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Comment by dbelchamber | Hacker News Reader

Eesh. If all of this is accurate, it is problematic indeed. I wonder how many of these homicides would cease to occur if drugs were made legal in Brazil (I wonder about this worldwide). I've never understood why it's difficult for people to understand the awful incentive structures that making drugs illegal puts into motion.

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I just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing.

'Making drugs legal' is frequently miss-understood. Treating addiction as a public health problem by decriminalising addicts and personal posession while keeping the trade in drugs firmly illegal, as in Portugal and now Norway, looks like the way to go.

The recent changes to the law in Norway are widely reported as 'decriminalising drugs'. That is highly misleading. They have decriminalised drug use and personal possession, but the drugs trade itself is still criminal.

Decriminalizing possession doesn't do anything to help the violence associated with the drug trade though, does it? I thought that was one of the main reasons for the "legalize completely" argument.

Yes it does, by dramatically reducing rates of addiction and drug use. Take away vast swathes of the market for illegal drugs and the violence associated with it subsides. At least that’s what has happened in Portugal. Now that Norway is following suit, in the years to come we will have another case study to look at.

Different thing.

There aren't black markets for things that aren't illegal. Often, the gang murders we thing of are "turf wars" where one gang is competing with another gang for the same sales territory.

So legalizing drug trade likely decreases drug gangs, which likely decreases murders. People might still die from drug use, but that becomes a separate problem.

We dont know if this is true,because no developed country has decriminalised the drug trade. It seems to me that doing that would increase drug use and the associated public health and social problems. I’m much more in favour of decriminalising use but keeping the trade itself illegal, as in Portugal. That enables attacking the problem from both directions at the same time. Restrict availability through cracking down on dealers, while also removing the market through treatment and rehabilitation.

We have alcohol in the U.S. as an example; It was made illegal; so gangs moved into the import business and made more money than they had before - gangs had turf wars bigger than they had had before.

Moonshiners started making it, and sometimes it created poison.

The police were corrupted where corruptible or killed when they didn't go the gangs ways.

The rich had parties and skirted the enforcement of the law.

Here in Uruguay, marijuana is legal, and homicides are at an all-time high (higher than Argentina and very near to the rates in Brazil, we used to be at less than a quarter).

I´m not sure if decriminalizing all drugs would change the equation much (there´s still smuggling, prostitution and other vices to lord over).

Uruguay almost surely feels a strong influence from the Brazilian policies.

> Here in Uruguay, marijuana is legal, and homicides are at an all-time high

Are the homicides because of drug related issues? What about other drugs like cocaine and heroin?

This is the only real solution. No country has yet tried it. Legalizing weed (Uruguay, some US states) is not even in the same ballpark as what you suggest here (which is my suggestion too in another comment). Until you can go into a pharmacy and buy coke, heroin, and other shit like that over the counter, this problem will never go away. Maybe if murder rates double again and again it'll motivate people to change their government enough to get this done. I don't know how many people must die before governments start to change their stupid drug policies, but clearly, we are nowhere near the amount needed. A fucking waste of millions of lives (if you count incarceration too). Just to be clear, Brazil is in no way unique here.

At this point I'm almost convinced that Brazil keeps the drugs illegal due to the pressure from dealers alone.

Why do you think homocide rates are somehow correlated with legality of drug usage?

Because 80% of them are directly related to drug dealers. (Or at least that's what the news keeps saying here.)

Have you compared that number with countries where drug usage is legal?

You are working hard to find a problem with it, aren't you?

80% of the crimes being linked to drug use means that most people will only care about the remaining 20%.

But, anyway, AFAIK, drug usage is not a crime in Brazil. Dealing is. And for dealing related crimes to go away, one has to legalize the entire production and distribution.

Brazil, like most of South (and now perhaps north too?) America suffers from macho populism. A lot of character politicians with tough messages, empty promises and sadly the population just falls for it every time.

These stats, along with others, is the result of years of populism, corruption and neglect.

Let’s ignore the fact that the last president was a woman and that this is the direct result of her party disastrous administration. Blame machismo. It always works.

The lower house has 513 members and 54 women. The senate has 81 members and 13 women. Only 12% of mayors are women. Dilma was the first and only female president.

I love how you still hold on to the narrative that if we elect women all the problems will go away when in Brazil female politicians like Dilma Housseff and Gleisi Hoffman are pretty much as corrupt as their male counterparts.

Your first point is a good one. However I don’t think you can blame one administration with all this mess surely?

Not one but 3 and a half. Her predecessor from the same party ruled for 8 years and she was president for 6 years before being impeached for fiscal embezzlement. So yeah... 12 years in which crime rates skyrocketed.

Crime reduction in 1992 (in the US) is attributed by some to Roe v Wade (1972). It took 20 years. The young people who are dying now (guns deaths hit the young and poor the worst) were born at the end of the 1990s and start of 2000s, which was a period of high unemployment and even famine (300 children died of malnutrition per day in 2001).

There is a competing theory to Roe V Wade, lead poisoning. A HN regular is the Mother Jones article, and it makes a compelling argument.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...

http://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2017/...

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...

The world is not an Ivy League campus. It is kinda insulting you think this is the cause of crime.

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