Hacker News Reader

Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

What I want to know is why governments support all illegal drug dealing, and dont get a cut of the action themselves. The illegality is pretty much what makes it profitable. All the "war" on drugs does is keep the prices up. Mean while the government just pours our tax money down the drain, get zero in return.

Legalize it and the government can tax it. Dealers get wiped out, and with them, a lot of the violence. The tax money raised can pay for a lot of rehab, and the police can concentrate on actual crime with the saved resources.

I could go on...

View on HN

Because they're already making a lot of money from weed and other drugs being illegal. It's the prison industrial complex, man. The government isn't interested in stopping violence. If so, we'd have much saner drug laws. Drug busts are easy and when you do them the DEA and federal government give you money to buy shiny toys like tanks and new body armor.

Yeah, I suppose you do have a point there...

Nasty way to run things, no?

It's phat to blame the prison industrial complex, but they're just taking advantage of the Puritan strain in American society. Remember, we're a country that actually passed a Constitutional amendment to make alcohol, even beer, illegal.

I'm sure the DEA loves the status quo, but that's not where the votes come from. The votes come from everyone who bought into Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign. People like my mom, who thinks pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day, and supports keeping it illegal because she thinks that's bad for the country. If you poll your mom and her friends, I bet you see that viewpoint pretty well-represented.

The government runs propaganda campaigns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Youth_Anti-Drug_Media_...) to convince people like your mother that drugs are the worse thing imaginable. Those people then turn around and support the government in its opposition to drugs.

So why do they want to convince the public that drugs need to be pursued in the first place? If they were merely responding to pressure from the public, then that would be one thing, but they are fueling that sentiment. They want the public to think that way.

Do they want to sway the public because they are themselves 'true believers'? Or are there less noble motivations?

I suspect it is a combination of both.

The government fuels positive sentiment around pretty much all of its policies. It doesn't go round saying 'our policies suck' because that would provide an opening to opposition.

I don't see many television commercials for, say, the USDA's Rural Development programs. The absence of such television ads isn't them saying that those programs suck either. Being quite about it is the default position, spending many millions on primetime television ad spots to push it is exceptional.

I suspect the root of it is that drugs make individuals respect authority less, so naturally to protect it's power government opposes the use of drugs. Rationalization takes care of the rest(play up the negative aspects of drug usage, downplay the positive aspects of usage and legalization).

As I've said before, I think the power of marketing is less extensive than regularly believed. If the government could create demand for the drug war, then Microsoft could've made Windows RT happen...

My mom, who isn't a native English speaker, doesn't consume American media. And her Indian movies aren't being interrupted by ads for a Drug Free America.

The fact is that prohibition is a natural tendency in many societies. Whether its Jews not eating shrimp or Muslims not drinking alcohol, prohibitions have existed since long before modern marketing campaigns. In the U.S., prohibition of alcohol was not the result of government propaganda and powerful interests, but a grass roots movement, fully supported by women in particular. Just as that generation saw alcohol as an attack on their husbands, this generation of mothers sees marijuana as an attack on their teenagers.

So your mom didn't lap up Nancy Reagan's "Just say no."?

"Just say no" was a propaganda campaign and you rightly describe it as widely influencing the population. Somebody told your mom that "pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day", she didn't dream that up all by herself.

Um, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but pot really does cause some young men to "give up on life" (whatever that means) and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day.

There actually is a such thing as a stoner. I don't hate them or want to outlaw them or anything, but they do exist. Nancy Reagan didn't invent them.

I've known kids that give up on life, not get jobs and play video games all day without weed.

Weed isn't the problem here. The kid and/or his family is generally the problem.

Typical strawman from tptacek; I am not disputing that pot, alcohol, television, or plain laziness sometimes cause people to become burntout bums. The myth is that all, or even most, people who smoke pot become burnout hippy bums and that it is a phenomenon uniquely caused by pot.

You are both absolute lunatics if you think government run propaganda campaigns have nothing to do with that perception.

Let's review:

1) rayiner describes the 'status quo' as stereotyping pot users, calls out media campaigns as one cause of this, and calls out his mother specifically as an example of this.[1]

2) I agree with rayiner.[2]

3) rayiner does not like it when people agree with him, and backpedals.[3]

4) I call him out for backpedaling.[4]

5) You "jump into the fray" damn near a day after rayiner's comment with a red herring large enough to make a professional fisherman blush.

