The year Mexico legalised drugs | Hacker News Reader

The year Mexico legalised drugs

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158 pointsmonort69 comments

…there was no intrinsic link between drug addiction and criminality. In fact, it was only the high price of drugs, generated by prohibition, that led users to commit crimes, he said.

This statement is a real eye opener for me.

The US government learned this with the prohibition of alchohol in the early 20th century, then promptly forgot it.

Or used it to incarcerate a portion of the population and use it as an excuse to violate people's rights. Although it's unnecessary now that we can use terrorism as an even better excuse.

Drug crackdowns still abuse minority parts of cities. The people pushing drug laws still would like to keep those minorities in prisons without the right to vote.

Its a shame that they have to use evidence of a crime to abuse those minorities.

Don't forget Cocaine Importing Agency!

Criminal drug prohibition belongs to a whole category of policy ideas that don't work and cause tremendous harm and yet are tried over and over and over again for ideological reasons.

Others include things like (to be equal opportunity and criticize both left-wing and right-wing ones) abstinence based sexual education, rent control and price controls generally, extreme trade protectionism, military driven attempts to re-make foreign societies, full scale command economies, legislating religious and social customs, etc.

Look at the influence alcohol has in the US today though.

"An estimated 88,000 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States"

I could google statistics for violent crimes committed while under the influence of alcohol, drunk driving statistics, etc. Whether we like to admit it or not alcohol has left a giant, negative, impact on our society.

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-co...

The lessons from the abolition era were that people were going to get alcohol, and the after-affects were so violent and crime-ridden that the government was better off legalizing it and producing laws around the consumption and distribution of it. The same lessons are applicable to drugs outside of alcohol. 88,000 people is terrible. But most of those are due to people knowingly breaking laws. Laws that were written for peoples safety.

When there are no laws around drugs except for "dont do it", you're gonna get gang violence like the abolition era had. Organized crime is not something you want.

> Whether we like to admit it or not alcohol has left a giant, negative, impact on our society.

I don't think anyone disputes that. The question at hand however is if the legal status of alcohol has any influence on the impact, and if so, what it is.

The assumptions of drug or alcohol prohibition are that a) Making a substance illegal reduces consumption of that substance. b) Reduced consumption results in reduced harm.

The thing about b) is that not every drinker is a violent drunk and not every drug user is using drugs in harmful way. Prohibitionists are assuming that it not only reduces the number of users, but also that it reduces the number of problematic users.

Now the casual pot smoker or the "one beer after work" drinker is not causing trouble for society. At the same time, they are the ones most likely stopping consumption should the substance become illegal. However, the alcohol or heroin addict may not cease consumption the day his substance of choice (or at this point, habit) becomes illegal but instead acquire it through the black market, potentially causing more damage than the substance itself would.

> Now the casual pot smoker or the "one beer after work" drinker is not causing trouble for society.

> At the same time, they are the ones most likely stopping consumption should the substance become illegal.

What makes you say that? Over 100,000,000 Americans have tried marijuana, which largely remains illegal.

The influence of alcohol, or any drug, should be a kicker during sentencing for all violent and negligent crimes.

Implying that you wouldn't have those same effects with prohibition in effect (people very easily got their hands on alcohol, nor is it possible to ever prohibit it, considering how easy it is to make) in addition to organized crime and black markets for the stuff and lost tax revenue.

Many drugs at the population level cause more damage than harm, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise. (e.g. alcohol, marijuana)

Unfortunately, so does banning them.

There's an individualistic vs societal interest aspect to this as well. For some people marijuana is the best treatment or their illness, so do we inflict suffering on them for the greater society?

It doesn't mean that novel approaches couldn't be effective. It would be relatively easy to contaminate/poison the supply rather than stop it, but rather morally reprehensible.

Also, the current political climate benefits from a drugged populace (dumber, less motivated) with the second-class citizens (cheap labor) criminality creates.

they didn't forget. The department tasked with prohibiting alcohol consumption lobbied to ban other things so they'd continue to have jobs.

In what way? Is this not a commonly accepted truth where you are from? Or did it speak to you in some other way that I don't see?

I read his statement as sarcasm. I'm actually hard pressed to think of how I could interpret it seriously.

I would suggest reading up on the Swiss system that hugely reduced a severe heroin problem by treating addiction as a medical problem instead of a criminal problem. Doctors simply administer as much heroin to addicts as they want. It was so successful that now Germany and a couple of other countries have adopted it. Portugal has also had success with decriminalization. There is plenty of evidence out there to support his statement.

Yes, and the person you reply to is saying that this is obvious (from my understanding). I think you have just argued for something you already agree on.

It was nice, though, to learn about the countries that have had success.

