the Feds arresting drug dealers on every corner in a large scale operation first and foremost? Perhaps the simplest thing to do in order to disrupt the supply.
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    > I guess we all agree that drugs are obviously bad for society as a whole That seems to require defining “drugs” very deliberately to only count substances and use cases such that by definition you’ve only included stuff that’s bad for society as a whole.
  • rjbwork 5y ago
    I think drugs are great for society as a whole. I think criminalizing a handful of addictive drugs so that there is no economically viable way to be an addict and live an even minimally productive life or keep from poisoning yourself is terrible for society as a whole.
  • soperj 5y ago
    >Perhaps the simplest thing to do in order to disrupt the supply. When you're removing supply, but not disrupting demand, a way will be found. The real answer is to legalize & sell it, no more drug dealers, remove the overdoses because it was cut with fentanyl, no longer fund gangs = less homicides
    • fosk 5y ago
      This is false. Arrest drug dealers day after day for a generation, and the demand will lower because new generations won't even know what drugs are, or when the effect of heroin is, therefore they won't chase it. Demand for a good (or drug in this case) it is not inevitable. It can be disrupted too, it's not a given. But the demand for any good cannot be disrupted without first and foremost removing the supply. So we must start disrupting the supply, which shows up every day at 6am on our street corners.
• alamortsubite 5y ago
  I feel like Ehrlichman admitting the war on drugs was just a pretext for marginalizing Blacks and progressives should have been the end of it. But no, and that's already 25 years ago: In a 1994 interview published in Harper's Magazine, Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman suggested racial animus was among the motives shaping the drug war. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] War or Black," Ehrlichman said. "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."
  • chrischen 5y ago
    I think the obvious answer often overlooked is that a lot of people are simply still totally fine marginalizing Blacks, Latinos, progressives, and other minorities.
    • duped 5y ago
      Not just "fine" with it, it's the current driving force behind the Republican Party.
      • l33t2328 5y ago
        I don’t think that’s true in the slightest.
        • Supermancho 5y ago
          You have to add the bottom 60% or "working poor" to make it true enough.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • csours 5y ago
• whydoineedthis 5y ago
  People say it failed without recognizing how bad the crack epidemic was, and is currently only a shadow of what it could be had it been left unchecked. Yes, there are still drug problems - but not to the common extent you saw in the 80's. I think the issue is that people hear the word "war" and think that only the cops and military are the sole soldiers. There is only so much they can be expected to capture without some massive invasion of citizen rights. The truth is that more must be done by the communities themselves. Whether you call it a "war", or by any other name, you will need more than just cops and TLA's to solve the problem. And yes, we should spend more on education as part of all of these efforts. The concerned citizens of this country have been asking for that balance to change for a large number of reasons. Unfortunately the status quo remains.
  • LorenPechtel 5y ago
    Note that crack itself was a result of the drug war. Crack is a way to get more use out of a given amount of cocaine.
    • pseingatl 5y ago
      It's also due to the fact that at least for a while, the DEA made ether unavailable. So the drug labs turned to benzene as a substitute. The problem is benzene is gasoline and no one is putting powder that smells like gasoline up their nose. The solution? Cook crack. The smell disappears when you boil the powder with baking soda. Had it not been for the DEA, crack never would have been an option.
  • tmountain 5y ago
    Drug epidemics follow a natural ebb and flow and tend to be generational. As younger family members take note of the effect that life ruining drugs like crack have on elder members of their families, they have a much lower propensity to experiment with those drugs. As communities collectively recognize the impact of drugs like crack, social outreach and grassroots efforts to educate and improve the situation are much more effective than the fear of whatever legal repercussions might come from outside. Crack literally "ran its course" and that's why the epidemic stopped. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/19/us/crack-s-legacy-a-special-report-a-drug-ran-its-course-then-hid-with-its-users.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/19/us/crack-s-legacy-a-speci...
