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Comment by ellisdewalt | Hacker News Reader

It's dumb because even if they wanted to have that severe of a punishment for LSD specifically, they could do math and just make the sentence greater for smaller amounts of actual drug. Be as cynical as you like, but we'd see equivalent exaggerations for every other drug if your line of thinking made sense.

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It depends on the audience for those drugs and their relationship to the people making laws. Take, for example, crack versus cocaine. Crack and cocaine are nearly identical drugs. Crack has the same sentence for one gram as cocaine does for eighteen. (The disparity used to be five times greater before 2010.) But crack users are more likely to be black, low-income, and less educated. I can't imagine why they'd be a preferred target for "tough on crime" legislation. Aside from, y'know, systemic, institutionalized racism (and good old-fashioned poor-stomping, but it is well-known that the War on Drugs was intended to target black people).

Similarly, LSD was widely associated with undesirables in the sixties and seventies--counter-culture movements. Do you have a better way to provide yourself with cover for attacking them?

If you're surprised or skeptical of either claim, I recommend you read Dan Baum's recent report regarding his discussions with John Erlichman and H.R. Haldeman's diaries[1] (themselves available in the Nixon Presidential Library). Both men were deep in the Nixon White House during the formation of the War on Drugs; it's illuminating stuff.

[0] - http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1

[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/18/us/haldeman-diary-shows-ni...

Essentially agree 100%. My minor nitpic is that while I'm willing to be cynical almost whole hog including your examples, we even have similar examples that are more dumb and less insidious than yours. E.g, truffles vs mushrooms in the netherlands (one is banned, the other isn't, I'm not aware of one being the uppity fungi vs the hood shroom)

Even in the LSD example, someone using a fancier stationary could be way more guilty than a cheapo two ply. The whole thing is ridiculous in ways the crack vs cocaine thing is relatively less so. If anything, this law encourages lsd to be made on the most portable medium possible. If you claim this too was intentional, then we enter the realm of the ridiculous.

This might sound like splitting hairs, but I'm just advocating to a caveat to cynicism for things once in awhile being just flat out dumb.

Crack and Cocaine are nearly identical from a chemical perspective, but not from how they are used and their effect: http://www.attn.com/stories/2643/crack-vs-cocaine

It's comforting to think it's all just a ploy to get at black people (like how cannabis was rebranded as "marijuana" because it associates it with those pesky Mexicans everybody hates) but there are valid reasons to be more afraid of crack than of cocaine despite both sharing practically the same active ingredient.

EDIT: I'm not saying the War on Drugs doesn't particularly affect people of color more than other groups, or whether that is intentional or not, but pointing at the active ingredients and saying "look, they're the same except racism" is simplistic.

From your article, it certainly does seem like injected powder cocaine and smoked crack cocaine are about the same on the body. And you can trivially make crack from powdered cocaine.

Nobody has said they're 100% the same besides racism. The claim is that racism plays a role in why the sentencing disparities exist.

Black politicians championed greater penalties for crack:

http://prisontime.org/2013/08/12/timeline-black-support-for-...

http://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champion...

I'm not arguing that institutionalized racism doesn't exist, but this crack vs cocaine issue comes up all the time and the issue has more to it than "It's because of racism."

There's no math to determine the quantity of active ingredient in illicit substances. That requires analysis. Including the carrier keeps it simple. It's also self-aggrandizing, as it's much more impressive for the DEA to announce they've seized 10g of "LSD" than 10mg. Again, this is coming from an agency that is known to weight the root ball when calculating the yield of seized marijuana grows.

Both you and eropple are spot on. I would have admitted both of your points but I'm not as knowledgeable.

The issue is, might_atomic says he is cynical that the reason the law is the case isn't dumb, it's intentional. If we're being cynical, I can think of many ways to be extra punitive against any particular drug you like for any reason. Even if we assume self-aggrandizement, my assumption was we could all be fall more cynically creative as to how a drug enforcement agency could get than arguing about the weight of paper.

For example, why not just call all the precursor chemicals drug as well, we could say they produced 50lbs of lsd because of the running water used in the process.

I'm just advocating for a level of cynicism that looks at a bigger picture to where once in awhile we could say something is dumber than it is insidious. Without doing so, I think it contributes to the persistence of laws that are in fact dumber than even their creators intended.

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