Many people are addicted to caffeine; but how many steal to buy coffee?

it's so cheap and readily available that they don't have to this is because it is legal

Would making alcohol cheaper prevent drunk driving? Bar fights?

Cheaper drugs will likely reduce theft and gang violence, but they sure as hell won't prevent people from being irresponsible while intoxicated.

The number of drugs who are linked to a higher chance of criminal behavior due to being intoxicated are rather limited and when it comes to drug related crimes another topic in itself.

Someone smoking tobacco, weed or heroin wont just suddenly get the idea, that it would be fun to rob someone.

When it comes to heroin, but also other highly addictive substances, the main issue is procurement crime. Which is no wonder if someone is addicted and you look at the street prices. Its not feasible for alot of people to make that kind of money legally. Which is a completely different picture if you look at procurement closer to production cost. Production of something like poppies is as inexpensive as it gets.

>The iron law of prohibition is a term coined by Richard Cowan in 1986 which posits that as law enforcement becomes more intense, the potency of prohibited substances increases.[1] Cowan put it this way: "the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs."[2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition

Given the choice between not being able to get adequate pain relief due to DEA intervention, and legalizing drugs, I would choose legalizing them, provided legalizing them would not limit dosage to insufficient levels for pain relief.

It is incomprehensible to me that it is somehow acceptable to solve the "opioid crisis" by making people with serious pain suffer and by persecuting their doctors for trying to help them.

However, it would be totally appropriate to allow limits on employment, insurance, and government benefits due to drug use. While I support their right to choose, I shouldn't be required to subsidize someone else's destructive choices.

If you limit an addict's ability to get medical insurance, you'll end up subsidizing them anyway. Hospitals are prohibited from turning patients away in the US (and I wouldn't want to live in a world where they could do so). So addicts show up, get treated, and default on any bills they incur. The expense from this treatment gets passed on to everyone else. Try visiting an emergency room at 1am on a Saturday night and you'll see what I mean.

Incidentally, do you have the same views on employment, insurance, and government benefits as they pertain to alcohol consumption?

Although "Hospitals are prohibited from turning patients away in the US (and I wouldn't want to live in a world where they could do so)." is technically true. For instance if you have aquired Hepatitis C and went to a hospital in the US with no insurance, they will not consider treatment to cure the disease. They will help make you comfortable with your chronic disease until it kills you.

Medicaid is one of the largest buyers of the Hep C cure.

You don't just magically get medicaid though. You have to apply for it and follow up with things if they send you stuff in the mail. If you don't do that you go back to being uninsured which leads back to what JudasGoat said where you will get the minimum amount of care in order to get you out of the hospital.

There is a running experiment in Seattle, WA, to have more palliative care facilities for chronic public inebriates [0]. "It's a lot cheaper having them spend the night at 1811 than at the E.R. or at the drunk tank," Mr. Meyers said.

It still seems that "1811 Eastlake" is operating as of 2016 [1] and is looked as a model for San Francisco as of 2011 [2].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05homeless.html

[1] https://www.desc.org/what-we-do/housing/1811-eastlake/

[2] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-looks-at-Seattle-...

I disagree that it's appropriate to limit their benefits. I used to feel the same way (regarding health insurance) about people who don't do exercise or eat healthy, why am I subsidizing all these people who chose to be unhealthy then get type 2 diabetes? It seemed to me that running a few times a week and eating vegetables is so simple but we still give them benefits. I eventually came to the conclusion that you really just need to treat anyone that wants to get better

I think the right approach to drugs is to regulate use by neighborhood. And with monetary fines only.

Outright bans cause too many problems. Illegal production makes drugs more dangerous. And allowing everything has some social costs too. Each approach eventually leads to many people wanting the opposite policy, so it will just go back and forth.

Regulating it by neighborhood will allow people to keep drug abuse away from their kids, while still allowing those who want to use drugs to access it without too much trouble. They can just travel to a neighborhood where it's allowed. Avoiding fines will give them an incentive.

Neighborhoods that do allow drug use will pick which drugs to allow and be able to tax the activity and have rules to handle the activity. There are red light districts for prostitution. Why not handle drug use the same way?

Hamsterdam?

City governments may very likely choose to have no (as in zero) districts, effectively banning the activity. It's happening much like this with cannabis legalization in California.

Then doesn't the municipalities foot the bill for prosecution and incarceration?

Yes, and at least here they are more than willing to do so.

> I think the right approach to drugs is to regulate use by neighborhood. And with monetary fines only.

So, if you have the money to pay the fine without breaking a sweat, you just ignore the rule.

> Regulating it by neighborhood will allow people to keep drug abuse away from their kids

No, it won't. For much the same reason local fireworks bans don't, except drug use is a lot easier to conceal.

> Neighborhoods that do allow drug use will pick which drugs to allow and be able to tax the activity

No, they won't, for the same reason neighborhood bans don't work. It's impossible to police effectively.

