Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I don't use cannabis. If it were to go away tomorrow, my life wouldn't change one bit.

I am absolutely thrilled with this blanket pardon.

Rephrasing the statement slightly, like:

> I am pardoning additional individuals who may continue to experience the unnecessary collateral consequences of a conviction for simple possession of beer, attempted simple possession of beer, or use of beer.

and it sounds utterly obvious, and ludicrous that it ever would have been an issue in the first place. I love a good stout or porter, and I can walk into just about any grocery store, flash my ID, hand over some cash, and walk out with a bottle of drugs that's caused far more societal harm than cannabis ever did. That I can drink a beer in public and no one bats an eye, while my neighbors could smoke a joint in their own house and go to jail for it, is insanity.

Good on you, Mr. President, for making life better for a whole lot of Americans.

View on HN

100%. The War on Drugs was always in contradiction of the spirit of the 21st Amendment, which ended Prohibition.

It needs to be formally acknowledged as such, and further as fundamentally unconstitutional, but these kinds of victories take time. At least that so-called "War" is destroying fewer lives now.

And the 13th amendment, kinda.

It goes against the spirit of it but not the word of it.

The unfortunate part of the 13th amendment was the addendum that slavery wasn't slavery if it was part of the prison system. Which had the effect that those who wanted to continue the slavery system figured out "Oh, we'll just criminalize being black, and then we're legal again!"

How else was the government to continue to systemically hold down minorities in this country post-Civil Rights Act, while simultaneously enriching the Military Industrial Complex by flooding local law enforcement with military equipment paid for by US taxpayers?

You act as if they couldn't have gone about this 10,000 different ways.

This worked because it's what the people wanted - in response to the 70s - not because some evil scheming overlord.

No, it's fact, not conspiracy theory.

"You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#Drug_war_quote

This is one of many many sources. I'm not willing to put together a comprehensive list of something that is so well known.

Families often raise a concern about how they never knew member X to be a baddie (eg The Golden State Killer). This is not a compelling refutation. Whether anyone can be wrong or lying about anything, is equally weak.

The man said it. I have no doubt.

The part about "enriching the military industrial complex" is certainly a conspiracy theory though. The MIC has only ever shrunk in importance in the American economy, and giving people their used products is like the opposite of enriching them.

Normalizing the use of the equipment guarantees additional future domestic purchases, subscriptions, and other support revenue.

Does it really? Do people really think "Ah but of course the military needs more money, it's given a good use, since the police get it afterwards"?

That’s not even an uncharitable interpretation of what I wrote.

I was talking about the domestic law enforcement continuing to use the stuff they got for cheap/federally subsidized, or free, because “it’s effective.”

They generally don't actually use it or have a use for it though, that's part of the problem. And I don't think buying replacement tires for an MRAP is a lot of subscription revenue.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tell...

Please tell me more about Congress spending money on equipment the military doesn't need or want isn't corporate welfare for Defense Contractors.

Eisenhower even warned us to such actions in 1961, and literally if there was ever someone who would know: it would be a man that was on both sides as a high-ranking general and President. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...

> https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tell...

This article is not about giving used equipment to police departments.

> Eisenhower even warned us to such actions in 1961

Yeah, and we did what he said. US military spending as % GDP has gone straight down since ~1985. (Except around 2008 - but that's because our GDP went down.)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/02/california-s...

Since 1997, the 1033 program has handed $7.4bn worth of surplus equipment from the Department of Defense (DoD) to more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies across America.

Nixon was certainly an enigma compared to other US Presidents: Advocated for "Universal Healthcare" by basically mandating the Federal government to provide stop loss reinsurance to employers and creating a marketplace for poor people with income adjusted premiums... sounds familiar.

Created the EPA

Warmonger but hated by the CIA/FBI

You're missing the point.

All that was popular as well.

This wasn't some evil mastermind scheme to enrich the military industrial complex.

