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Comment by zachrose | Hacker News Reader

> Drug prohibition has been a categorical failure in every outcome it was intended to achieve.

The following flavor of comment has been made many times on HN, but since I’m halfway through Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow I’m in the mood for making it again here:

The drug war has been “successful”, because its goal was to incarcerate, disenfranchise, extort, terrorize, and break apart the families of minorities so that America could retain a racial hierarchy after the civil rights movement. This hierarchy is advantageous to the ruling class because they can continue to exploit poor whites economically, keep them off the bottom of the hierarchy, and retain their political support.

When Reagan declared a War on Drugs in 1982, less than 2% of Americans viewed drug use as the most important issue facing the nation. In 1989 that number was at 64%, all without a significant increase in drug usage. (Rates for drug crimes did increase, because criminality was the effect of the War on Drugs, not its cause.)

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The last point is unsupportable. The increase in crime rate started in the 1960s: https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/2016/07/Violent-Crim.... By 1982, when Reagan declared the war on drugs, violent crime had nearly quadrupled since 1960, and was near the eventual 1992 peak. It had already more than doubled by 1972 when Nixon first used the phrase “war on drugs” (though it wasn’t Reagan that actually waged that war).

An explanation that fits the data better is that drugs were a scapegoat for a distingegrating society and an explosion in crime.

Your link shows violent crime. Parent comment addressed drug crimes. It’s not clear to me how related those two things are.

It's popularily known the rise in violence and gun related homicides in the 1980s-1990s coincided with the explosion of crack cocaine (and a lesser extent heroin) and the proliferation of modern street gangs as we know them today (ie. bloods, crips, bd, gd, etc) in urban ghettos.

It's not difficult to find stats showing the vast majority of victims of violent crime happen in the same neighborhoods where drugs and drug sales coexist. Whether or not it's directly related it's at least a significant driving factor financing violent criminals and intertwined into related cultures as 'respected' professions.

An explanation that fits the data better

Only if you ignore the overwhelming racial bias in enforcement.

How did racial bias in enforcement cause violent crime rates to skyrocket starting in the 1960s when the drug war was initiated in the 1980s?

GP said that the motivation was racial, you said that the motivation was law and order. You can determine motivation better from future actions than from past context, and the actions showed a bias towards incarcerating minorities. If the intent was to prevent crime by reducing drug use, we should have seen similarly tough enforcement among white drug use, which we did not. You are falling into the common post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

OP said that "criminality was the effect of the War on Drugs, not its cause." Maybe I am not understanding his point, but I took that to mean that crime was caused by the drug war, which cannot be reconciled with the data.

Ah, it was ambiguous (to me) what "The last point is unsupportable" referred to.

I meant that if you were to declare a similar War on Jaywalking, you'd see jaywalking rates skyrocket.

This is (imo) a terrible failing in our political thinking.

We narrate our stories using abstractions & personifications, mixing symbolic and regular language. What we end up is more poetry than anything. It sounds good when it expresses our feelings. This is (to quote Monty python) no basis for a system of government (or thought).

What/who's intention was it, that you mention above? Are we talking about actual individuals collaborating knowingly to achieve these goals or is this a "nation weeps" sort of abstraction. What, in less poetic terms does "the real goal" really mean?

How does this explain drug policies in Japan or Azerbaijan?

I mean, I definitely agree that Machiavellian dynamics were involved. Electoral feedback loops. Racism. All these played a role.

But.. when someone insists about the "real reason" without demystifying the abstractions... I think we've left the realm or rational discussion. We're in religion territory.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281296850_Drug_abus...

> The paper argues that Japan's 'war on drugs' in the 1980s was a direct result of pressure from the United States to adopt harsher sanctions and from a punitive Japanese public that associates drug use with poor self-control.

I think you'll find a similar story elsewhere

I suspect you will, if you're goal is to find a "connect the dots" narrative eminating from some centre. We can argue about which dots and which lines are more important, but before all that...

