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Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016a

I don't have an answer for you but I do know that if there is one it needs to include:

- Murders due to the existence of a black market (people don't tend to get killed in such high volumes in an open market)

- Deaths due to enforcement of the laws. Both "criminals" and law enforcement.

- Deaths due to people failing to seek medical help because they don't want to go to jail

- Deaths in prison of people who are only there because of prohibition

- Suicides due to the consequences of prohibition

- May or may not count people whose lives were generally ruined because they are felons now and the trickle down punishment of those people's families as well.

I have no doubt that number will pail in comparison to a "real" war. But that doesn't mean those lives are not worth saving.

It is a bad precedence to say that because one thing (real war) is worse than another (drug war) that we shouldn't try to end both.

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The OP chose to talk about bloodshed. We are now characterizing how bloody the 'war on drugs' has been. We are not characterizing how bad it might be in any other sense. This is a focused argument intended to examine something precisely. I asked about bloodshed in response to a claim about bloodshed. I don't want to hear about 'trickle down punishment' in response. Do you understand how inadequate that is?

Nobody wants to engage in debates over arbitrarily specific terms just to satisfy one person's pedantic beef.

Also, you don't own the thread; people can respond as they please and the votes and mods will sort it out.

It is my hope that the power of our words will sort things out. I'm here to argue in the original sense of the word, and while I am ultimately interested in the broad consequences of drug laws in the US, I consider it healthy and productive to first focus on an indisputably negative consequence, physical harm -- especially when it has been proposed that these laws have resulted in more of this than any war in recent history. If we can't talk through this point, a fair treatment of broader and less easily chracterized consequences is hopeless.

By bloodshed, I mean death or casualties, not limited to only when blood pours out. When people talk about bloody wars, they also cite casualties which includes wounded. It's obviously incalculable, but consider these:

  1. US gang violence. (8,900 deaths in 2010, higher in 80s,90s)
  2. Drug war related deaths in Mexico 1990-2010 (220,000 deaths)
  3. Drug war related deaths in Columbia, 1990-2010 (450,000 deaths)
  4. Killings by militarized police. (unknown)
  5. Overdose deaths (65K in 2016 at peak, but a lot in 70s-90s)

http://jpfo.org/articles-assd03/gun-stats-perspective.htm

https://colombiareports.com/the-price-of-colombias-drug-war/

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/05/upshot/opioid...

I would guess that overdose deaths primarily occur because the user doesn't know what dosage they are given, a result of the black market. I suspect there are some intentional suicide overdose deaths, but those would be low. The overdose deaths are just for one year as are the gang violence deaths. Gangs arm themselves with drug money.

The US had 720,000 deaths in our bloodiest war, the Civil War, 2/3rds of that was disease, which you may or may not consider bloodshed. Just Mexico and Columbia alone account for 670K deaths between 1990 and 2010. Add 7 years to the top end, and 20 years from 1970 to 1990 and that number is growing substantially.

I'm not sure if you would count the Philippines as directly related to US policies, but I think their death count is already at 12K for the year.

Anyway, these are some numbers that I threw together in about 10 minutes. It excludes a bunch of countries that were directly affected by US drug war policies. The numbers are quite high. Not WWII total deaths high, but certainly Civil War military deaths high (our bloodiest war).

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