It was run-of-the-mill everyday politics.

The world isn't fair.

That doesn't mean we're all being fooled by some evil genius mastermind pulling the strings we can't see.

It just means that people don't care about what's right or wrong, mostly - just what they want.

It's pretty clear what certain people wanted in response to the 70s stemming from the rise of minority groups like the Black Panthers or the American Indian Movement trying to use their newly-enacted rights to fight oppression. Even the NRA was pro gun control when the Black Panthers were using the 2A for open-carrying to protect black Americans.

If it was truly about marijuana use, then when usage rates for white and black Americans are effectively the same, black people would not be 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for possession than white people.

> black people would not be 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for possession than white people

While on its face true, this isn’t taking into account things like recidivism or multiple charges.

That’s to say the average black person has more priors and is more likely to have multiple charges when charged compared to the average white.

I think the thing you said about priors is repeating a talking point about prosecution or sentencing disparities that isn't particularly relevant in the context of an arrest.

I have no idea what you mean about multiple charges.

> I think the thing you said about priors is repeating a talking point about prosecution or sentencing disparities that isn't particularly relevant in the context of an arrest.

Arrests don’t occur in a vacuum. The prior convictions are known and are a factor.

> I have no idea what you mean about multiple charges.

Person A is smoking pot and is arrested. Person B is smoking pot wearing a bloody t shirt with a knife in his hand. If you’re more likely to engage in criminal activity, you’re more likely to be smoking pot while engaging in criminal activity (again, on average).

> If you’re more likely to engage in criminal activity, you’re more likely to be smoking pot while engaging in criminal activity (again, on average).

I think a slightly simpler way of putting your point is that Black people are more likely to be serious criminals than white people. Am I missing some nuance?

Yes, and if person A and B are white American and African American, the AA smoker is much more likely to be actually arrested, rather than given a warning, etc. at the officer's discretion.

Dog whistles about unknowns like previous convictions or criminal history, and fictitious scenarios attempting to justify your point, don't actually help you the way you think they do.

If you're ignorant enough to think there isn't a disproportionately racist response in the WoD and the application of anti-cannabis laws on the citizenry, you need to open your eyes.

Attempting to claim "the prior convictions are known and are a factor" without admitting the disproportionate affect race has on such convictions being sought in the first place, is ignorant.

"Arrests don't occur in a vacuum." - If you deliberately and willfully ignore the existence of racism in the policing and justice systems, then you're not considering all the factors - and are being misinformed at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst.

For example, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67214409 - a world championship medallist and Olympian sprinter were arrested on entirely fictitious charges of having suspected drugs and weapons - with no basis, and with no evidence of such items being found.

If you can't see how the factor of race fits into the application of these laws against certain citizens more, that's your failure - it's nothing new.

None of what you say counters their point. At the end of the day African Americans commit a disproportionate amount of crime, it would be a miracle if they didn't have more prior convictions on average.

They're trying to denounce the racial aspect of likelihood of being targeted/prosecuted, by going "African Americans are more likely to be involved in crime already" - which is also inherent on racial biases and profiling in the police and criminal justice systems.

The point is that they can't jump to racist dog-whistles and then pretend like race isn't a factor in targeting to begin with.

Citation needed.

All the stats we have focus around arrests, charges, convictions, so any systemic racism in enforcement is included.

African Americans being arrested more per capita for a crime is not inherently the same as committing more crime per capita.

I have a hard time figuring how you could ever prove your claim, because how do you show who committed crimes that were either not suspects, or crimes that weren’t discovered or reported?

Simple, crime correlates with poverty, and African Americans are disproportionally poor. It would take a miracle for them not to commit more crime.

But if say, one group was more targeted they would have more priors and more multiple charges, isn’t it just a feedback loop?

Or say, one group has historical disadvantage which causes them to be disproportionately poor which causes them to be more likely themselves to commit crime and/or live in high crime areas. Which then leads to an increased police presence and, therefore, an increased chance of police interaction.

