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Comment by labster | Hacker News Reader

No, you seem to be confused as to what voters actually want. Sure we could do drug treatment for less money and more social benefit, but how does that punish the baddies? If we give them free treatment and forgiveness, what does that say about me? I was good and they did the bad thing, and yet you want to throw a feast for your prodigal son. Taxes are high enough already, too high to give money to those fallen souls.

Or something like that. At least the first half. Most of us here are engineers, scientists, and tech leaders who can see how disruption can make a better system. But a lot of people see the opioid crisis not as health crisis but as a moral dilemma.

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No, this is Seattle, we don’t want baddies to be punished. We want buses that don’t smell like burnt peanut butter. We want parks without tents, libraries without naked guys running around in crisis, and we’d like it all for some property tax rate that is less than 2%/year. It would also be nice if our grocery stores didn’t shut down due to shoplifting excesses, but that’s a stretch goal.

> Sure we could do drug treatment for less money and more social benefit, but how does that punish the baddies? If we give them free treatment and forgiveness, what does that say about me? I was good and they did the bad thing, and yet you want to throw a feast for your prodigal son. Taxes are high enough already, too high to give money to those fallen souls.

It's ironic that Christianity says they should do exactly that.

I don't think it says that. The younger son comes back and yes, a one-off feast is thrown, and the son's betrayal is completely forgiven, but the dad tells the older son that everything he has is his. He doesn't say, "Give your brother some more cash".

I don't have a strong position on drug laws, as I don't live in a city that's devastated by drug use. I just wanted to weigh in on the meaning of that parable.

I argue that in this context money spent on a one time feast can be interpreted as money spent on drug rehab. Rehab after all is meant to be a process, even if lengthy, that results in one no longer being dependent and hopefully not relapsing. Rehab is not a process of feeding the vice (unless there are various corporate interests and the process is perverted).

The point is to contrast retribution and discrimination with rehabilitation and empathy. Christianity very much endorses the latter option at least as long as the other is part of the in-group.

But maybe the in-group and out-group separation is very much the point of these laws since the war on drugs (started by Nixon) is a direct continuation of slavery after peonage was ended by FDR during WWII.

> the war on drugs (started by Nixon) is a direct continuation of slavery after peonage was ended by FDR during WWII

Do you have any justification for this? It seems an utterly bizarre take on the face of it.

If you mean the first part then here is a quote from John Ehrlichman, the White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon:

> “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Family members of Ehrlichman reject the veracity of the quote but I see no reason to since it is not about himself, it is about Nixon and his policies. There are some more voices questioning whether he was lying but even those voices admit Nixon was racist. I think it matters not whether introducing those laws had racism as a primary purpose, or whether they "coincidentally" aligned with a hidden agenda. Prohibition might not have had the purpose of creating a mafia network but failure to foresee that and failure to promptly react when the negative side effects of a law become apparent still matter. Prohibition in the US lasted 13 years, the US war on drugs is ongoing since the 70 even after other countries like Portugal demonstrated it is cheaper and more efficient to focus on rehabilitation.

If you mean the second part, see FDR's Circular 3591 from 1941-12-12. September 1942 is when the last slave in the US was freed. Nixon was elected a few decades later.

Feel free to explain which part is an utterly bizarre take.

> which part is an utterly bizarre take

I don't know which is; it just appears that way. It would be that the war on drugs was a continuation of slavery, which I don't think you've mentioned

Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman. And discrimination is something the US has struggled with since the very beginning. It is the very notion that some people deserve to be restricted more and protected less by the law than other people. The notion that the out-group should be dehumanized and therefore it deserves whatever misery it finds itself in. This is a social illness. All that changed in the US are the names and sizes of the in-group and of the out-groups. But the illness is still there in the minds of the people.

It's a continuation in the sense that it is a manifestation of the same social illness.

> Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman.

Ugh, no, don't argue in favor of my beliefs this badly. We know what slavery is, and creative redefinitions only make you sound dishonest. Slavery, real slavery, still exists in the US, and we don't have to make up weird definitions to say that.

Slavery still exists in the US, legally. The thirteenth amendment says:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." (Emphasis mine).

