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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
by 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 agoPeople 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.