What is that centre, in nonsymbolic language? Actual people who consciously designed a plan to terrorise and marginalize minorities? I don't think that's what the op (or the writers he cites) are claiming. I suspect what they mean is more abstract. Something like:

The biases, concious or otherwise permeating society influenced the decision making in such a way as to... IE a personification.

Forgive me for not having more details on hand right now. So far in my reading of her book, Alexander’s thesis has three main prongs of support.

The first is historical. When we look back at Jim Crow, do we say that grandfather clauses and literacy tests were about improving the quality of citizen engagement at the polls? Of course not. Jim Crow was designed to reaffirm a racial hierarchy within the constraints of the new constitutional amendments. Is it inconceivable that we would get policies designed to reaffirm racial hierarchy in the colorblind constraints of the civil rights movement?

The second is rhetorical. What specific appeals did politicians make to support the War on Drugs? What images did they use?

And the third, as a comment below points out, are the results of the drug war. Was it carried out in a racially evenhanded manner?

The War on Drugs is large enough that there can be no smoking gun tape of politicians conspiring to pull one over on society and do the racism again.

It seems less than coincidental that your second poll was in the late 80's when the crack epidemic was in full swing. Parallel that to the opiate of now, and I think the dramatic swing can be normalized quite a lot.

I know HN likes to simplify complex issues so that they can tie a nice bow on it, but claiming the driver of drug prohibition is incarceration of minorities is a massive and inaccurate simplification.

Were there people who had racist views about drug use? Sure. Is that the main reason why we have drug prohibition? No.

This is a very US centric view but the war on drugs is very international. Cannabis is illegal in most of the world where Americas race relations simply aren't issues, so I really don't buy into this reasoning.

This is good old moral superiority at work.

You're both right. The origins are racial ("Chasing the scream" by Hari is another good resource here) and the brainwashing was successful so for a while now we're stuck with the consequences. When the old stupid racists (who voted for Brexit) finally die (not so long hopefully) younger people (more likely to use or know someone who uses) will legalise it. Politicians just reflect society; it's not true that a clear majority of UK voters want cannabis legal so it's not worth May going against the old farts and the media etc.

   ... When the old stupid racists (who voted for Brexit) 
   finally die (not so long hopefully) ...

Over 50% of Great-Britain is stupid and racist? You have a source for this claim?

Anyone without a college education is stupid and racist now.

The left has not learned the lessons of brexit and Trump and continue to drive away the working class that they have utter contempt for.

I know plenty of working class brits who are pro EU.

Regardless of the epithets used to describe them, it's worth remembering that, accounting for turn-out, it was around 37% of the British electorate that voted to leave the EU.

There's no reason to believe that the result as it stands couldn't have been extrapolated across the rest of the population.

My argument is that the number of people who didn't vote doesn't need to be extrapolated: apathy isn't a yes or a no vote, but something else.

Are you sure it's apathy though? There are plenty of other reasons why somebody might not make it to the polling station.

(EDIT: For example the elderly who have been shown to be overwhelmingly pro-brexit could have diffculty)

All polling and analysis since the result bears out that the vote was indeed representative of the population.

Sure, it isn't just apathy (as in your example). But if you compare the turn-out for the Scottish independence vote in 2014 (~85%) with the EU referendum (~72%), I think it might be a considerable factor.

Another factor is complacency on the part of those that would have voted to remain: polling leading up to the referendum showed a clear remain win.

(I should point out that I'm not suggesting that the result of the referendum isn't pro-Brexit, but that the numbers don't support the case for a so-called "hard Brexit")

Yes, as time goes by it seems as though sense is starting to sink in, though it is still quite close. A year ago I wouldn't have been confident at all.

[0] https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/if-there-was-a-referen...

[1] https://yougov.co.uk/news/2018/03/29/where-britain-stands-br...