This is a massive loophole, and one which has been taken full advantage of. By criminalizing things which shouldn't be criminalized, and then enforcing those laws unequally, you can effectively enslave a large portion of whatever group you want to.

In some cases such as Angola prison, the prisoners/slaves are literally forced to pick cotton for no pay. In other cases, the prisoners/slaves are paid some small amount: this is better for optics, but these same prisons easily recover the money by vending basic necessities at gouged prices: if you pay a seamstress $1/hour and then charge her $10 for a tampon at commissary, that's not pay. Prisoners can't shop elsewhere and can't work elsewhere.

And to be clear: the work isn't voluntary. Refusal to work is punished with solitary confinement and sensory deprivation--and that's if they bother to comply with the law instead of just beating prisoners who don't work or paying another prisoner to shank them. With little oversight, there's little stopping prisons from doing this.

In addition to lack of oversight allowing abuses of power, it also allows unsafe work conditions. Prisoners/slaves are unable to report unsafe conditions to anyone, and when unsafe conditions occur, there's no incentive to fix them.

Prison slavery is used by a variety of industries. JCPenney and KMart use prison slavery to manufacture clothes, IBM uses prison slavery to assemble circuitry, Wendy's and McDonald's use prison slavery to process foods.

I was not aware of all you wrote. I guess thanks for picking up the ball when I dropped it.

As an eastern European, for whom high school had almost nothing to say about American history (other than WWII) and afterwards I originally learned the usually parroted variant only to later correct the knowledge I had, I am baffled again and again every time when learning new things about the putrid fractal that is slavery in the US. I was never even that curious in the first place.

I did hear about the prison industrial complex but I had no idea about the "Angola" and how close this gets to slavery called by a different name. Reading about it now. I believed that while for profit prisons were inhuman, prisoners were not used for forced labor. I always kinda assumed that meant that prisons received so much money from the state they even made a profit.

That major western brands make use of it feels nauseating. I believed this was stuff we were criticizing China for.

Well the key word is “Baddies” we need to stop looking at drug addicts as “bad” but merely sick.

The actual “baddies” would lose their funding if you cure the junkies. The problem is the system as it is is profitable for other more socially acceptable “baddies” who stand to lose out. e.g sacklers

He is pointing out the voters perspective which is valid and rarely reflected on social media since it is innately selfish.

At it's core this is a social issue that is swept under the rug for decades since the real solutions requires harsh reform that will likely destroy careers for pursuing it.

Drugs are a strong form of control, not just for the peddlers but to appease the masses from their painful reality, something that certain branches might like with AI and stuff reducing the usefulness of labor.

And the reason for that is the drug users as criminals narrative has been promoted by a combination of well meaning misinformed people and mere neerdowell grifters.

The solution is to promote this alternative narrative, something which is happening now thanks in part to successful activism and better education, but also an increasing wariness on the part of the public on the true motives behind public drug policy. I don’t think it’s a pure coincidence that this is all happening at the tail end of the opioid pandemic!

"we need to stop looking at drug addicts as “bad” but merely sick."

The root of the sickness often extends far beyond the individual into society. That's what many people don't want to look at or acknowledge. They insist on casting blame on the victim, and keep creating more victims.

To be honest I think you’re being to kind to the they. Yes there are some people who act out of being misinformed, or fear but there are cyclical people that pump this point of view specially for profit. Look at the sea change now in the US that pharma sent to far and people finally realised a lot of the “drugs bad” schtik was merely PR

The chapter in Erewhon from 1872 is interesting. In this strange utopia/dystopia the sick are punished like criminals and the criminals are treated with compassion as if they were sick. Particularly relevant for considering how drug addicts are treated.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon/text...

> but how does that punish the baddies?

I hope we (as humanity) will get over punishment for the sake of punishment. It is a power tool to steer people away from harmful behavior and I don't think we can stop using it altogether anytime soon but it should be used to the extent it actually changes people's behavior - longer sentences not necessary better in this regard than shorter ones in combination with some re-integration program. And if we can prevent antisocial behavior without punishment why not at least try?

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