• yoink32 5y ago
  love that the link is the text version
• hourislate 5y ago
  Just think of the the savings if they just removed Cannabis from the war and legalized it? I'm guessing a trillion $$ over the last few decades. Just think of how many peoples lives have been utterly destroyed by the system over low level Cannabis possession/use? Even now the Biden Administration and the Democrats in Congress are dragging their feet and not fulling an election promise to the American people by legalizing Cannabis. I predict it won't happen because of lobbying from some of the industries below and the 100's of millions given to to these same representatives over the years to keep the status quo. Winners 1.Police System/Unions 2.Prison System/Unions 3.Judicial System/Lawyers. 4. Politicians Losers 1. The American people/tax payer Disclaimer: I do not use Cannabis or ever have.
  • greedo 5y ago
    Just a side note about the "100's of millions" line. Our Congressional representatives are pliable for much much smaller sums. Like $10K...
  • pmoriarty 5y ago
    It's more than that. It's a moral panic. Drugs and crime are inexorably wedded in many people's minds, so to them drug users are criminals so moving towards legalizing drugs is being soft on crime, which is a non-starter for a lot of politicians who want to seem tough on crime. The media also loves to whip up a sensationalistic frenzy when they publish lurid drug stories... and the public, including many politicians, buy this.
• balozi 5y ago
  I see the failure of the War on Drugs and the resultant human toll as an indictment of the big government idea. Its an attempt to central micro-manage an issue that should be addressed at the state or even community level. The federal gov often involves itself in much more than it should.
  • atombum 5y ago
    Big government here meaning the intersection between Big Business, Big Lobby and Big "Government". The War on Drugs wouldn't have near the legs it does if it wasn't aggressively lobbied for by private prisons, alcohol distributors, and pharmaceutical companies.
  • pmoriarty 5y ago
    Local governments could get it just as wrong as federal government does.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  It would be suicidal to challenge marijuana, since it is going against the current mob mentality on HN and elsewhere, but I am going to do just that. In my personal experience: - I think Marijuana should be legalized but it needs to be made uncool to consume just like Tobacco. Currently, it is the opposite. Social media loves weed. - Marijuana destroys personal ambition, productivity and self-esteem. - Marijuana is addicting even though people say its not. It is much easier to quit than Tobacco, but denying that its not addicting is not true in my experience. - Marijuana is a nuisance on streets, apartments, etc. It has such a potent smell, it is impossible to get rid of. I would say it has 100x power of smell than perfumes, probably even more. You can smell Marijuana in your car if someone on the road is smoking it. - Lung damage, it's undeniable. - Marijuana is a gateway drug, I strongly believe this but open for changing my mind if there is data supporting otherwise. It's time we make Marijuana uncool. Sure, we should stop incarcerating people for possession but I strongly oppose the current Marijuana culture. It's toxic to the society. I welcome counterpoints and discussion, just being honest about how I see the Marijuana culture. I've been there and done that for 2 years straight in college. Roommate was a weed dealer.
  • whydoibother 5y ago
    You do realize you can vape flower/concentrate and eat edibles, right? >Marijuana is a gateway drug, I strongly believe this but open for changing my mind if there is data supporting otherwise. The burden of proof is on you to show this. What you strongly feel doesn't matter.
    • CodeWriter23 5y ago
      The "gateway drug" assertion isn't an "all or nothing" issue. There's nuance to it. Ask a bunch of drug addicts if they used weed before [heroin|coke|speed|lsd|<insert-drug-of-choice>|aota], most of them will say yes. At least the ones I've been hanging out with in NA for the past 25+ years. Does that mean, smoke weed and you'll automatically end up using other drugs? No.
      • whydoibother 5y ago
• lettergram 5y ago
  If you look at violent crime over the last 50 years it has steadily decreased. I think it’s reasonable to see a correlation. It’s possible decriminalizing could lead to a huge wave in crimes as people try to pay for their fix. That being said, I’m pro-liberty. I feel all drugs should be accessible
  • 3pt14159 5y ago
    All drugs? Carfentanil which has a lethal dose that's so small it's hard to notice or see? I understand legalizing somethings we don't necessarily even like to put up with, but if something is as lethal as a gun I'm pretty comfortable infringing a bit on some freedoms.
    • vidarh 5y ago
      A few drugs that are essentially largely used as alternatives to safer drugs could possibly reasonably remain illegal. The question to me books down to what addicts do if the drug remains illegal. Getting all drug users over onto a legal supply matters. Doesn't need to be easy - prescriptions etc. for the worst ones would be reasonable. But getting them onto a legal, regulated supply from providers that can nudge them towards treatment or safer alternatives is even more important for the highest risk drugs.