Maybe areas that allow drug sales will be able to tax (some of) it (but any tax in the “legal” area directly reduces the impact of fines in the “illegal” area, and even people who go wholly legal will shift activity to the lowest tax areas available; you might also look into what a big business cigarette smuggling to avoid taxes is.)

> So, if you have the money to pay the fine without breaking a sweat, you just ignore the rule.

Not just that, but if you can't or won't pay the fine, what happens? You end up imprisoned just as if the penalty had been to throw you in jail all along.

If you can't pay the fine in most states you aren't supposed to go to jail.

I'm not worried about activity that people successfully conceal or do in private. That isn't what upsets people who want to criminalize things.

It is also possible to have penalties that scale with the value of your property or income.

And I don't think we need to worry about policing either. Neighbors in such neighborhoods are perfectly capable of recording video. It is public activity that is the issue, not private, so no need for undercover stings.

Activity goes where taxes are low and where it is convenient. Taxes are very high in Manhattan but it is more popular for many activities than rural New Hampshire.

And there are other considerations too, like safety. A place where there is no tax and perhaps no order might have lower appeal than a well-policed area with a moderate tax.

That approach might help in some circumstances, but it has been tried in some areas in Australia with alcohol, with the effect of pushing up the prices like a black market and people consuming the alcohol quickly as to not get caught with it.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-08/100-dollars-for-a-bag-...

And they had to stop because of the US... no surprise there.

Indeed... Here is hoping that our next president (AMLO) who is kind of leftist and admires Cárdenas, will finally legalize drugs.

The British East India Company, the largest drug trading organization of the 19th century, is to be blamed for most of modern drug trade.

It is very likely that the opium poppies in modern Mexico are direct descendants of the ones planted by the British.

After the British lost their colonies in the Americas, they tried to fix their economy by selling opium to China. A few decades later, many Chinese workers moved to the Americas, among them, opium poppy planters. Few decades later, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and many of them moved to Mexico.

Total death toll? millions of people.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgQahGsYokU (animated explanation)

Fascinating. I've always had an amateur historian bent when it comes to drug history, especially that of Papaver somniferum. From writing about laudanum label designs in my design history class to reading Steven Martin's Opium Fiend novel detailing his addiction to smoking opium like they did in the 19th century, I've had a peculiar fascination with this substance's history despite my only actual experience being with morphine before an appendectomy surgery.

You seem knowledgeable about the history in this case. Any suggestions for further reading?

I just casually history-related articles online. In this case, deep historic knowledge is not required to arrive to this conclusion.

In my case, questions such as: "what happened to the British empire after losing the American revolutionary war?" eventually led me to learn about that.

Don't forget to mention that the independent USA tried to compete in the Opium Wars selling middle eastern opium to China.

I get that the trade imbalance meant that BEIC/Britain looked for something other than silver to trade. But wasn't Qing (?) China closed?

AIUI they traded with Chinese merchants at designated ports, trading opium to get tea. The Chinese then traded the drugs on.

Three things that don't make sense to me in the "traditional" telling of "Britain purposefully created opium _addiction_ across China".

* One, that opium addiction was a new idea, opium was widely used in Britain.

* Two, how did merchants at the ports create demand in the interior, surely they met demand outcompeting local sources on cost and so widening the market.

* Three, after Britain was shut out of the trade China seemingly already had a massive local supply.

These things tend to make me think that in some measure the Chinese closed the ports in order to prevent cheaper product from supplying an already established and widespread market. And yet, I've read, once that BEIC supply was stopped the Chinese maintained the market with local supply.

Are their letters/papers where controllers of BEIC talk about addiction? Did they 'just' look for a large market that they could undercut?

It seems more like a tale of amoral merchants (of many nationalities), rather than evil Britain. But I'm from the UK (which does and has done plenty of evil things, selling weapons to the Saudis when we know they're using then to kill civilians, for example).

[banter] Of course the British are still addicted to tea, but we diversified our supply somewhat. Having comestibles disposed of in the sea seems like a repeating theme - perhaps the Dutch will sink our potato shipments after Brexit.[/banter]

When the emperor banned opium, the British sold it to smugglers. When the Chinese seized 20,000 chests of trafficked opium to stop it from being sold, the British attacked China and made them sign an agreement to buy tons of stuff from the British, including opium.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36781368

So Britain stopped trading, and traded legally with Chinese people who themselves smuggled the opium ... see to me that sounds like the smugglers are doing the worst thing there?

The Chinese seized and destroyed opium from merchants from several countries, Britain sent forces to release merchants, ships, goods and was demanding compensation for the destroyed opium, which compensation they then fought to acquire.

