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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Rather than framing this with a racial lens, why not look at this as evolutionary change in policy given the evidence on europe and numerous studies showing zero tolerance as being counterproductive.

Coke, shroom, acid, horse users (midfle class)in past decades were dealt the same zero tolerance policies with no effect, this surge is seeing a different response in light of new acceptance of recreational drugs and in light of the failures of past policies.

But you know the NYT will get more views and reactions by framing it as racial.... But then they fail to look at policies in Latin America or Africa which are equally punishing, not to mention homogenous places like Japan and china where punishment is harsher and there are no minorities to oppress.

Is the NYT suggesting we go back to zero tolerance?

It used to be said sex sells, now it's race sells.

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None of these drugs were the typically used by black communities. Crack cocaine was however, and special laws were passed in New York City to make the punishments for possesion / sale up to 118x greater than being charged for an equivalent amount of powdered cocaine.

If you really are trying to move away from the racial lens of the drug war, how do you explain the racist pretenses under which prohibition laws were passed, as well as the targeting of minority communities in policing and prosecution?

To my untrained and minority eye, compassion for drug users and the disgust with the drug war seem pretty well correlated with people seeing people they identify with going through the system.

One of the points is we saw similar factions to drugs use surges in other countries. Latin America, Africa. If it was white on minority you'd think those countries would have implemented different tools or implemented the tools differently, but they did not.

Go to Venezuela see how they treat drugs users.

It's hard to look at what other countries do in response to drug addiction because the United States pushes very hard for them to join in on its drug war and maintain its status quo. This should be surprising to no one. Only in the past decade or so have people in other countries (Switzerland for example) really begun to push back and say, "this doesn't work, we have the data to show what does, we are going to do that instead."

I find it hard to believe Russia, China, Venezuela and others would take suggestions from the US with regard to internal politics.

I think what happened was that drugs started to emerge from the underground shadows in the early 20th cent. People, politicians, etc. got spooked and being ignorant of how to best address (as we still are but understand some aspects better) took a hard stance against its proliferation into the general population.

This was followed by any strong central government. Here and everywhere. It's odd to see this framed as if it only happened because it affected minorities when the same policies happened in other countries with no minorities and countries where minorities are the majority and make the laws.

The different attitudes now are certainly a result of a slow shift on attitudes about drug use. Some of that is a weariness with the failed drug war, some of it is that people are more educated about the effects of drugs, and some of it is the fact that other countries have decriminalized successfully.

But another aspect is that people are responding to it differently because it is ravaging their own communities. It's easy to demonize drug users when they're people from other groups but not as easy when it is your child or neighbor.

That doesn't necessarily reflect racist attitudes but US drug policy has been absolutely shaped by racism in the past. Drug abuse was seen as just another aspect of black pathology and compassion for addicted users wasn't even on the table. Some of that was because there was a sincere belief that incarceration was the answer but enforcement and incarceration were (and are) disproportionately used against black communities.

And let's not forget that part of the reason marijuana was banned in the first place is because it was thought that black jazz musicians used it to seduce white women.

At any rate, I don't think that focusing on the fact that white folks affected by the heroin epidemic want more compassionate solutions is going to help things. Everyone should just be happy that rationality is beginning to prevail in our response to the drug problem.

Maybe because part of the evolutionary change in policy comes from white people complaining, an act that's futile when done by minorities in this country?

People including whites, hippies, etc. had been complaining since at least the 70s. We bad similar policies in white countries, we still have them in Asian countries and African countries. Just because you see coincidence does not indicate cause.

A small subset complained, but the majority voted for politicians who were vocal about their intentions to implement harsh laws that would impact the poor and racial minorities. They also voted for judges and DAs who voiced their intention to uphold a zero tolerance policy.

They've done this consistently for decades.

It's such a common fallacy that there's even a Wikipedia article about it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

I agree. Race has nothing to do with this.

That may be one component, but I think it's more that the idea of 'treatment instead of punishment' has gotten more widespread in recent years. That and the fact that the drug war has been waged for over 40 years now and it hasn't really reduced usage.

I think minority complaints about certain issues did fall on deaf ears in the past (police brutality being chief among these) but America is a different, more tolerant place now that it was in the early 80's.

This.

This is very close to the cliched observation that the best way to get rid of a law is to enforce it strictly.

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