  • genericone 5y ago
    Just wondering, whats your take on the Opium Wars between Britain and China?
  • tetranomiga 5y ago
    > I think it’s reasonable to see a correlation. That's not reasonable at all. Forensic science and surveillance technology has made gigantic bounds in the past 50 years, as has almost every other aspect of crime fighting. We've busted mafias, dispersed organized crime syndicates (you know, the REAL bad guys) and made education more widespread than ever. It's gotten a lot harder to do serious IRL crime undetected (cyber crime is a whole other story). Giving a bunch of young latinos and african americans horrible mandatory minimums in lieu of addiction treatment has very arguably contributed to slowing down the decrease in violent crimes.
• nextstep 5y ago
  The War on Drugs is a powerful tool the US uses across the globe to pressure unfriendly nations and to keep tons of cash off the Pentagon’s official books. No reform of American drug policy will be possible as long as the CIA and other agencies actively benefits from drug trafficking.
• mathattack 5y ago
  I wonder if his sons struggle with addiction changed Biden’s views on the topic. —— "What we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam, not another limited war fought on the cheap," declared then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., in 1989. Biden, who chaired the influential Senate Judiciary Committee, later co-authored the controversial 1994 crime bill that helped fund a vast new complex of state and federal prisons, which remains the largest in the world.
• stephc_int13 5y ago
  There is, I think, a global misunderstanding about the nature of addiction. When pushed to the extreme, any addiction can be destructive. Food, sex, alcohol, tobacco or games are a few perfectly legal examples. Food addiction is especially interesting because it is at the same time widespread and denied. Also, the immediate effects and destructive power are less spectacular than crack. From my completely empirical observations, there is a simple trick to overcome any type of addiction: being happy. Being wealthy can help.
  • pmoriarty 5y ago
    I was seriously addicted to video games for years. Thank god I wasn't thrown in jail for it. That's an extra source of misery that neither me nor my family needed. Imagine if they threw fat people in jail for being addicted to food. This is basically the same thing they're doing to drug addicts. It's insane.
    • stephc_int13 5y ago
      Yes, there is a mix of denial and misunderstanding about the nature and weaknesses of the human mind. Controlling addictive behaviors requires the full cooperation of the subconscious part of ourselves, this is easier said than done, and I have not seen anyone succeeding while being miserable.
• splithalf 5y ago
  It’s odd to hear so much focus on America and American politics. We have more liberal drug laws than other non-western countries but the discussion always has a lot of American exceptionalism in reverse.
• errantspark 5y ago
  Can we talk for a second how absurdly good a user experience the text site is? It's 9kb over the wire, the whole thing is one request, it does everything it needs to do to get me the article and it happens instantly and without waste. The full site is 88 requests, takes 5 seconds to complete, transfers over 300x more data and brings me no additional value. The article doesn't even begin on the first screen, I have to scroll to start reading! The text version gives me the first 7 paragraphs without any user input.
  • swiley 5y ago
    The content is really only there to convince you to load the analytics framework.
  • alphabet9000 5y ago
    yes, it is really nice. personally, i hope "the web" will experience a renaissance over the next couple of years - with sites becoming as minimal as possible - like this text-only NPR page, where the only thing that matters is 'the content', without any distractions (social media buttons, "5 min. read", etc). All client-side SPA javascript libraries will be abandoned in favor of serving pure raw HTML (preferably with zero javascript and as little, if any, css as possible). my dream is to find people that have 'bloated' websites and to be hired to convert their pages into pages that look like they were made by hand in notepad.
• reggieband 5y ago
  I'm hazy on where I heard this justification, but I recall some argument that the rate of violent criminals who recreationally use drugs is very high. That is, if a violent criminal is caught walking down the street and is searched then there is a high probability that they will have some kind of illegal drug on them. The opposite isn't necessarily the case. That is, a drug user is not high probability to be a violent criminal. But by having available such a large net and by removing a large number of recreational drug users from the streets - the end result is a high proportion of violent offenders are also removed from the streets. So a combination of "stop and search" policing with "three strikes" policies has the effect of significantly reducing violent crime. However, there is a good argument to be made that the benefit is far outweighed by the damage such policies have caused.