There's no need to add in the practically unprovable presence of deliberate targeting when other explanations sufficiently account for disparities.

I don't think anyone wanted the sweeping disinformation campaign about marijuana that flooded both the airwaves and law-enforcement training syllabuses that we got from the federal government.

It is hard to expect a republic to make sensible decisions when it's citizens are being actively misinformed. It is also hard to not impute malice on people who push blatantly false information.

Good points.

It does make one wonder why, given the history of known deception, many people have recently seemed to abandon all critical thought and fervently believe whatever the government tells them.

Richard Nixon is widely recognized as said scheming overlord, with the drug policies he enacted.

It’s very hard to read this article without concluding that Nixon was such a scheming overlord leading the charge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs

Cannabis laws applied to all Americans.

They are not enforced the same way to all, though.

At the discretion of both law enforcement officers and prosecutors.

Do you have evidence that cannabis laws were enforced disproportionately?

sure, let me spend my Saturday going on Google for you, to find the overwhelming evidence that has been gathered for the past several decades, which you somehow missed.

or claim to have missed.

We know that the US police are more likely to shoot white people than black people based on the FBI data, so it’s not unreasonable to think this may also be an urban legend

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK425763/ with 10% v.s. 8% use, 4x arrest rate for black folks: https://norml.org/marijuana/fact-sheets/racial-disparity-in-...

It would be interesting to see if there were other offences being committed or where possession was the sole offence.

"Application" depends purely on enforcement and the discretion of (a) the arresting officer, and then (b) the justice system further down the line.

You can't deny that the WoD and cannabis prosecutions in particular have disproportionately targeted African Americans and other minorities.

Measured by annual average alcohol consumption in the US before and after prohibition, the 21st amendment was a huge success.

I think temporary society-scale prohibition when drug use becomes a widespread societal ill is good policy. Afterward, individual mandatory punishment/rehab for those who abuse drugs/alcohol and harm themselves and others should be the norm.

> Measured by annual average alcohol consumption in the US before and after prohibition, the 21st amendment was a huge success.

That begs the question by assuming that's a good measurement. Is it? Since prohibition ended, has alcohol become so uniquely destructive here (compared to all other alcohol-allowing societies) that we've wanted to ban it again? I'm of the strong opinion that it's not.

> I think temporary society-scale prohibition when drug use becomes a widespread societal ill is good policy.

Add that to the long list of things I agree with in principle, but reject in practice. Our timeline of such experiments is a series of social disasters.

In any case, I think there a clearly distinct categories of drugs. I don't want to live around meth users, because drug itself makes them paranoid, irritable, and hard to be near. I couldn't care less if my next door neighbor smokes weed.

You likely live around well-adjusted prescription meth users and don't know it.

In the same house, even! There's a huge difference between a low dose taken under a doctor's supervision and a recreational dose taken as large and frequently as desired.

> I think temporary society-scale prohibition when drug use becomes a widespread societal ill is good policy.

OK, but we passed a constitutional amendment saying the opposite, and the so-called "War on Drugs" operates in defiance of the spirit of that amendment.

>OK, but we passed a constitutional amendment saying the opposite

Which amendment is that? The 21st repealing prohibition did not make any value statements on whether prohibition was ever good policy, it merely repeals the amendment banning alcohol.

> and the so-called "War on Drugs" operates in defiance of the spirit of that amendment.

There is no "spirit of [the] amendment". It repealed a ban on alcohol. Alcohol was undeniably an extreme social ill before prohibition.

Re: alcohol, there are people with Minor in Possession charges on their records. It would be good to expunge those, too.

I've always taken it for granted that stuff like MIPs on your record get sealed or expunged once you hit 21. IMO it's silly to have it be a mark on your record even temporarily, but insane to me that some states don't automatically expunge misdemeanors for kids.

My MIP was a factor during the background check for my security clearance in my early 20s. Since then nobody has cared.