I'd be for a second referendum on an actual agreement for what Britain's relationship with the EU would be, post-Brexit. Some of the options, particularly those favoured by those that voted to remain, are poor.

I think many people right across the continent would probably have similar feelings.

Many are "unhappy" with how the EU is presently being run but nobody would want to "leave".

The confusion around Brexit emerges from just how poorly the referendum was run. It was a choice between "remain" which can only be a vote for the status quo (unsatisfactory for many) and "leave" which is open to so many interpretations as to be useless.

But to call Brexit a "referendum" in any constitutional sense is talking it up a bit. It was a plebiscite. An actual binding referendum against a written constitution would have to provide actual wording; rather than just a single word.

I thought this was because Britain didn't have a constitution as such so the don't have actual referendums?

> An actual binding referendum against a written constitution would have to provide actual wording; rather than just a single word.

I don't disagree for any philosophical reason, but this is very easy to abuse for anyone that favors the status quo. The most notable example I can think of is the republic referendum (to remove the queen as head of state) here in Australia. Deciding the form of the republic was done first and the constitutional changes to do just that was the only question put to the public, splitting the Republican vote.

On the other hand the EU has a bit of a reputation for voting until the plebs get it right, so I can definitely see the case for binding referendums.

No easier than a false “remain” “leave” dichotomy ...

> I thought this was because Britain didn't have a constitution as such so the don't have actual referendums?

The UK does have a constitution, it's simply not codified into a single document. Parliamentary sovereignty means that Acts of Parliament are part of the constitution, and so any referendum's result cannot be binding, which may partly explain why they weren't seen as part of UK politics up until recently - there have only ever been three national referendums, one on EC membership in 1975, on changing the voting system in 2011, and leaving the EU in 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_the_United_King...

Reminds me of all of the scapegoating of the EU for local policies and outright fiction like banana curve standards.

Ironically the actual things to object to the EU about like their godawful internet policy proposals aren't on the radar.

Anyway UK has parliamentary supremacy so a constitution would be empty words without changing that. I would say that the policy seems very dangerous but constituions are messy in terms of getting ease of change right - especially in such an legal body. Imagine if nasty old bits like not allowing Jews to inherit property got embedded.

Imagine if nasty old bits like not allowing Jews to inherit property got embedded

Seems like a strawman, but I guess if that were the case it would have been amended out years ago ...

Semantics about strawmen applied to history aside it still would have added significant friction to it. Antisemitism was downright fashionable until WW2 and it could have impeded more gradual progress like the first Jewish member of parliament. It can be changed but it is significantly harder and easily can wind up judged "not worth the effort". Just look at how long it has been since the US ratified an amendment to the constitution.

This also smacks of whattabouttery and is more an argument for not codifying antisemitism in your constitution than having a constitution at all ...

How things might have been different if the UK government had used the result as a warning shot to the EU, and a case for reform.

> Are you sure it's apathy though?

Perhaps because it was very clearly billed as a non-binding referendum, which would only have an advisory impact at best?

That the politicians took a basically 50/50 result and have used it to _remove_ the EU citizenship of everyone in the UK is beyond taking the piss.

> it was very clearly billed as a non-binding referendum

Was it though? It seems to me that many very clearly consider it to be binding, though ridiculously the actual meaning is ambiguous.

> Was it though?

Errr yes? That was the whole point. The general concept I had of it was along the lines of "Lets see what the general opinion is, so if there's a large majority one way or another we'll know if we need to look into it".

The non-binding bit was so they didn't have to _commit_ to actually doing anything, just in case.

If that was the case it would have been called a plebiscite rather than a referendum.

That it was in actual fact a plebiscite to those who actually understand this nuance isn't relevant to the "Brexit means Brexit" hordes who don't. Or to your friends and neighbours looking on aghast ...

There are a 1.4 million 18 and 19 year olds in the UK that didn't get to vote in 2016.

Likewise there are over 1 million who did get to vote who are no longer alive.

