Hacker News Reader

Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Please tell me, how many marijuana dealers would you have been willing to execute in the 80s? How many brewers would you have been comfortable executing in the 20s? How many homosexuals in the 50s?

I for one am very happy not to be living in an all-powerful police state. What's obviously "moral and good" seems to be awfully fluid across history.

View on HN

So I'm not arguing that we should completely emulate Singapore and other Asian countries here. Life-ending punishments for low-level dealing of soft drugs is too harsh and incompatible with our vision for society. Likewise for imprisoning addicts.

But I think enforcement can work if we're willing to do what must be done. People exporting and importing large quantities of hard drugs into the United States get no sympathy from me.

Maybe when large poppy and coca fields were needed enforcement could have worked had it been pursued vigorously. But we apparently really didn't want to do that and it was mostly all lip service.

But now? Super powerful chemicals being continually adjusted. A zillion e-packets zipping around the world. Forget about full enforcement. That is no longer possible if we "just try hard enough". Unless maybe you want to stop the mail and bomb 35 countries into smithereens. And incarcerate even more people than the ridiculous number we already have. We can still "discourage" with occasional busts (and probably should for deadly drugs for now) but maybe it's time to sit down and rethink rather than continuing to playing wack-a-mole.

Make better drugs. Less harmful ones. That's the eventual answer I think.

The US incarcerates more people than any other country.

It's clearly not working.

That most prisoners are serving for merely drug offenses is a myth. A huge percent have drugs on the list of crimes they were convicted for, but almost all of them have a violent crime on there as well. Mass incarceration is due to high rates of violent crime and strong punishments for them, not drug enforcement.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15591700/m...

But perhaps it's all related. Violent crime occurs because it's fueled by an illegal cash cow in the form of drugs. People don't just murder or assault people without being driven to do so. They have an economic incentive.

I made no mention of drug offences.

The US incarcerates more people than any other country, and yet it still has much higher rates of crime, including violent crime, than Europe.

If imprisonment worked to reduce violent crime we'd expect Europe to have higher rates of violent crime than the US.

We already do this. Large level dealers/kingpins are prosecuted to the fullest extend of the law and often receive extremely long sentences. However, as has been proven, it doesn't work.

Your point about Singapore is taken though, you raise a strong point. I think the issue though is that there are two effective ways to deal with drugs:

1. Totalitarian-police-state-type of enforcement (lets call it the Singapore model) where even low level offenders are hit were severe sentences.

2. The end of prohibition. This destroys the current economic framework supporting the drug industry; this would severely reduce the violence associated with the illicit drug trade.

What doesn't work is this sort of middle-of-the-road approach that we currently have.

Obviously, these two are at exact opposite ends of one another. I think we should pick the one that is more fitting with our national character and purported values of life, liberty, and individualism (the 2nd option...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com