The counterargument is that these people are punished not for carrying weed, but for breaking the law.

The law could say "nobody shall wear a red tshirt", and I think it would then be morally okay to arrest and punish anyone who continues to wear red tshirts.

Anyone not okay with the red tshirt law can go get the law changed through the usual democratic process. But if they just ignore the law and wear a red tshirt anyway, then punish them.

So you don't consider civil disobedience to be an appropriate way to agitate for change?

Well, not all states have drugs laws that are absurd. At least one decent thing about California, Oregon, and Washington is some sensibility about legalizing or at least not prosecuting non-dangerous drugs. But, sad to say the ultra religious/conservative states are still stuck in legacy reasoning and it will take generations to change minds. And yes, alcohol is much worse than marijuana, shrooms, LSD.

Hey, let's not forget that, somehow, Mississippi has decriminalized possession for a very long time now. And more than 75% of the voters wanted medicinal marijuana. Now the state officials continue to brutally enforce their morals against medical patients, having already dragged out the legislation to provide a legal framework for medicinal use, but that's regrettably hardly unique to medical marijuana patients.

The problem is they really just helped out the black market. They didn't legalize anything. They stopped prosecuting small amounts.

I'm writing this from California, so I was using "neighbors" expansively to mean Americans in general. My experience in California has shaped how I see the argument. I grew up in the Midwest and heard a million reasons why weed was a ticket straight to hell. Now that I live somewhere that it's completely legal and normal for your average person to possess and use it, I can see that, literally, none of the dire warnings I'd been taught have come to pass.

California legalized weed, people who wanted to use it started admitting that they use it, and... that's about it. Nothing bad happened. If anything, I know people who switched from alcohol to weed in the spirit of harm reduction, and they seem to be better for it.

Decriminalizing drugs and other progressive changes to law enforcement have led to some problems in San Francisco and Portland. There’s a real sense of the breakdown of social order.

Does something else being worse (alcohol) but acceptable mean that an alternative (cannabis) should be acceptable?

If alcohol was not already widely (ab)used in a county would they be wrong to prohibit it?

(Note not meant in any form of malice, intended as probing questions for discussion)

"Should be acceptable" is the wrong way to look at it. "Should be illegal" is the question that should be answered.

There's a subtle but important distinction between

> Alcohol is allowed, so cannabis should be allowed.

and

> Alcohol is not illegal, so cannabis should not be illegal.

Our legal system is a default-allow denylist: unless a law says you can't do something, you can. The government doesn't grant permission. It removes it.

So because the government hasn't made the case that we should ban alcohol, I think it's on them to prove that cannabis is somehow worse to justify its banning.

> that's caused far more societal harm than cannabis ever did.

Yes, I think this indisputably so. However, the more widely cannabis is used the greater the harms seem to be.

You're right my local bodega has been running out of chips and cookies at an alarming rate. Things are getting dangerous out there.

this is true, but the harm is so small (at least when compared to alcohol) that it shouldn't meet any threshold for prohibition nowadays

In absolute numbers, the harm from weed is increasing as more people use it. As a rate, it’s a rounding error compared to alcohol.

For instance[1]:

“According to the 2022 Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 29.5 million people ages 12 and older (10.5% in this age group) had AUD in the past year.”

Compare that to[2]:

“The incidence rate of cannabis-induced psychosis increased steadily from 2.8 per 100 000 person years in 2006 to 6.1 per 100 000 person years in 2016.”

You’re orders of magnitude more likely to suffer harm from using alcohol than cannabis. I’m saying that as someone who enjoys the occasional drink but doesn’t use weed; I don’t have skin in the game.

[1] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-to...

[2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31839011/

Fair enough, but youths seem to overdo everything. And alcohol is one of those things you can overdo.

I'm curious as to where the break-even is. e.g. one joint per day is as harmful as 2.5 beers per day.

Also a good point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com