  • callmeal 5y ago
    > "three strikes" policies has the effect of significantly reducing violent crime. That's not quite true. The three strikes policy had the effect of increasing violent crime. After all, if it's going to be their third strike, why would anyone go small? https://slate.com/business/2008/03/do-three-strikes-laws-make-criminals-more-violent.html https://slate.com/business/2008/03/do-three-strikes-laws-mak...
    • pseingatl 5y ago
      Or violently resist arrest if a three strike indictment is a possibility. No need to violently resist a shoplifting bust, but if it might carry a life sentence, the calculus is very different.
    • reggieband 5y ago
      That article and the effect they are suggesting aren't in contradiction to the initial justification. There are two different arguments. 1. Individuals are more likely to act more violently if they already have two strikes against them. This leads to a measurable statistical increase in the violence perpetrated by individuals who have two strikes against them in jurisdictions where three strikes policies exist compared to individuals who have two comparable crimes on their records in jurisdictions where there are no such policies. 2. The overall amount of violent crime in jurisdictions with three strike policies is lower than comparable jurisdictions where there are no such policies. I see no incompatibility with these premises. That is, both can be true simultaneously. In fact, the evidence provided in the article you linked seems to suggest just that.
• world_peace42 5y ago
  And yet, there are considerably more drugs here than in China. I think the failure of the war on drugs is more of an example of how ineffective the US government and political system is, rather than the separate idea of waging war on the drug trade.
• dalbasal 5y ago
  Often being for and against things creates a logic of its own, especially when things are contentious and doubly so when they're political. Military spending is popular. Civil aid aimed at similar causes is extremely unpopular, even when the sums are far smaller. I'm reminded of French classes, in my education. We learned French for four years. None of us spoke French at the end of these years. I brought up this fact to teachers, parents. When I grew up I spoke about it to friends, who were language teachers. The idea of giving up, canceling French classes, simply because it was failing to teach kids French is mostly seen as appalling. OTOH, a priori, I'm quite certain that "teaching French even though kids won't be able to speak French after four years' would not be a popular idea. "Learning a foreign language is important." I agree that the war on drugs is bad. But, I also use illicit drugs myself sometimes.. and it is considered normal in my social circle. That makes it easy for me. For someone that considers drug use immoral, or terrible in other ways... "I am against drug use" will usually translate into support for whatever anti-drug policy is going. Efficacy is just rhetoric fodder. We're just not that rational, even less so at the political level. "It works" or "it doesn't work" aren't anywhere near as important as "I am for/against..."
• sunstone 5y ago
  Well at least it has enriched the mafia so that's something.
• macspoofing 5y ago
  What the difference between the American "War on Drugs" and almost every other nation having similar anti-drug laws?
  • coderintherye 5y ago
    To start with, the fact that those other nation's drug laws in many cases were directly influenced into being by the United States. More importantly, the money for resources for enforcing those laws often comes from specifically earmarked U.S. funds. To put it another way, how many other countries in the world have active agents in the field in multiple other countries to interdict and disrupt drug supply chains?
• fredfoobar 5y ago
  It's actually a war on who makes money off of the drugs, opioid crisis comes to mind.
• joshuaheard 5y ago
  We lost the war on drugs. Addiction is not a criminal problem. It is a medical problem that should be dealt with by the health care sector, not the justice system.
• topspin 5y ago
  Some answers: The War On Drugs delivers a lucrative criminal justice system with great latitude including broad search and seizure privileges, an enormous regulatory appendage and high volumes of convictions which employ a vast number of people with professional incomes across numerous professions. The War On Drugs also provides excellent fodder for entertainment, creating subject matter for countless serials and movies. Criminal drug dramas have served well in supplanting the classic Western in contemporary entertainment.
• pseingatl 5y ago
  You cannot win a war against yourself.
