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Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

First many of those crime cartels could not exist without the banning of drugs, prostitution and gambling. The same goes for violent crimes in general. Large numbers of violent crimes are done by people involved in drug dealing or consuming. If drugs were legal you would not put so many people in these situations.

Falling crime rates is happing all over the first world. Most countries have know-where near the policy infrastructure that the US has. So thats probably not a very good expiation.

Nobody says that their is no real crime. In all the speech by the state its sounds as if we are getting rolled over by a totally new wave of terror and crime while in reality its the exact opposite. What bother so many is that they underline all their arguments with this false impression.

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> First many of those crime cartels could not exist without the banning of drugs, prostitution and gambling.

That doesn't mean that it's an "invented crime." It's undeniable that drugs, gambling, and prostitution have real social costs and harms. The people are entitled to regulate commerce in their society generally, but trade in harmful things especially. When people uses organized violence to circumvent that regulation, in the pursuit of profit, that is actual crime, not invented crime.

> Large numbers of violent crimes are done by people involved in drug dealing or consuming.

You're presupposing a direction of causation here. Your average street gang does not exist because of drug dealing or consumption (and indeed, violent street gangs long predate any restrictions on drugs or alcohol). They deal in drugs because it's easy money, but arise for other reasons.

> It's undeniable that drugs, gambling, and prostitution have real social costs and harms

So does banking and the police. Or firearms and alcohol. Both are regulated, but not outlawed.

Heck so does "pursuing happiness". Skiing accidents. Bankruptcy when your art studio goes under. Smoking. Pretty much anything fun.

As a country, the USA is actually constituted to allow these things. Because, individual freedoms. And inalienable rights. I hear somebody want to crack down on something, I think "There goes somebody who forgot what it means to be American"

Being pedantic: pursuit of happiness and inalienable rights are in the Declaration of Independence, not the constitution. The right to regulate interstate commerce (and thus put restrictions on a lot of the fun things) is enumerated.

Being pedantic right back: the US Supreme Court refers to the Declaration as source material for the Constitution, to illuminate its intent.

There is a ruling where they refer to it as providing intent and color, but not law. And cases can only be decided based on law.

I don't think you can make a decision based solely on the "pursuit of happiness" phrase from the Declaration of Independence, but you could use it as a supporting argument for your claim.

When the gov't attempted to prohibit drug use, it created the opportunity for a black market in prohibited drugs to thrive. If you can accept the following:

  * Some people are going to take drugs without regard to legality.
  * Some people are going to fill the market's need for drugs through smuggling or manufacturing.
  * The government is utterly incapable (by design, actually) of completely preventing the above.
  * Without criminalization of drugs manufacturing and sales, there would be very little or no reason for violence in the drugs trade.

Then it's fair to say that criminalizing drugs use is the cause of the violence, or at least that decriminalizing drugs use will result in a reduction in violence.

>violent street gangs long predate any restrictions on drugs or alcohol

Violent street gangs opportunistically traffic in contraband because prohibition creates a dearth of supply, driving prices high enough to support an illegal black market.

You can not expect me to support the weaking of encryption and critical infrastructure just to arrest criminals who would not exist if the state policy would not be stupid in the first place.

> It's undeniable that drugs, gambling, and prostitution have real social costs and harms.

Its also undeniable that enforcing these things has real social cost and harms. In this balance I am of the opinion that it would be far superior to have a different policy.

> You're presupposing a direction of causation here. Your average street gang does not exist because of drug dealing or consumption (and indeed, violent street gangs long predate any restrictions on drugs or alcohol). They deal in drugs because it's easy money, but arise for other reasons.

That does not mean that these gangs would be much weaker and therefore less important if they could not make easy money. These are mutually supportive, a tight group can do well in a illegal market, and because of that it can produce benefits for its members, increasing memberships and power.

Possible, but unlikely. According to a recent study, the majority of offenders are sentenced for violent offenses, and the majority of those sentenced for violent offenses have never been convicted of a drug crime.

Its tricky to say, seems to me that prior conviction is not a very good metric. However I don't know any better way to figure this out either.

You can take the analysis further and observe, as that study did, that the set of people incarcerated for violent offenses is almost entirely disjoint from the set of people incarcerated for drug offenses. There is very little overlap, not just in the current prison population but over time as well.

We should end the war on drugs, of course, but we more urgently need to end what Ta-Nahisi Coates calls "the carceral state", and that will require much stiffer medicine than drug legalization.

>According to a recent study

Please post the study.

It's not exactly "recent", but http://harvardjol.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/HLL104_crop... is what I presume 'tptacek is talking about (it was discussed on HN before).

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