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Comment by njn | Hacker News Reader

the same old story: the US ruins everything. Why was I born here again? fml

Would you please not post nationalistic flamebait here? That's definitely not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The US certainly isn't perfect, but many other global powers throughout history have made their fair share of catastrophic mistakes that changed history.

I can't think of another great power I'd rather had won World War 2. Even those countries it defeated were prosperous in a couple of decades. Contrast that with how France treated Germany after World War 1 or how the Russians subjugated eastern Europe. Not to mention what would have happened if Germany had won.

Still, the drug war has been a huge waste of energy. It enriches some very evil people. And actually makes these drugs much more dangerous, as potency is all over the map as a result of it being illegal.

Are you specifically excluding the last few decades from your evaluation of the negative impact that the USA foreign policy has had on humanity?

Still, if any other power has won, the effects would be much worse.

I’m not sure we would know that. I think I agree, but foreign policy has too many variables for such a simplistic revision

> Just five days after the introduction of the law, the US state department invoked the 1935 amendments to the Law of Importation and Exportation of Narcotic Drugs. The amendments allowed the US to establish an export embargo on narcotics like morphine and cocaine when it deemed the objectives of a country to be neither medical nor scientific.

A state has no right to manage its narcotics exports?

> Early 1930s Japan is the world’s leading cocaine producer (23.3%) followed by the United States (21.3%), Germany (15%), U.K. (9.9%), France (8.3%). [1]

[1] https://www.narconon.org/drug-information/cocaine-timeline.h...

A state has no right...

What state was this? Was a vote held? A law passed? No. This was one asshole LEO, Anslinger, just like lots of other asshole LEOs before and since. The reason that religion invented hell, was so we could savor the idea of this banal excrescence burning there as the decades pass and the death toll of his evil manipulation rises.

Please don't rant like this on HN, regardless of which LEO you're talking about.

LEO?

Law Enforcement Officer

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