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Comment by vaadu | Hacker News Reader

Good luck fighting this. The drug war has become a racket.

It puts power into the hands of the government. Governments do not give up power unless a court or foreign army forces them to.

The private prison industry is going to fight any drug law changes that put a crimp in their wallet.

And police departments are not going want to give up freebies that come with civil forfeiture.

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> It puts power into the hands of the government.

True, in general. But the prison population is also overwhelmingly non-white, and non-white people statistically vote Democrat. Prisoners can't vote. As one of the two ruling parties in America, it would be in the Democratic Party's best interest to liberalise drug laws to augment the racial minority vote.

If you never vote for a politician that is "tough on crime" by imprisoning kids that decided to smoke a joint, and so do everyone you know - and if you will treat anyone who says it's OK to do this as dangerously insane individual - you have a good chance to take it back. American society has undergone a lot of changes in the last 100 years with regard to many freedoms of many people who were persecuted by the government or denied their rights because of various government restrictions with regard to gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual conduct, etc. - and when people realized it is wrong the government eventually had to cave and clean up their act. It is time US realized as a society what horrendous wrong "war on drugs" is. Once they do, no prison industry would be able to resist.

Courts are part of governments.

Traditionally, this is not always true. Courts have often been a check on governments rather than an institution of them. In common law (or "case law") republican jurisdictions, courts are supposed to act to restrain government to acts permitted by law.

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