• cletus 5y ago
  The War on Drugs was and is: - Virtual signaling ("tough on crime") of the worst kind as it capriciously incarcerated minorities to the tune of millions of man-years; - Fear-mongering for political power; - Suppression of minorities, hippies and the anti-war movement; and - Yet another form of voter suppression that has plagued the US for a long time. It's like we learned nothing form Prohibition. But the damage this has done goes well beyond the mass incarceration of minorities. It led to the enrichment of drug cartels and thanks to the ready supply of firearms in the US, the US armed the drug cartels and enabled the massive bloodshed that caused. It's quite literally drugs into the US, money and guns out of the US.
  • mynameishere 5y ago
    People keep repeating this, but when citizens see behavior that has serious negative consequences, they may--in perfectly good faith--want to suppress it through law. Not everything is a devious ploy. Also, the received wisdom that alcohol prohibition was a mistake is debatable. The many ills of alcoholism (health problems, violence, drunk driving) declined enough to possibly justify the experiment. But the experiment never changed human nature, of course. So it ended.
• NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  The war on the freedom to do drugs* It's no more a war on drugs than "gun control" is about controlling guns. "gun control" is actually citizen disarmament, because every law they pass exempts the police, military, and retired police. So its' not about guns, but who can have them. Both of these represent a propaganda technique known as 'framing': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences) When people think of it as "gun control" it presupposes the notion that guns are out of control when that isn't the issue. Same with "the war on drugs" drugs are an inanimate set of chemicals. It's not a war on drugs, but a war on personal freedom to do them. But when you frame it that way, it's obviously reprehensible. Especially in the "land of the free".
  • MauranKilom 5y ago
    > When people think of it as "gun control" it presupposes the notion that guns are out of control when that isn't the issue. To clarify: Are you saying guns are not out of control, or guns being out of control is not an issue? Also, if you were to substitute "nukes" or "ebola vials" for "guns" in your argument, would it still stand? If not, where do you see the difference? (To be clear, I'm not convinced that your argument applies equally to drugs and guns, this is why I'm extrapolating it here.)
    • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
      >Are you saying guns are not out of control, or guns being out of control is not an issue? Guns are inanimate objects and thus are not capable of being out of control. >Also, if you were to substitute "nukes" or "ebola vials" for "guns" in your argument, would it still stand? Yes, no, and yes. Ebola is a living thing that can act independently once released. Even a nuke either explodes or doesn't. The issue I'm trying to raise is not so much about guns, but the propaganda phrase used to promote citizen disarmament. The subject is accurately described as citizen disarmament, because of the exceptions included in every second amendment infringing law. They invariably exempt authority from the restrictions when the second amendment explicitly prohibits exactly this. If every law they passed an tried to pass applied also to the military, police, and retired police then it would actually be "gun regulation". But it never does, so it is is not firearms regulation, but citizen (and only citizen) disarmament.
• coderintherye 5y ago
  There's a fascinating interview with Bud Krogh, one of the Nixon administration who helped foster the drug war, back in 2000 where he reflects on what it looks like over time: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/interviews/krogh.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/intervi...
• hintymad 5y ago
  I was wondering if China and Singapore's wars on drugs have been effective. On one hand, Chinese online communities boast how drug-free their countries are. On the other hand, numerous researches show that harsh punishment does not necessarily reduce a crime. And of course, some also retorted that China had less drug problems only because there was no trustworthy stats. Nonetheless, it's astounding that 2% of American adults are on cocaine and more than 10% of American population misuse opioid prescription while Americans wrote more than 190 million opioid prescriptions.
• ttonkytonk 5y ago
  I remember growing up in South Carolina, being handcuffed in my residence for small amounts of marijuana, coming home to find the cops in my residence because my roommate dealt small amounts of marijuana (less than a pound). We lived in a trailer and mostly smoked pot, we didn't bother anybody. My guess is the questionable-to-doubtful justice of the War on Drugs is one of the main culprits of the issues we see with law enforcement. Personally I believe we would be better off if all drugs were legalized.
  • ttonkytonk 5y ago
    I remember hearing a doctor on the radio say that either all drugs should be legal or illegal - otherwise it's rank hypocrisy. They or someone also said with legality use goes up but crime goes down. I have a friend who told me a story about going to prison for trying to sell a few prescription pills. He was homeless at the time. Taking laws and justice seriously is the foundation of our Western tradition (see Plato and Socrates).