When accounting for the entire country, about 1 in 4 voted to leave the EU, 1 in 4 voted to remain, 1 in 4 didn't know/care and trusted their MPs to do what was best, and 1 in 4 were not allowed to vote because they were too young and must rely on their MPs to do what is best.

Well there's been plenty of polls, analysis and investigation since the Brexit result trying to slice and dice and determine what was behind the result and sorry but that's the picture that has emerged.

For what it's worth, I don't think it's as a result of any innate quality of the English psyche, indeed as the birthplace of liberalism and one of the most ethnically diverse populations in Europe such could hardly be the case.

My hot take is that it's emerging from most ordinary people's frustration at how the UK economy has been steered in such a way as to ensure that the benefits of globalisation go to a few while most everybody else has to deal with any negative consequences. Very telling that the core economic hubs were anti-brexit and the "forgotten" parts of the UK were pro-brexit. Scotland notwithstanding of course who would've left the UK a few years before only for the issues of staying in the EU ...

Old stupid racists most likely voted for brexit.

Other people also voted for brexit, including young stupid racists, middle aged opportunistic millionaires, people who wanted to vote against Cameron, and other groups.

Overall only 26% voted for brexit, and many of those "old stupid racists" have since died, so no, it's nowhere near 50% of the United Kingdom and Gibraltar that are "old stupid racists".

I live there.

I would add to this, that there's probably a lot of lobbying at work as well. In my country at least, the lobby groups for that "other recreational drug", alcohol, and the pharmaceutical industry are both very powerful. There are vested interests in not seeing (a) popular recreational use and (b) promising medical applications take hold, precisely because it's something that can just be grown and is difficult to control and profiteer upon. I'll be accused by many people of spouting conspiracy theories but it doesn't require any mental backflips at all to render it plausible so I'm claiming Ogham's.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/

America started the war, and pushed it on all its allies.

But if it was all about domestic politics then there would have been no reason to to that.

Except fighting drugs requires international co-operation. Once the officials are legally bound to do something, they will start doing their business as effectively as possible, including, perhaps, feeding back the message to the higher ups that they need international co-operation.

The higher ups cannot say "we don't care" because that would immediately politically de-legitimize the drugwar effort.

Hence, all policies, despite their true intent, have all sorts of unnecessary appendices unrelated to the original goal.

> Except fighting drugs requires international co-operation.

You're not wrong (well you arebecause even that doesn't work), but things like cannabis are entirely domestic so no international cooperation required. The harder stuff typically originated from places that weren't close American allies so our cooperation wasn't particularly important.

> things like cannabis are entirely domestic

Not true at all.

I was responding to the idea that it is not about fighting drugs.

> because its goal was to incarcerate, disenfranchise, extort, terrorize, and break apart the families of minorities so that America could retain a racial hierarchy after the civil rights movement

IF you believe this then trying to solve the problem at its roots you are undermining your own strategy.

"This is a very US centric view but the war on drugs is very international."

US basically dictates global policies in the block of countries not part of the soviet sphere of influence during the cold war. US defends it's position in the global community using every trick and leverage available. If something is illegal in the US you can be quite assured they will try to apply leverage to make it illegal everywhere else, especially if it's an issue that requires international co-operation - like the war on drugs, for example.

For example, the international banking system is basically controlled by US policies. Parties, that do not co-operate and obey US authorities can and will be shut out of the large pool of global financial services that is critical to running businesses effectively.

Another effect is the pure cultural force US practices have on the "western block" of countries. Lots of ideas (good or bad) are taken into use in other countries after they become fashionable in the US.

You are quite right prudish moral superiority is of course a facet, but that is not the key here, I think.

Although the US has a lot of influence on international culture and laws the above is simply not really true.

