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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

The thesis of the War on Drugs is pretty much that there are abstract, amorphous dangers to recreational drug use, and the proper role of government is to provide immediate, concrete dangers so that people will stop.

It does have a certain twisted logic to it, if you ignore every piece of empirical evidence generated over the last hundred years.

Mixing Tylenol with oxy is twisted in a different way, because it replaces an abstract danger (if you take some amount in some period of time, you might become dangerously dependent) with a somewhat less abstract danger (if you take some smaller amount in some shorter period of time, you might die).

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In Australia we've had ads which specifically focus on the unsafe, illegal manufacturing conditions of a banned drug as a reason to avoid the drug. For example: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-J1b1lX7HRxU/TlBbd9d4WHI/AAAAAAAAAN...

When I first saw this ad series I was stunned by the hollow, almost cynical reasoning on display, only to then be even more stunned by the lack of reaction in others. Your one-sentence summary of the War On Some Drugs, however, provides an insightful context to the campaign.

When I first saw this ad series I was stunned by the hollow, almost cynical reasoning on display, only to then be even more stunned by the lack of reaction in others.

There's a substantial cohort of the population[1] that thinks If something is illegal it must be wrong. They wouldn't make it illegal unless it was. Getting through to these people, in my experience, is almost impossible.

[1] Probably not on HN. But we're not representative of the country at large.

MP "You can't compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal one."

Professor Nutt "Why not?"

MP "Because one's illegal."

Professor Nutt "Why is it illegal?"

MP "Because it's harmful."

Professor Nutt "Don't we need to compare harms to determine if it should be illegal?"

MP "You can't compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal one."

http://www.amazon.com/Drugs-Without-Hot-David-Nutt/dp/190686...

The thesis of the War on Drugs is that we can expand police power, persecute minorities with impunity, give hand-outs to well-connected industries (pharma, alcohol, tobacco, prison operators, etc.), and generally terrify the population into submission. There has never been any other goal, all the way back to cocaine first being made illegal a century ago.

And fund the CIA dark side ops. (Iran Contra)

You're making a huge assumption here, which is that the central point of the war on drugs is actually to stop people using drugs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_compl...

Or that the role of the US Government, as presently practiced is to do anything other than funnel tax money to crony capitalists. Take it form the middle class and give it to the plutocrats.

I guess the logic is not much different from the one used to burn people at the stake for their sins. If you smoke weed, it's bad for you, so we will put you in jail, which is 100 times worse, but at least your soul is cleansed by the government now.

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