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There's all this discussion of these issues, which relate to racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc. They seem complicated and nuanced and peopl

• mellavora 11y ago
  Seconded.
• a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
  The drug war is a direct consequence of the Warren Court reforms of the 1960s. Equal Protection and Disparate Impact made illegal many local laws and policing methods that had worked to maintain order. Prosecutors needed new tools to get criminals behind bars, hence the war on drugs.
  • monochromatic 11y ago
    I don't think I've heard this theory before. Can you flesh it out a little bit please?
    • fluidcruft 11y ago
      I found this via Google (which isn't much): https://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/the-war-on-drugs/ https://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/the-war-on-drugs/ When the author was asked in the comments to expound on the thesis he just provided a link to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Court#Due_process_and_rights_of_defendants_.281963.E2.80.9366.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Court#Due_process_and_r... I think the crux is in the last paragraph of that section, although the link to the War on Drugs is not made explicit: > Conservatives angrily denounced the "handcuffing of the police." Violent crime and homicide rates shot up nationwide in the following years; in New York City, for example, after steady to declining trends until the early 1960s, the homicide rate doubled in the period from 1964 to 1974 from just under 5 per 100,000 at the beginning of that period to just under 10 per 100,000 in 1974. Controversy exists about the cause, with conservatives blaming the Court decisions, and liberals pointing to the demographic boom and increased urbanization and income inequality characteristic of that era. After 1992 the homicide rates fell sharply. I think it's entirely reasonable that the War on Drugs began as a reaction to rising crime rates. My two additional bits: I've often heard that the US is a little exceptional in that it approaches the problem of "police doing bad things" by throwing "tainted" evidence out and mostly not holding the police accountable for their actions, whereas other countries allow the "tainted" evidence to stand but then allow some sort of proceeding against the police to address the bad behavior. It seems from my limited understanding that the US approach stands on the Warren Court. It's interesting that both aspects of the US approach (War on Drugs, shielding the police from liability) are under fire. I wonder if these things are as controversial in other Western countries -- if not maybe the Warren Court really does deserve some scrutiny. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the Warren Court caused the police protectionism, rather that it tacitly allowed it to persist with frameworks that mostly provide indirect corrective feedback to police misbehavior.
    • darkroasted 11y ago
      It's not just the Warren Court, the other big problem is witness intimidation and the "don't snitch" ethic makes it very hard to convict people for murder, so drug cases are used as a proxy. From "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America": ----------- This was how Coughlin did his job on many a night. Coughlin couldn’t do much about all the shooters in Southeast who got away with it. But he could enforce drug laws, gang injunctions, and parole and probation terms relatively easily just by driving around and making “good obs”— good observations, cop lingo for catching, at a glance, a bulge under a shirt, a furtive motion of hands. A chase might ensue, and sometimes ended with the cops shutting down whole neighborhoods as the LAPD “airship,” or helicopter, thumped overhead. Coughlin took extra risks to get guns— this was the gold standard. Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault. This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result. But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant— or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law. Leovy, Jill (2015-01-27). Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (pp. 140-141). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
      • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        An old story - the gangsters of Chicago were eventually caught on tax evasion. There's some real value to this practice - after all, what ethical problem is there in arresting someone for one crime vs another, if they are guilty of both?
  • Zigurd 11y ago
    "Maintain order?" After the violence and racism, a big problem with police is the crappy solution rates to violent and serious property crimes. The Drug War just masks that lack of effectiveness.
    • mineshaftgap 11y ago
      Is it your contention that the black cops in Baltimore are racist against black people?
      • millermp12 11y ago
        That's where structural racism comes in, i.e. there is no shortcoming, no defect, no flaw in the black community (i.e. that Orwellian term People of Color to describe a pretty much monochromatic phenomenon) that can't be attributed to whites/racism. Get with the program, please.
      • CPLX 11y ago
        Yes. Is your contention that the obvious irony of that situation renders it impossible?
  • panglott 11y ago
    If the problem is racism and brutality in law enforcement, I don't think the right response would be "it was better before the 1960s". Law enforcement was racist before the 1960s because the law was explicitly racist then.
• Bostonian 11y ago
  Legalize which drugs? Only marijuana, or also crack, heroin, or LSD? If a certain drug causes brain damage and makes its users invalids, who will support them? I think a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done for each drug.
  • CPLX 11y ago
    Other things that make people brain-dead and create invalids include snowboarding and being a pedestrian. Ending the drug war is actually in fact as simple as it sounds.
    • pyre 11y ago
      If only. The War on Drugs is a jobs program. What will all those newly out of work people do? What will all of those local police departments do without the 'easy' money from the government? (I realize that some of them don't need the extra funding and just use it to buy 'toys,' but I'm sure there are other to count on it in their budget) I'm not saying that it shouldn't end. I'm saying that it is not "as simple as it sounds" and if you try and treat it that way there will be fallout to deal with.
