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> 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

> 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.
  - neither_color 5y ago
    >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 Not really, the flaw here is seeing each "blue state" as 100% blue and each "red state" as 100% red. A blue state can be simply a matter of a single blue city surrounded by red counties. The holdout states give a voice to the people in holdout counties whose lifestyles are at the whim of a super-majority in the city. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-electio... I prefer a government that does as little as possible and leave it up to each local population to do what's best for themselves. This thread, after all, is about the federal government abusing its people with the war on drugs. Changing the faction in charge and making things even easier for them doesn't solve that problem as that faction is then subject to corruption too.
    - cmendel 5y ago
      Whether government corruption is inevitable is frankly irrelevant to the broader question of political representation. I understand very well the (R) v (D) distinction is predominantly Rural v Urban. I believe in democracy and, as such, believe that people, not land should vote. Any system that is as so incredibly unrepresentative is unjust. If 1% of CA moved to Wyoming; Wyoming would be majority Californian. Them having equal representation in a co-equal political body is insanity. Wyoming has a population half the size of the city of San Jose. As an aside; I find the coding of land to be deeply misleading. https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/hpB3wkTVkPJsrJ6-qjtbUx-i2Jc=/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost/public/IFEZDTO7WVFSXNCM564TCFVOJI.png https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/hpB3wkTVkPJsrJ6-qjtbU...
    - vkou 5y ago
      > The holdout states give a voice to the people in holdout counties whose lifestyles are at the whim of a super-majority in the city. Every non-geographic minority group in this country somehow manages to deal with this problem. What makes rural conservatives require such a truly exceptional level of representation?
- tetranomiga 5y ago
  > Political change happens step by tiny step. No it doesn't, political change is simply impossible without massive financial backing, which is why policies that benefit the classes that don't have a lot of money have to jump through all those hoops you mentioned to eventually get the money behind it.
  - vkou 5y ago
    If political change is impossible without major financial backing, you should be able to tell me which billionaires sponsored the de-stigmatization, normalization, and legalization of homosexuality in the United States over the past 30-50 years.
    - crateless 5y ago
      > sponsored the de-stigmatization, normalization, and legalization of homosexuality in the United States over the past 30-50 years Well, I wonder how to quantify all the "normalization" of homosexuality in tv shows/movies over the last 20 years or so (guesstimate) for example. Surely tv shows like Six feet under and culminating in Modern Family had a role to play though I wouldn't know how to put a dollar figure to it.
ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
>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. Well it does sound like you're equating the War on Drugs to the War on Marijuana. There are other substances that most people really don't think should be accessible to everyone. Is it even possible to be a responsible Heroin user? Or even Meth?
- locallost 5y ago
  it probably isn't, but bans don't work either or are simply not effective compared to education. the only places where it works are basically dictatorships where people are obedient and don't make waves about anything. if you're a democracy and have "freedom" as a high priority it simply doesn't work to order people what they have a right to smoke, drink or inject. but what you can do is educate people and it's not even expensive compared to the ludicrous amounts of money spent on the war on drugs. countries like Portugal have demonstrated that quite well.
- monocasa 5y ago
  A better question might be is there more net harm to society from prohibition of those drugs or treating the issue as a medical one? Whether you like it or not the substances are available to everyone either way, as the better part of a century of the war on drugs has taught us.
- E-Reverance 5y ago
  >>There are other substances that most people really don't think should be accessible to everyone. Is it even possible to be a responsible Heroin user? Or even Meth? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF-RQLP530M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF-RQLP530M
- louthy 5y ago
  > Is it even possible to be a responsible Heroin user? Or even Meth? Of course it is. The issues that you equate with the image of meth and heroin users are not as a result of the drugs; they’re nearly always a symptom of the problem, often mental health related. Addiction is always a public health issue, no matter what form, whether it’s gambling, food, alcohol, drugs, …
cactus2093 5y ago
