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Comment by contourtrails | Hacker News Reader

They broke laws and are being punished as criminals. Many people of all races are punished in the same way.

I think drug laws in this country are way too harsh, but those are the laws. People should not break them if they don't want to be jailed.

Also slavery was a human problem for thousands of years, it took humanity collectively waking up to the evils of slavery to abolish it. Human governments the world over supported the instition in the past, and now they've evolved. Don't judge them today based on the mistakes of the past.

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"I think drug laws in this country are way too harsh, but those are the laws. People should not break them if they don't want to be jailed."

This quote might be a defensible argument if the laws were applied equally in the United States. What has happened is that we have so many laws that the government doesn't even know how many laws there are anymore[0]. This has led to something called selective enforcement[1]. When everyone breaks the law, but you are twice as likely to be punished for it if you are one color vs another, then personal responsibility has very little to do with it. The government is setting up an environment where they can punish whomever they want, whenever they want, and then punishing the people they don't like for non law related reasons

[0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304319804576389... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement

Come on now. What are you even talking about?

> People should not break them if they don't want to be jailed.

I'm white. That means I can smoke as much herb as I want and not even dream of entering the criminal justice system unless I'm extraordinarily unlucky. Moreover, I don't give a flying fuck what some politician in Washington has to say about my diet. I don't base what I put into my body on bad laws.

But if you are black, you have a much more difficult decision to make.

> now they've evolved. Don't judge them today based on the mistakes of the past.

If drug prohibition is the "evolved" form, then we still have a long way to go. That's the point.

You're suburban. Growing up poor and in a requisite poor area, plenty of your white friends will end up in prison and jail. A lot of mine did.

I'm with you, prohibition of weed is very backwards. But that's hardly slavery.

Drug prohibition is indeed slavery - in the case of the text of the 13th amendment, literally so.

Moving the bar from "you're enslaved based on your color" to, "you're enslaved based on your diet" is not much of a move.

That is the most niave understanding of government and racism.

How so? Economic circumstances negatively impact certain people more than others in the world but how are modern western governments perpetuating racism?

Come on man, your best advice to imprisoned black people is, "well, you shouldn't have chosen what to put in your own body" and you can't see your mistake?

If their diet is what is causing them to commit violent crimes, which is what the majority of prisoners are in for, not weed, then yeah, that diet is a problem. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-real-answer-to-...

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