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Comment by yostrovs | Hacker News Reader

Ms. Griner violated a law that is essentially identical to the laws still existing in some U.S. states. If she would have been caught with a bunch of cannabis vape pens in Louisiana, the outcome would have been similar. Perhaps a shorter sentence, but Louisiana like Russia sees cannabis through a criminal prism. There are many thousands of people currently in prison in the U.S. for the same types of crimes. It seems completely nonsensical to be freeing someone from a foreign prison for the same crime that others are in prison for in her home country. Had she been imprisoned on trumped up charges or for something fundamental, such as expressing her political views, I'd be much more sympathetic. But she knowingly violated a law that parallels ones we have in many U.S. states.

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that's a whole lot of non-sequitur there, as the weed is entirely beside the point. the russian government wanted to make a geopolitical point and gain leverage, and they would have found something else to trump up and attract mediopolitical news coverage. griner is a minor celebrity, so perfect for not generating too much outrage, but enough to get more than incidental coverage.

yes, other countries (including the US) have done this too, but in this case (and many other cases), it's a civilian, not a gvernmental or military member, who has been pulled directly into the crossfire, and that's the core "wrong" here.

On the other hand, those US laws, if they carry comparable sentences as she is facing, are equally unjust. If this case is what it takes to realize how disproportionately cruel the US laws are, and to get them changed, then so be it.

I will also speculate that most of the people agitating for her release are also opposed to those US laws you mentioned, so it's not hypocritical for them to lobby for her release, even if it may be hypocritical for the US as a whole to focus on her, without releasing the many non-violent low-level drug offenders they imprison.

I side with her, as I would if this had happened to her in the US, but the OP has a point. It could've happened to her in the US, especially because she is black. Not all people that defend her are hypocrites, but a large portion needs to look in the mirror. The ACLU says: "Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana"

https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers

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