Hacker News Reader

Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that this sounds so tin foil hat because it is absolutely true.

There is no grand conspiracy to keep drugs illegal. There is a vast, semi well intentioned system built over a century that people adapted to over time to profit off of and now that they are profiting they are not going to give it up easily. Because of the governmental nature of the people who profit they are also very well positioned to lobby for themselves. The sheer number of small actors who benefit from this system has made it unbelievably entrenched.

View on HN

>There is no grand conspiracy to keep drugs illegal

Many people working together to keep something illegal in order to profit is not a "conspiracy", it's lobbying.

>semi well intentioned system

How is valuing money and power over millions of lives "semi well intenioned"?

Very few of the millions of people are conspiring together in a single group. They conspire in small groups to achieve their individual goals which may directly contradict the goals of others within the system on a case by case basis.

It's not like some secret cabal where they sit around in black robes and vote on how to maximize false arrests for profit.

Do you think out of every one of the millions of people in that system that literally every person has absolutely no intention other than profit? Yes, some people within the legal and even prison system have good intentions. To think otherwise a pretty cartoonish world view.

I think the hangup people have is when they see apparent orchestration, groups of people making moves that seem coordinated, they assume that conspiracy must be the explanation.

But we know from nature that this needn't be the case. Look at a school of fish. There is no hierarchical command structure, nor any democratic council of the fishes, or anything like that. Their schooling behavior is emergent behavior from each individual fish following more or less the same rules as the other, coded in their DNA. They take cues from each other, go with the flow, but they're not actually conspiring with the other fish. There is no Fish Illuminati, just a bunch of fish doing normal fish things.

The failure to recognize the possibility of emergent (or convergent) behavior in humans is I think the root cause of many conspiracy theories. This is related to the concept of pareidolia, e.g. seeing patterns when there are none. In this case there are genuine patterns (fish clump up in schools) but the explanation offered up for this behavior is erroneous (fish Illuminati.)

Equating corporate lobbyists and special interest groups with "secret cabals in black robes"? That is caroonish indeed. Unless of course you consider black suits and ties to be "black robes" ;)

It is both. They way Purdue Pharma managed and sold OxyContin was 100% a conspiracy. They have also lobbied a huge amount. Imo in medicine, with doctor kickbacks etc, the line between lobbying and conspiracy is extremely fine and a few "legal" lobbying tactics should probably be illegal.

Never well intentioned. Always exploiting hollow morality to permit the state to commit acts of violence at will against select segments of the population

It's not just that though. It's also seen as a way of criminalising undesirables.

Nothing tinfoil hat about it. Drug dealers & cartels are well-known for using force to maintain monopolies.

I’m assuming the parent comment referred to “legal” actors lobbying to keep drugs illegal, as opposed to the cartels themselves.

Do you think cartels have an interest in drugs being illegal, and if so could you explain why? I’d expect cartels to welcome the change as they can do away with fighting the law (where they no doubt pour a lot of their resources into) and start operating as legitimate businesses.

they won't function as legitimate businesses. there's not significant money to be made growing legal crops or synthesizing simple, 100 year old compounds. their business is operating a supply chain that most nation states are busy trying to disrupt.

> I’d expect cartels to welcome the change as they can do away with fighting the law (where they no doubt pour a lot of their resources into) and start operating as legitimate businesses.

Prohibition reduces competition which raises margins. It's the same reason why large corporations like regulation that destroys small competitors. The cartels don't want to have to compete with Joe Farmer in Iowa growing drug crops and selling them at the same margins as corn producers do.

If drugs were legal I imagine that other than the cartels would produce and sell the drugs. Maybe big pharma and the tobacco industry.

Your definitions of cartels & force are different to mine :)

Legitimate opiate producers compete in the same market with illegitimate ones. The force they use is police, dea, etc., instead of guns directly, but the techniques are the same.

After all, a state is what happens when organized crime expands its time horizons.

What a pompous lie.

The state happened when people get fed up of being trodden on by tyrants, warlords and robber barons and decide to implement concepts like law, order and justice.

That it's not perfect doesn't mean it should be reduced to a trite, intellectually bankrupt, soundbite.

Drugs in Portugal are still illegal, so that doesn't answer the question.

But now we’re just playing semantics.

For most intents and purposes, the difference between legal and fully decriminalized is not significant.

The parent’s point is that there are many parties with an interest in drugs being criminalized, which explains why the world has not copied Portugal’s decriminalization model.

Its very significant to me

“Decriminalized” is the same level as when literal snake oil salesmen were going around fairs in the 1880s selling unknown substances that killed you

“Legal” is when the quality is regulated and analyzed for a specific purpose and consumers know what they are buying and sellers face consequences for violating that

> For most intents and purposes, the difference between legal and fully decriminalized is not significant.

Parent talked about profit, but in Portugal the production, distribution and sale are still a crime, and therefore the people profiting from those activities are still the same.

The profit is in enforcing the law. Defense contractors and prison guard unions don't make any money when something is nominally illegal but nobody is actually spending any money trying to stop it.

Which only applies to America and not the rest of the progressive democracies which tend to lack these actors.

So why not in Germany, the UK, France, Sweden, Italy? Why just Portugal? That is the question.

Less US-centric thinking!

It applies to other countries proportional to the extent that they have a bureaucratic apparatus to fight a "war on drugs" employing manpower and technology to arrest people and put them in prison.

Which is to say, there is a bias everywhere in favor of the status quo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com