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Comment by patrickmay | Hacker News Reader

The article traces the Bogle's family start in crime back to the Prohibition era. While there are, of course, a host of reasons why people become criminals, ridiculous laws are a contributing factor. The War on (some) Drugs is repeating the same behavior and expecting different results. It's well past time to end it, along with the human devastation it causes.

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While the War on (Americans who use (some)) Drugs is a decades-long tragedy whose human costs dwarf most natural disasters, it's pretty clear the goals of US drug policy aren't to reduce criminal activity, but instead explicitly criminalize what may consider a personal choice.

Given that minimizing criminal activity isn't a concern isn't a goal, what incentive is there to change the policy? Saying that the war on drugs causes more harm than drugs is obvious, but repeatedly pointing that out and expecting policy to change hasn't worked for a long time.

It has been working, just not quickly. Weed is legal across the whole west coast.

Pseudo-legal. It's still illegal in the whole country, but federal law enforcement is giving a pass in states that have removed state level laws against it.

The opiod crisis challenges the notion that lax drug laws would be an improvement.

In USA, there are 2million people in prison/jail right now, and 2million people with an opiod use disorder.

https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html

I support legalizing — or at least decriminalizing — most drugs and treating it as a public health issue rather than a crime. But after talking with some police officers I can also understand their perspective on keeping drug laws in place. They often know who the local gang members and other violent criminals are, but don't necessarily have enough evidence to convict in court. Most of those serious criminals also use and/or deal drugs. So when the police catch them holding it's easy to get a conviction and take a bad guy off the street for a while.

it is as easy as convicting innocent person to get that bonus

That's just a police state with extra steps. Why not make breathing illegal and give cops discretion to only arrest "bad" people?

Also, dealing is very different from using.

"Tracey Bogle, who served a 16-year prison sentence for kidnapping, armed robbery, assault, car theft, and sexual assault"

Yeah, he'd be a saint if drugs were legal.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

If you make it illegal, for the sake of being able to throw certain demographics in prison (brown, black, hippies), then you incentivize further actions. If you're caught, you're already going away for a long time.

That's why decriminalization/legalization of drugs also stops other crime. Suddenly, $thing is no longer criminalized, so people doing it have no reason to commit crimes.

TFA didn't mention drugs, it talks about a family where burglary was a bonding activity. Plenty of crime existed before War on Drugs, and it still exists in places where such strictures don't exist.

The article is scant on details, but if the ancestor's only crime during Prohibition was bootlegging, then actually, it's possible Prohibition caused generations of other crimes that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Then we should also get rid of the prohibition on ivory- after all, think of all of those future generations of criminals we're creating by jailing poachers.

its not the same thing at all, and your argument is logically fallacious because of it. A person consuming a drug violates no other beings rights. This is obviously not true about ivory poaching.

The fallacy is defining all crimes as drug crimes, then saying legalizing drugs will end all crime. Might as well legalize violence directly.

But actually, crime IS crime, in important ways. Put it this way; marijuana can be a "gateway drug" without being addictive, because people who are willing to break the law and social norms to do one thing are the kind of people who might break the law and social norms to do another thing; it's correlation in that case, though. To extent the analogy, maybe now the marijuana user's child begins using marijuana because their parents did, but then they move on to hard drugs. Their willingness to break the law and social norms in one way made them more open to doing so in another way.

Same thing here; if you create too many victimless crimes, children of 'crime' may grow up to do crimes that actually have victims.

> The fallacy is defining all crimes as drug crimes, then saying legalizing drugs will end all crime.

But no one is making that argument. You’re attacking a strawman.

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