      • atwebb 11y ago
        >What will all those newly out of work people do? Making drugs? Selling drugs? Work in treatment? Work in the new recreational environments setup to take drugs? Increase enforcement of public intox/driving issues? Police elsewhere and other issues?
        • pyre 11y ago
          How do you make that transition though? You don't just fire a bunch of people, cast them to the wind with some sort of hand-wavy explanation about how the "invisible hand" will sort everything out in magical fashion. If you just cut all of those people loose, then you will have to deal with the fallout of a bunch of angry unemployed people, and their friends/family/etc. In addition to <opposing political party> using it as a "you don't love America" field day.
• eevilspock 11y ago
  I agree that we should end the drug war but you are oversimplifying.
  • CPLX 11y ago
    Not really. Much like "end apartheid" or "US out of Vietnam" we are occasionally presented with government policies so clearly unethical or ineffective that they defy oversimplification. The drug war is one such obvious failure.
    • happyscrappy 11y ago
      It is ending. Legalization of marijuana is the start.
      • justaman 11y ago
        Legalizing marijuana is _very_ different from changing the policy on crack-cocaine. Crack is one of the primary issues in lower income/black communities. A good first step? Absolutely, but it will be another generation before any policy is passed that results in the taxation of other narcotics. The US needs to sell guns to someone...
        • happyscrappy 11y ago
          Right, crack is illegal so they can sell guns. Are you for real?
    • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      It is still nuanced in how you do it. For example, what about age limits for drugs? What about adults being banned from getting drugs (say an 18 year old getting alcohol). What about pharmaceuticals being sold without a prescription. What about ensuring safety standards in what was being sold (say ensuring that the crack in the store wasn't cut with anything horrible). Edit: That said, I do think the argument that even with all this, the argument that legalizing everything now and worrying about the details later is better than keeping it illegal while we work out details does have merit. I'm not convinced it is right, but I'm not convinced it is wrong either.
• lars 11y ago
  The drug war is part of it. But the big thing to fix is income inequality. High income inequality is correlated with higher homicide rate, higher robbery rate, lower civic participation, higher mortality, lower social cohesion and lower well-being in children. So many social problems are strongly predicted by this variable, yet many refuse to consider inequality to be a problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality#Effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality#Effects
  • ctdonath 11y ago
    Many consider inequality a symptom/consequence of one's own chosen behavior, not a cause. (ETA "chosen behavior" clause.)
    • moomin 11y ago
      Indeed, the City of Ferguson's finances relied on the regular fining of its poorest citizens. Basically backdoor taxation.
      • millermp12 11y ago
        Not unlike the lottery, which the poor regularly spent their meager pittance on. Taxation of the poor as Lincoln noted. So can be ban lotteries (and casinos, too) unless participants demonstrate they can afford the losses?
        • alchemism 11y ago
          Since you mention it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotteries-americas-70-billion-shame/392870/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotterie...
        • mkr-hn 11y ago
          Lotteries are a symptom of the problem of poor financial education. Lottery-funded scholarships are the only way a lot of kids get to college. Ban the lottery, and their parents will blow it on something else. That something else will probably not allocate most of its funding to scholarships. edit: If this country were rational enough for the solutions proposed in replies, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
• ams6110 11y ago
  I'll agree that the drug war is out of control and as a "cure" it's worse than the disease. But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty. The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail. By blaming the war on drugs we are also completely ignoring the other elephant in the room, and that is the massive breakdown in family structure that has occurred amongst the impoverished. This is particularly the case for African-Americans but I don't claim that it's a racial thing, directly. It's part of the cycle of poverty. In DC, which is a large focus of the original piece, over half of babies are born out of wedlock. For African Americans it's close to 70%. With no parents working, and fathers typically absent, children do not learn the behaviors and responsibilities that are required to be a productive and self-supporting member of society. They then perpetuate this in subsequent generations. Our "war on poverty" has, like the war on drugs, been a failure. The poverty rate in 1965 was about 15%, same as today, with trillions of dollars spent. The war on drugs funds a massive effort to catch and punish drug dealers and users. So of course that happens. The war on poverty rewards disfunctional, irresponsible, and self-destructive life choices. You get what you pay for.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • ZeroGravitas 11y ago
    Asking someone to turn out their pockets and then arresting them because some marijuana is now "publicly displayed" is as close to "no reason" as you're going to get. Also, if the father is absent, maybe it's because he's in jail, like some scary number of people in the US? Maybe he can't get employment, because he's a felon, like a scary number of people in the US? The person you replied to is right, ending the war on drugs makes a lot of things, including all the things you list, better. It's a great place to start.
  • dismal2 11y ago
    The war on drugs is directly related to what you are talking about.
