Comment by mptest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mptest | Hacker News Reader

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>"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

>"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," Ehrlichman said. "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."[1]

Good to know it's always been like that. Legalize and tax all drugs. Spend the taxes on rehab and clinics instead of the money that will be spent no matter what going to drug lords. It is illogical to have any other drug policy than complete legalization and regulation/taxation.

[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...

You quote a very US centric reason. So why aren't any other countries legalizing it?

Treaties like the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs as well as political pressure from the US Government.

As a non-American, I think that you’re underestimating or understating the US’s unfortunate influence on the rest of the world. It’s almost like they’ve been fighting for it for hundreds of years.

Is the suggestion here that drugs were criminalized in Europe because of diplomatic pressure from the Nixon administration?

Yes.

https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/how-the-united...

It was literal American policy to pressure other countries to do so. I mean an open one - not a secret, but something American politicians were proud about. It was seen as a good thing by them and by the voters.

Why were drugs forbidden in the Soviet Union then?

Soviet Union did not had all drug war in this sense.

Drug scene in Soviet Union was massively different then the one in the West. A lot of western drugs were not available and came only with the fall of the Union. The actual issues were alcohol and sniffing. The actual drug scene was something that came with opening of the borders and society needed to adjust.

Soviet Union doing something is not proof that American policy was not what I said. Soviet Union did stuff for own reasons. They did not forbid just drugs either, they forbid half the things existing outside of their borders.

Because of their own reasons?

Nobody claimed the US was the sole cause of the global war on drugs, but it is a major reason given their stance and political influence.

Germany recently moved a big step toward legalizing pot.

Psylocibin and MDMA are getting established (again after many decades) in psychotherapy in the US.

In general consumption of many hard drugs are tolerated legally and in practice in lot of places around the world.

...

That said heroin, homelessness, mental illnesses and addiction are simply things with a "nuisance profile" and has a super high correlation to crime. So it's not surprising they get the prohibition treatment.

>why it got the prohibition treatment

which ALWAYS fails. it leads to fentanyl instead of regulated pure heroin which we tax. It leads to the money that could go to put these people in addict centers in to drug lords' pockets. people are going to use it anyway. prohibition does nothing but fill our jails with minorities. Tax it, limit daily use, use the billions flooding to violent cartels to fund social solutions to addiction. It's pretty simple. and undeniable the war on drugs is a failure.

Yes, yes, exactly. Thank you for following up with this! I got disillusioned, burnt out, fucking fed up and let down almost all at the same time after reading the comments here. (Especially about how everything is just bad, fucked up, suboptimal, prime broken windows example, and so on.)

The billions required to build housing-first luxury rehabs with hookers and hypnotherapists for everyone are there ... spent on the War on X (pun maybe intended?) and shipped to warehouses where cartel bosses keep their proceeds.

The whole thing is a clusterfuck of neglect, underfunding, and ... in general short-term thinking or more precisely the relatable but oh-so-wrong "hot heads in the soothing sand" policy.

  .

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"""

[In Seattle] People walking by homeless camps have seen bike "chop shops" there, but the police won't do anything. In the police's defense, on the rare occasions they do arrest homeless people for theft, the county attorney will just drop the charges.

---

Oakland PD is the D league of police in the Bay Area. It doesn't have adequate funding and the population is the most hostile. So most A tier cops avoid it, while OPD gets rookies and the leftovers. Then there's the fact that they have half the police they should that similar size+crime cities do. Guess how many police are patrolling at one time among 430k people in the crime that Oakland gets? 200? 100? It's 30! 30 officers to respond to whatever mayhem is going on. One officer busy filing paperwork and driving 2 hours to Dublin jail for every 40,000 people...

"""

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-inc...

Great addition. the massive misallocation of a militarized police is another source to solve these problems. But unfortunately for too long the conservative mindset of "punish the addict" has provided the electoral support that led to anti drug legislation prevailing over plain reason.

All while the smarter ones upstream knew it was all a lie and just a way to screw over groups they always wanted to screw over, not even getting in to the benefits their corporate masters gain from the free labor of prisoners who get 20y for dealing something that should be dealt over a regulated counter and the police force to capture those that get caught. All while systemically undermining and undeserving areas who have the most need of social programs. Hopefully logic eventually prevails. as shrooms and dmt become legal in some places i hope we can eventually do the logical thing and stop funding violence and start funding social progress.

Not to mention the destruction of any trace of an actually productive economy in these areas. Prison labor is anything but free. It's extremely inefficient, ridiculously subsidized by public funds (direct costs of the whole criminal-justice system, removing people from the labor force, the cost of lack of rehabilitation, etc.)

I don't know. I used to say this but then you look at places where it's been done like Canada and the PNW and the results are pretty disappointing.

I think the answer to drug use is to make life worth being sober for rather than monkeying around with the law.

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