> I don't know what your political ideology has to be to think the War on Drugs is a good thing This is quite a straw man, not wanting to decriminalize all drugs is not the same as thinking the War on Drugs is a good thing. (And it's not like there is one particular policy that on its own constitutes the "War on Drugs", so this is a very vague statement anyway). It's also interesting to me that in many other arguments, the liberal/progressive side likes to (rightly) highlight other countries that have done a better job and present an example to follow. Not so with drug laws, because there are no such clear examples of success. There are countries with much less of a drug problem than the US which have much harsher drug penalties (like Japan and Singapore). Then there is the most popular example on the other extreme, Portugal, where it is not at all clear whether their decriminalization policy worked or not [0]. US society clearly seems to be moving in the direction of legalizing less harmful substances like weed and relaxing criminal penalties for small scale possession, which I believe are good things. But I don't see any reason to believe that decriminalizing everything would make things better. At the local level, US cities where opiates are effectively decriminalized like SF have horrible outcomes when it comes to drug abuse and overdoses. [0] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ondcp/ondcp-fact-sheets/drug-decriminalization-in-portugal-challenges-and-limitations https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ondcp/ondcp-fact-sheets...
- thatswrong0 5y ago
  Sending those pesky addicts to jail will certainly fix the issue.
  - username90 5y ago
    That is a strawman. Most countries keeps drugs illegal without sending addicts to jail. There is no reason you have to go with one or the other.
    - brokenmachine 5y ago
      >Most countries keeps drugs illegal without sending addicts to jail. This has to be a joke, right? Which countries?
handrous 5y ago
> 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. A lot of people continue see locking up addicts as keeping dangerous people off the streets, so basically a good thing. They tend not to think significant rates of rehabilitation are possible, and that attempting it would be a waste of money that would also lead to higher crime rates. > The most common-sense things don't even have a chance at passing These same people would find it laughable—literally—that you think decriminalizing all drugs is common sense. They would see this as plainly, and wildly, out-of-touch with reality. Typical pie-in-the-sky and/or ivory-tower liberalism. (these are not my views, to be clear)
- GoodJokes 5y ago
  The answer is your ideology needs to be conservative. Helps to be racist, classist, and ignorant too.
barbacoa 5y ago
I don't think the laws are the way they are because people don't have common sense. Think of all the lawyers, drug testing lab techs, court clerks, judges, and probation officers that would lose their jobs if the war on drugs was lifted. If you ever watched police shows like "cops" they seem to spend 2/3 of their time arresting people for drugs. It's hard solve home burglaries, it's easy to bust people with petty amounts of drugs in their cars.
- lr4444lr 5y ago
  This. Exactly this. People seem to forget that whole industries and careers in the tens if not hundreds of thousands would be overturned at the stroke of a pen, even if it is a good idea for lots of reasons. And the people with a vested stake in the status quo are going to fight like hell to keep it. Ending the war on drugs needs to be practically unwound in a manner that doesn't trigger a huge special interest outcry that will thwart any and all progress.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Just because those jobs exist is not a reason for them to continue existing. They can find work in fields such as helping addicts instead of oppressing them.
chrismcb 5y ago
I guess it is a good description of politics, in that didn't people have different ideas on how to solve our problems. I think drugs, for the most part, should be decriminalized. I think prohibition taught us that. In the other hand drugs can be bad, and people are what stuff abuse can do. This is one reason we try to criminalize it. So, it isn't exactly cut and dry.
smsm42 5y ago
Unfortunately, a lot of people oppose legalization of drugs. Even marijuana - a drug with zero addictive potential and being massively recreationally used for generations, including by prominent public figures, without any serious ill effects - only slowly gains ground to be allowed to be used medically (that's while much more dangerous substances are actively used medically and nobody has a problem with that). 36 states allow medical use of marijuana, and only 17 states decriminalize it completely. And the federal ban remains, with laughably false classification of marijuana as a substance with "high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use". What to say about other drugs, with less established patterns of safe use? I don't think it's "corporate stooges or obstructionist trolls" - people are just profoundly ignorant in the matter and are unwilling to change their minds about it, however large tall the most idiotic war of all wars takes. It'd be easy if it were just a bunch of corporate lobbyist trolls. Widespread ignorance is much harder to overcome.
- piva00 5y ago
  > I don't think it's "corporate stooges or obstructionist trolls" - people are just profoundly ignorant in the matter and are unwilling to change their minds about it People are kept profoundly ignorant in the matter. That's what I hate the most about the War on Drugs, people are kept from being educated on them, learning about the real dangers, instead it's just FUD and when young people discover they were lied to and experiment with drugs they have very little knowledge of the risks.