Drug laws in Europe vary wildly between countries, with places like Portgual decriminalising even hard drugs and places like the Netherlands having an open culture when it comes to buying and consuming cannabis and other 'less hard' drugs. Then of course there's the big difference in laws when it comes to drinking; a 16-year old drinking on the street is perfectly legal in quite a few European countries whereas in the US it would get you arrested on multiple charges.

Banking laws are very different as well: I think the recent introduction of MiFID II shows quite clearly that Europe has very different views on regulation. Hell, the new rules on investment research are pretty much opposite to the US ones.

GDPR is forcing numerous US companies into complying with European views on privacy.

OP is quite right in saying that it's a very US-centric view to think drug policy around the world is mainly caused by race relations in the US.

Another point of view is recently-introduced SESTA. It was a law intended to stop sex trafficing in the US. Seems like a nice bill, right?

Well, as a direct consequence of it, sites like Backpage got shut down and reddit banned loads and loads of communities that were used by sex workers in countries across Europe where sex work is as legal as it can get. Sex workers were simply cut off of their usual ways of communicating between each other and attracting customers because of a law in the US.

And the reason that the Netherlands always gets mentioned when talking about soft drugs is because it decriminalized marihuana decades ago. In reality, the way they did that was very impractical and open to loopholes that were commonly abused by the coffee shops. Dutch laws on drugs, at their current state, are way worse then the laws in places where marihuana was decriminalized recently. The reason for that is the pressure from the neighbors, because the ability to buy and grow larger quantities + open borders = more work for Belgium and Germany.

Let's compare Canada and the Netherlands. Canada: you can grow 4 plants and have up to 30 grams with you for recreational use. The Netherlands: you can grow 2 plants and have up to 5 grams with you at all times. In the Netherlands, these restrictions also apply to the supply side, so coffee shops operate mostly in a shady gray area. In Canada, they're introducing licensed supply chain.

> vary wildly between countries

Not really, name a European country where I won't be jailed for having even an ounce of cocaine? Portugal is as close as it gets to sensible drug policy, and they've only decriminalized (as opposed to legalized) small personal-use amounts.

The only drugs that should be regulated are antibiotics :)

An ounce is quite a lot but there are several places in Europe where a small quantity of unidentified white powder on you will not cause consequences unless you're a suspected dealer or something. And you won't get searched in the first place unless you're being taken into custody (for some other offense) or suspected for being a danger to others or yourself.

E.g. Berlin is very tolerant. So is Portugal.

Helsinki would be complete opposite. You will be searched for any minor reason and anything found on you will cause consequences regardless of why you're being stopped and searched.

Berlin was arresting people with any amount of weed in certain public parks just a couple years ago, because an awful coalition government thought Zero Tolerance would surely work this time.

Its laws are more or less identical to New York State's - decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, everything else is extremely illegal - just with shorter prison sentences and perhaps slightly looser enforcement.

> Not really, name a European country where I won't be jailed for having even an ounce of cocaine?

Spain. A couple of years ago I was in Madrid and went out to a bar with some friends. One of them tells me to come outside with him, then he proceeds to prepare some cocaine lines on the roof of a random car parked on the street right outside the bar. When he's about to snort them, some normal looking guys approach us (not in uniforms) and then all of a sudden they flash their badges (they were cops). I thought I was going to jail right there and then.

The cops asked for our ids and then started grilling us about where the cocaine came from, they said that if we gave up our dealer they would let us go. My friend was feeding them random info which they wouldnt buy. Then one of our friends who was inside the bar came outside looking for us. Somehow he realized what was going on at a glance, he walks up to the cops and asks what's going on. The cops tell him they caught us in possession of cocaine. Before they could keep talking, he cuts them off and demands that they write us a ticket and let us go. The cops are a little bit baffled and are about to say something when our friend tells them he's a lawyer, that he knows how these things work and sternly demands again they give us a ticket and let us go.

After that the cops didn't say a word. They just gave a ticket to my friend who had the cocaine (I didn't even get one), confiscated the cocaine and then let us go.

