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Comment by lgessler | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of how weed is currently sold in DC. You pay $60 or so for a sticker or a dozen cookies, and a courier meets you somewhere and also happens to offer you a "gift". IANAL but my guess is that since possession of weed is decriminalized up to a certain amount (but dealing is not), this is a safer way of going about it.

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A classic comic strip features a prostitute with a cup of pencils on the corner talking to a man. "Pencils are $20 and you can come upstairs to use my pencil sharpener for free."

Weed is legal (not just decriminalized, like Maryland, where there is still a fine) in DC for medical and recreational use, including growing, subject to amount limits. What’s restricted is commercial sale.

This is almost right -- as someone else said, Initiative 71 makes possession, use, cultivation and non-commercial transfer of small amounts of marijuana legal (not just decriminalized) in DC for adults 21 and up. So the regulatory workaround is as you say.

I'm not a lawyer either, but this pattern probably wouldn't hold up in court; dealers' inventories need to be bigger than the legal limit for possession, and the "gift" thing is a pretty thin veil around what everyone knows is actually an illegal commercial transaction. But there's a general understanding that cracking down on small-time "I-71 compliant" businesses is not a police priority, although it does happen from time to time.

Overall, I'm a pretty big fan of this approach to legalization; it allows for a competitive market without the risks of Big Cannabis advertising or of licensing schemes giving all the legalization profits to upper-class white people and cutting the economic victims of the drug war out.

This scheme comes up quite often, and the answer is always the same: autorities are not dumb, and this scheme offers you no extra legal protection whatsoever.

This is true. But it does offer a "brown bag" level of protection. I.E. the story from The Wire about how public drinking is illegal, but if you at least conceal what you're drinking in a brown bag, the cops won't hassle you because they don't really want to enforce the law.

I live in DC and the only weed dealers I hear of getting arrested are the ones who are extremely flagrant, like the one guy who operated out of a van with a giant pot leaf painted on it.

But it does. Complexity, misdirection, and deniability are the basis for getting away with anything. You keep yourself from being "beyond reasonable doubt" by adding doubt in as many ways in as many places as possible.

It is a problem.

This reminds me of how pachinko operates in Japan despite the ban on gambling.

I've seen "play for fun" slot machines in bars in states that don't allow them. If you won, the bartender would discreetly pay you.

A few years ago there were internet cafes where you could buy internet time and receive "sweepstakes tickets," then play games that revealed if you won. They were effectively casinos.

If you ever look at a prostitute's website, they'll often emphasize that you're paying to spend time with them, not for anything sexual.

The problem with these workarounds is that they're basically an invitation to corruption.

Wait, prostitutes have their own individual websites now? I was under the impression that a lot of websites had either closed or limited access to Americans for to some poor laws written to go after Backpage. The effects have been more prostitutes hurt or murdered and no less prostitution, it's just not as in the open anymore.

Let's be clear about what Backpage was doing, because it wasn't just "accepting ads from prostitutes".

Children were being kidnapped, drugged, and trafficked for sex. Those children were being advertised on Backpage.

Backpage had a choice: they could cooperate with law enforcement, they could do nothing, or they could cooperate with the traffickers to ear more money.

They chose to cooperate with the traffickers. They went out of their way to make it harder for law enforcement to protect those children.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...

Although it’s a legal document, the introduction to this report reads more like a tabloid, with “and child sex trafficking” tacked on everywhere to sensationalize things.

But here are the plain facts: Backpage.com intentionally facilitated adult prostitution, while attempting to avoid criminal liability for doing so. They also reported many thousands of child sex traffickers. It’s widely accepted that this was good for the adult prostitutes, since they no longer had to walk the streets and rely on violent pimps for protection.

As part of avoiding criminal liability, Backpage instituted a filter to remove a wide range of words from postings, for example “pay to play”, “full service”, etc. The allegation that they cooperated with child sex traffickers comes from the fact that this filter also included words like “teen” or “young”.

But on the whole, Backpage walked a difficult line between reporting any instances of child sex trafficking and continuing to give adult prostitutes a safe place to advertise.

These charges are primarily enforcing the ban on adult prostitution. The claim that Backpage was “cooperating” with child sex traffickers by filtering a wide range of words from postings is a pretty far reach, but it’s plastered all over this report in exaggerated terms. This is because many people realize that Backpage.com was beneficial to the safety of adult prostitutes, and legalizing prostitution would be more so.

Let's say we take your comment at face value, the law written to specifically target them was pretty poorly written and had wide ranging impacts. There were already ways for the government to take down Backpage if what you're saying is true, they should have taken those actions. What the law did was remove safe harbors protections for all websites to target one specific website, that's overreach. I'm not a fan of useless laws, I'm even more against laws that are harmful. Quite frankly the law didn't help stop child trafficking, and that's even more a problem. So what happened? The sites moved outside of the U.S., policing became harder, and even more children are victimized.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/backpage-ads-sex-traff...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/after-the-closure-of...

https://www.mcall.com/news/breaking/mc-pol-sex-trafficking-b...

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