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.
- neither_color 5y ago
  >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 Not really, the flaw here is seeing each "blue state" as 100% blue and each "red state" as 100% red. A blue state can be simply a matter of a single blue city surrounded by red counties. The holdout states give a voice to the people in holdout counties whose lifestyles are at the whim of a super-majority in the city. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-electio... I prefer a government that does as little as possible and leave it up to each local population to do what's best for themselves. This thread, after all, is about the federal government abusing its people with the war on drugs. Changing the faction in charge and making things even easier for them doesn't solve that problem as that faction is then subject to corruption too.
  - cmendel 5y ago
    Whether government corruption is inevitable is frankly irrelevant to the broader question of political representation. I understand very well the (R) v (D) distinction is predominantly Rural v Urban. I believe in democracy and, as such, believe that people, not land should vote. Any system that is as so incredibly unrepresentative is unjust. If 1% of CA moved to Wyoming; Wyoming would be majority Californian. Them having equal representation in a co-equal political body is insanity. Wyoming has a population half the size of the city of San Jose. As an aside; I find the coding of land to be deeply misleading. https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/hpB3wkTVkPJsrJ6-qjtbUx-i2Jc=/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost/public/IFEZDTO7WVFSXNCM564TCFVOJI.png https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/hpB3wkTVkPJsrJ6-qjtbU...
  - vkou 5y ago
    > The holdout states give a voice to the people in holdout counties whose lifestyles are at the whim of a super-majority in the city. Every non-geographic minority group in this country somehow manages to deal with this problem. What makes rural conservatives require such a truly exceptional level of representation?
tetranomiga 5y ago
> Political change happens step by tiny step. No it doesn't, political change is simply impossible without massive financial backing, which is why policies that benefit the classes that don't have a lot of money have to jump through all those hoops you mentioned to eventually get the money behind it.
- vkou 5y ago
  If political change is impossible without major financial backing, you should be able to tell me which billionaires sponsored the de-stigmatization, normalization, and legalization of homosexuality in the United States over the past 30-50 years.
  - crateless 5y ago
    > sponsored the de-stigmatization, normalization, and legalization of homosexuality in the United States over the past 30-50 years Well, I wonder how to quantify all the "normalization" of homosexuality in tv shows/movies over the last 20 years or so (guesstimate) for example. Surely tv shows like Six feet under and culminating in Modern Family had a role to play though I wouldn't know how to put a dollar figure to it.

ApolloFortyNine 5y ago

>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. Well it does sound like you're equating the War on Drugs to the War on Marijuana. There are other substances that most people really don't think should be accessible to everyone. Is it even possible to be a responsible Heroin user? Or even Meth?

locallost 5y ago
it probably isn't, but bans don't work either or are simply not effective compared to education. the only places where it works are basically dictatorships where people are obedient and don't make waves about anything. if you're a democracy and have "freedom" as a high priority it simply doesn't work to order people what they have a right to smoke, drink or inject. but what you can do is educate people and it's not even expensive compared to the ludicrous amounts of money spent on the war on drugs. countries like Portugal have demonstrated that quite well.
monocasa 5y ago
A better question might be is there more net harm to society from prohibition of those drugs or treating the issue as a medical one? Whether you like it or not the substances are available to everyone either way, as the better part of a century of the war on drugs has taught us.
E-Reverance 5y ago
>>There are other substances that most people really don't think should be accessible to everyone. Is it even possible to be a responsible Heroin user? Or even Meth? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF-RQLP530M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF-RQLP530M
louthy 5y ago
> Is it even possible to be a responsible Heroin user? Or even Meth? Of course it is. The issues that you equate with the image of meth and heroin users are not as a result of the drugs; they’re nearly always a symptom of the problem, often mental health related. Addiction is always a public health issue, no matter what form, whether it’s gambling, food, alcohol, drugs, …