If the Emperor/Lin Xehu(sp?) at any time ordered that selling tea to foreigners was illegal(?), then it looks much worse for the outside forces; if not then it looks like balance of trade was a prime motivation on both sides, rather than (im)moral considerations.

(https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/opium-war-1839-1842 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6304d1/what_... based on other tertiary sources I've read seem like good synopses.)

Stop complicating things. This is very simple:

1. The British planted opium then transported it to China and traded it.

2. The Chinese told them it was illegal.

3. They continued trading it.

4. The Chinese seized all of it.

5. They declared war so they could continue trading it.

I don't see the confusion or debate here. What the British were doing was very simple: illegal drug trade for profit.

What others were doing is a separate debate and does not absolve the British from anything. Don't mix things.

>Three, after Britain was shut out of the trade China seemingly already had a massive local supply.

As mentioned, smuggling became a huge business, and it wasn't too hard. The UK had a massive land border with China, China has a huge coastline with pirates controlling the seas/major rivers, which also allowed towns to ignore Beijing's orders. There was not a major local supply.

> Two, how did merchants at the ports create demand in the interior, surely they met demand outcompeting local sources on cost and so widening the market.

The Yangtze and Yellow rivers.

So why did the Chinese merchants exchange their tea for opium? If they didn't already have a market for it, did they set about creating the market.

AIUI the opium was traded in local ports, then smuggled to the interior by locals (because other ethnicities couldn't get access). Is that wrong; could you cite sources.

Are you saying British merchants navigated the Yangtze and Huang He in order to initiate opium use, just to trade tea ... why didn't BEIC choose some other product (whatever drug was being used, for example) if opium wasn't already in demand -- it must have taken decades to create that demand, especially as they might AIUI be killed just for being there (in the interior) and stood out from the crowd quite considerably.

It seems somewhat analogous to blaming North African nations (Kenya, Ivory Coast, etc) for my coffee/chocolate use, Nestlé are still evil, but I'm the one buying it.

>So why did the Chinese merchants exchange their tea for opium? If they didn't already have a market for it, did they set about creating the market.

The market built up over the century before the war by introducing it then importing enough to make it affordable.

>AIUI the opium was traded in local ports, then smuggled to the interior by locals (because other ethnicities couldn't get access). Is that wrong; could you cite sources.

The opium was generally traded in ports, but more as different boats were needed. Access was not a major issue. I don't know what sources you want, river deltas have been trade hubs for millennia.

>just to trade tea ... Why didn't BEIC choose some other product (whatever drug was being used, for example) if opium wasn't already in demand -- it must have taken decades to create that demand, especially as they might AIUI be killed just for being there (in the interior) and stood out from the crowd quite considerably.

"Just to trade tea" made them filthy rich in Britain, it's like saying the Spanish conquered Peru "just for gold and silver." There weren't other British products the Chinese had interest in, and the British decision to push opium happened sixty years before the war.

tl;dr. The British planted, transported and traded drugs for profit, and as a consequence ruined millions of lives, and counting. This is a solid historical fact.

The British were drug dealers, and many modern drug dealers exist because of the British. Period.

Don't try to dilute or deflect the blame. It happened, it continues to cause harm today, and it will never be forgotten. Live with it.

I cannot care less about revisionist arguments.

Similar tiny bit of history but in france organized crime, based on the few articles that I've read, it seems that it's old mafias in sicilia then south france that pushed for hashish importation (probably because bank jobs stopped being profitable) and then sold to the nascent urban market in Paris or similar cities. Lots of half educated young immigrants to sell to. side effect: northern africans are now stigamtized for this.

ps: the video above is part of this 4 part series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5CfNx__nBNX...

This is all tied together even more closely than that. Consider that from the beginning of the European China trade, the only reliable good that westerners could exchange for silk, tea, porcelain, etc was silver. An enormous fraction of the silver mined in Potosi and Mexico wound up in the hands of Cantonese merchants and Manchu officials eventually, by way of Manilla, Macao and Hong Kong. While Britain lost her colonies in the new world, Spain was facing her own troubles with her colonies, and many of the long productive mines started playing out in addition. So the silver specie supply grew tighter in the 19th century, and more expensive to sustain.

Conversely, in China, all this influx of Mexican dollars was distorting the currency - there was a bimetallic system where ordinary coinage was used everyday, but silver bullion or ingots were used for larger transactions, like taxes, set in so many ounces of silver. The cash price of silver floated on the market rate, and farmers changed cash or produce for silver to pay taxes. All that silver made silver cheap, right until the start of the opium trade. Then the flows reversed, and China became an exporter of silver. Tax rates set in silver remained the same, however, while the exchange rate became increasingly expensive. This impoverished many Chinese small farmers, and Manchu banner garrisons, and contributed to the waves of revolt that nearly tore the Qing state apart, most notably the Taiping Rebellion.

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