One of the biggest scares of my life.

For an ounce though? I picked that amount because it's not a lot, but it is generally considered to be more than a "personal use" amount.

You're best bet in the US getting caught with that much or more is to just get robbed by the cops, which actually happens all the time.

Have no idea how much my friend was carrying in terms of weight, didn't have a scale with me. Also, it would have probably been in grams not in whatever weird units you guys use in the US.

Jokes aside, it's confusing the way you used the expression "an ounce", given that "an ounce of" something is usually used to express just "a bit of" something.

Like Germany and prostitution?

And the world did end- not

Banking is a great example. FATCA forces banks all over the world to send financial information on American account holders to the USA.

If a bank has even a vague hint that you might be a US person, they have to send all your personal financial information to the USA, so that the USA can collect tax from you wherever you are in the world.

Not only is this terrible from a privacy perspective. It has cost foreign banks hundreds of millions of dollars to implement. It has cost Australian banks almost half a billion dollars over the past decade.

Yet any time the rest of the world tries to make the USA play by their rules, the US government claims some moral outrage about sovereignty.

> US basically dictates global policies in the block of countries not part of the soviet sphere of influence during the cold war.

You are basing yourself on vague feelings of superiority, rather than actual knowledge. Influential, yes. Dictating policy, not at all.

I'm in Portugal, we follow the US lead very often on foreign policy, but only when we agree.

We've taken our own way in drug policy, extradition (we've refused to extradite criminals to the US because of the death penalty), immigration, and in a host of other areas.

Then why would places unaligned with the US follow similar policies? Places like Cuba, Iran, etc?

The war on drugs is "very international" if you describe any and every kind of law enforcement as "war".

Cannabis is illegal in many countries, including one where a past minister of justice told a story about how he'd been offered cannabis by another parent at his children's school. The parent who offered was a senior policeman.

That isn't war.

As opposed to the country leading the charge with a president that "didn't enhale": https://www.google.com.au/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/4711887/b...

The US has unquestionably played an outsized role in shaping international drug policy over the last 100 years. I'm also pretty sure that the 'war on drugs' is a uniquely American phrase, and if it isn't it was certainly coined and popularised there.

"war on <<insert something here that isn't actual war>>" is uniquely American, examples include drugs, obesity, poverty etc. I've never heard this phrase used elsewhere. Why everything needs to be a "war", I don't understand

The parent comment is correct.

It’s not even a controversial position, as it’s been stated publically by the people who crafted and implemented the legislation that this was the stated aim.

And the US demanded that other countries adopt our drug policy laws and they followed our lead.

This cognitive censorship is something to be outraged about - flies directly in the face of the Establishment Clause of the first Amemdment and is deeply detrimental to our democracy.

Even William F. Buckley was against the War On Drugs.

What we ought to pour those resources into is a “War on Trauma” (if we still require branding things as a ‘war’ to garner political support.)

Trauma is what underpins the majority of mental health issues including depression, suicide, and addiction.

Drugs without trauma isn’t a problem, it’s when the drugs become a proxy for self regulation that we run into issues.

> And the US demanded that other countries adopt our drug policy laws and they followed our lead.

I know it's a common meme on HN but I find it hard to believe that the whole world decided to ban cannabis just because the US wanted to. It may have been a contributing/deciding factor in some places but there must be more to it.

I don’t think policy happens in a vacuum. And I imagine the same forces were are work in other counties as well — drug laws are a great way to keep young people and minorities disempowered and to preserve institutional power.

>> A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: “You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. <<

The world follows the US in all kinds of arenas, often because the US strongarms them into it.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/

The term you're using (war on drugs) is an American notion. No one is claiming that all drug prohibition is due to American efforts but we've been 'successful' in exporting and reinforcing the insane attitude for decades around the world.

This documentary opened my eyes to a lot of issues I didn't know existed. A good starting point that led me to read more about this. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5895028/

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