cactus2093 5y ago

> I don't know what your political ideology has to be to think the War on Drugs is a good thing This is quite a straw man, not wanting to decriminalize all drugs is not the same as thinking the War on Drugs is a good thing. (And it's not like there is one particular policy that on its own constitutes the "War on Drugs", so this is a very vague statement anyway). It's also interesting to me that in many other arguments, the liberal/progressive side likes to (rightly) highlight other countries that have done a better job and present an example to follow. Not so with drug laws, because there are no such clear examples of success. There are countries with much less of a drug problem than the US which have much harsher drug penalties (like Japan and Singapore). Then there is the most popular example on the other extreme, Portugal, where it is not at all clear whether their decriminalization policy worked or not [0]. US society clearly seems to be moving in the direction of legalizing less harmful substances like weed and relaxing criminal penalties for small scale possession, which I believe are good things. But I don't see any reason to believe that decriminalizing everything would make things better. At the local level, US cities where opiates are effectively decriminalized like SF have horrible outcomes when it comes to drug abuse and overdoses. [0] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ondcp/ondcp-fact-sheets/drug-decriminalization-in-portugal-challenges-and-limitations https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ondcp/ondcp-fact-sheets...

thatswrong0 5y ago
Sending those pesky addicts to jail will certainly fix the issue.
- username90 5y ago
  That is a strawman. Most countries keeps drugs illegal without sending addicts to jail. There is no reason you have to go with one or the other.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    >Most countries keeps drugs illegal without sending addicts to jail. This has to be a joke, right? Which countries?

handrous 5y ago

> 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. A lot of people continue see locking up addicts as keeping dangerous people off the streets, so basically a good thing. They tend not to think significant rates of rehabilitation are possible, and that attempting it would be a waste of money that would also lead to higher crime rates. > The most common-sense things don't even have a chance at passing These same people would find it laughable—literally—that you think decriminalizing all drugs is common sense. They would see this as plainly, and wildly, out-of-touch with reality. Typical pie-in-the-sky and/or ivory-tower liberalism. (these are not my views, to be clear)

GoodJokes 5y ago
The answer is your ideology needs to be conservative. Helps to be racist, classist, and ignorant too.

barbacoa 5y ago

I don't think the laws are the way they are because people don't have common sense. Think of all the lawyers, drug testing lab techs, court clerks, judges, and probation officers that would lose their jobs if the war on drugs was lifted. If you ever watched police shows like "cops" they seem to spend 2/3 of their time arresting people for drugs. It's hard solve home burglaries, it's easy to bust people with petty amounts of drugs in their cars.

lr4444lr 5y ago
This. Exactly this. People seem to forget that whole industries and careers in the tens if not hundreds of thousands would be overturned at the stroke of a pen, even if it is a good idea for lots of reasons. And the people with a vested stake in the status quo are going to fight like hell to keep it. Ending the war on drugs needs to be practically unwound in a manner that doesn't trigger a huge special interest outcry that will thwart any and all progress.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Just because those jobs exist is not a reason for them to continue existing. They can find work in fields such as helping addicts instead of oppressing them.

chrismcb 5y ago

I guess it is a good description of politics, in that didn't people have different ideas on how to solve our problems. I think drugs, for the most part, should be decriminalized. I think prohibition taught us that. In the other hand drugs can be bad, and people are what stuff abuse can do. This is one reason we try to criminalize it. So, it isn't exactly cut and dry.

smsm42 5y ago

Unfortunately, a lot of people oppose legalization of drugs. Even marijuana - a drug with zero addictive potential and being massively recreationally used for generations, including by prominent public figures, without any serious ill effects - only slowly gains ground to be allowed to be used medically (that's while much more dangerous substances are actively used medically and nobody has a problem with that). 36 states allow medical use of marijuana, and only 17 states decriminalize it completely. And the federal ban remains, with laughably false classification of marijuana as a substance with "high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use". What to say about other drugs, with less established patterns of safe use? I don't think it's "corporate stooges or obstructionist trolls" - people are just profoundly ignorant in the matter and are unwilling to change their minds about it, however large tall the most idiotic war of all wars takes. It'd be easy if it were just a bunch of corporate lobbyist trolls. Widespread ignorance is much harder to overcome.

piva00 5y ago
> I don't think it's "corporate stooges or obstructionist trolls" - people are just profoundly ignorant in the matter and are unwilling to change their minds about it People are kept profoundly ignorant in the matter. That's what I hate the most about the War on Drugs, people are kept from being educated on them, learning about the real dangers, instead it's just FUD and when young people discover they were lied to and experiment with drugs they have very little knowledge of the risks.