• rayiner 11y ago
  The drug war is a symptom of something more basic: Americans lack compassion. Consider something in the non-drug context: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/georgia-probation-misdemeanor-poor-jail http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/georgia-probatio.... You can bring up private prisons and probation companies, but the fact is that these laws have been on the books all along. They were passed by part-time state legislators, who are pretty representative of ordinary people in the state.
  • MrZongle2 11y ago
    "The drug war is a symptom of something more basic: Americans lack compassion." Really? http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-giving-statistics/ http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-gi...
    • harryh 11y ago
      This brings to mind the most famous quote from America's Greatest Poet: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."
      • MrZongle2 11y ago
        America and Americans (myself included) are full of inconsistencies and contradictions, but then I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a country that couldn't be described similarly to some degree. My point is that I take issue with Americans being painted with a big, wide brush of "compassionless" when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Is there perhaps less compassion or concern (in general) directed towards criminals or individuals who are perceived to have engaged in criminal activities, here in the United States? Probably. But implying that such mindset reveals a lack of compassion in toto is ignorant.
        • gknoy 11y ago
          In the context of the justice system, I think we tend to lack compassion. Most of the Americans I know (family, etc) seem more intent on __retribution__ and punishing Bad People, rather than compassion. Once someone is a Bad Person (criminal, poor, or even just someone they don't like), compassion seems to go out the window.
• millermp12 11y ago
  There's no drug war in the Congo, or Nigeria, Liberia, or Ethiopia. These are places, though, that most people, if they had their druthers, prefer to leave. So of course, end the drug war. But the elephant in the room doesn't go away if you ignore it harder. Eppur si muove.
  • CPLX 11y ago
    By "elephant in the room" you mean "black people" right? If you're going to be racist might as well own it. You were doing a better job of that in some of your other racist comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8970505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8970505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8468011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8468011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8468451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8468451
    • MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
      Thanks for the effort, some of those definitely cross the line. However, I disagree that staying silent is always the best way to handle this - there is an audience that can still be influenced by convincing arguments, even though they might remain invisible.
    • millermp12 11y ago
      I do. Your point, pussy?
• j_m_b 11y ago
  Few in the media have the courage to state the obvious, end the drug war. A call for the end of the drug war irritates too many governmental and private sector interests and points the finger on exactly what is to blame. Bringing up racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc. allows the blame to be spread, appeals to popular sensibilities and muddles the real issue.
  • beat 11y ago
    I think you have the causality backwards. We have a drug war because we have racism. We don't have racism because we have a drug war. Look up the history of the heroin and marijuana laws... it's depressing.
• worklogin 11y ago
  Like others, I believe that that is one solution, but that a rigorous, objective analysis of policies and the reasons behind why we do things is necessary, and this article presents the problems very well. To shrug off the philosophical roots of the broken system is not ideal.
• blazespin 11y ago
  This is not a race issue. This is an inner city culture problem. Ending the drug war is a first step. But we still have to give these kids something to do. Pay them to go to school.
  • DanBC 11y ago
    >This is not a race issue. This is an inner city culture problem. You realise that racist policies around suburb building and home loans cause the inner cities to be mostly black? White people got cheap home loans to move into nice neighbourhoods. And that's one of the reason people are calling it a race issue.
    • obstacle1 11y ago
      Oh look, a sweeping claim about evil Whitey being responsible for Everything Bad backed by absolutely no data or evidence. Shocker, that.
      • DanBC 11y ago
        It's trivially easy to find these policies. Here's one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
    • darkroasted 11y ago
      What makes a white neighborhood more "nice" than black neighborhoods, outside of the crime rate or the people that live there? Why is Roxbury/Dorchester in Boston "less nice" than Saugus? Dorchester has great homes, near a nice park, has great access to the subway that goes downtown. Why is 50th and Baltimore in Philadelphia "less nice" than Norristown? 50th and Baltimore has great parks, great homes, great public transit access to downtown. If it is the people that live there that make a neighborhood good or bad, than to blame segregation or red lining for bad neighborhoods is to beg the question.
• Sleaker 11y ago
  I think the portion of the article which deals with simple fines and incarceration based on not being able to pay highlights why it's not quite as simple as end the drug war, although it is probably a good place to start.
• e40 11y ago
  I also think there need to be penalties for Prosecutorial misconduct. Just this morning I was listening to the tale of woe regarding Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle on the Dana Gould podcast[1]. Wow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Arbuckle#The_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Arbuckle#The_scandal Clearly part of it was due to newspapers of the time just flat out publishing lies, but the prosecutor had a huge hand in what happened. Prosecutors often overreach, even when they are not downright corrupt, and this can lead to destruction of people's lives. There need to be consequences for prosecutors that do this. And if people are to tell me there are laws on the books that cover this, then they need to be enforced a lot more, because don't hear about it happening. [1] http://www.danagould.com/hot-buttered-shame/ http://www.danagould.com/hot-buttered-shame/ EDIT: added link to Dana's podcast.