Try reading the goddamn conversation before tagging in for your buddy.

[1] "The votes come from everyone who bought into Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign. People like my mom, who thinks pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day, and supports keeping it illegal because she thinks that's bad for the country."

[2] "The government runs propaganda campaigns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Youth_Anti-Drug_Media_...) to convince people like your mother that drugs are the worse thing imaginable. Those people then turn around and support the government in its opposition to drugs."

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233377

[4] "So your mom didn't lap up Nancy Reagan's "Just say no."?"

You're taking my comment about Nancy Reagan out of context and putting words in my mouth by characterizing it as propaganda. The sentence before that was "It's phat to blame the prison industrial complex, but they're just taking advantage of the Puritan strain in American society."

I don't think "Just Say No!" created the demand for drug prohibition nor do I think it is propaganda. I think for most people who push the message, Nancy Reagan included, it is a genuine and organic sentiment, consistent with Americam Puritanism. When I say my mom and others "bought in" to the message, I don't mean that government propaganda convinced them to believe something they would otherwise not. Rather, I think what you have is a group of voters with Puritan tendencies and authoritarian dispostitions who "bought in" and got behind a program that plays to those characteristics.

I think chalking it up to propaganda is short sighted, because it punts on the issue of how to convince the electorate. It makes it seem like if the propaganda went away, the drug war would go away. But the fact is that my mom and many people like her believe its the governments job to keep people from doing harmful things to themselves. They see drugs (along with alcohol and sex and a raft of other things) as something the government should regulate for the betterment of society. The culture associated with marijuana use, which is in many respects antithetical to what tjhey think is healthy for society, reinforces their belief that it should be made illegal, for people's own good.

Look, we live in a country where until recently I couldn't buy beer on Super Bowl Sunday in downtown Atlanta. A place where you can be arrested for walking down the street with a cup of beer. It's not big money and the DEA perpetuating that status quo. It's grass roots. You think the voters who passed blue laws all over the country need propaganda to decide people shouldn't be allowed to get baked?

There are lots of individuals and groups that have benefited greatly from the status quo on drugs and who made a conscious effort so that message cannon was always aimed at your mom and firing.

The Drug War has been massively expensive. It isn't expensive because they hand money to drug dealers, it's expensive because money is used to manufacture prisons and operate them, money is used to buy military equipment for police forces, money is used to supply dictatorships around the world (but esp. in South America) with helicopters, US-made weapons and cash, money is spent on wars that drugs are used as a partial pretense for. This money is all spent with the same individual interests who also happen to be some of our largest political donors.

So politicians, the ones responsible for official drug messaging and for drug laws, have a spigot of cash that will be cut off if they have a nuanced opinion about drugs.

It also often helps politicians to be seen as tough on minorities (especially presidents running for a second term) and "tough on drugs" has been a stand-in for "tough on blacks" along with welfare reform. The same demographic who is becoming more pro-drug is also a lot less racist than their parents, so that message doesn't play to them anymore. I think the Drug War is starting to be seen as preying on the weak, rather than preying on the undesirable.

It's not really meaningful to put the blame on Puritanism, because there were hundreds of years between the Puritan landing and prohibition, during which time most people spent a lot of their time intoxicated on whatever they liked. Drug prohibition was initially a result of race-baiting.

>If you poll your mom and her friends, I bet you see that viewpoint pretty well-represented.

I'm nearly 40, and my mother has always been against drug prohibition as far as I can remember. Depends on your family.

>pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day

I don't know it to be a cause, but I'd say that there's probably an association. Alcohol is associated with falling, being poisoned and liver failure, fighting and domestic abuse. Both have been associated with a pleasant afternoon with friends, too.

Judging by the prescription drug market, the effects of either drug wouldn't keep us from trying to give it to children if a buck could be made.

>What I want to know is why governments support all illegal drug dealing, and dont get a cut of the action themselves

They do get a cut. Property forfeiture, among other things. Right now I am reading Balko's "The Rise of the Warrior Cop" and McCoy's "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade" You'd probably be amazed. I am.

It's considered a conspiracy theory, but many people do believe the government takes a cut of the drug trade. That money would be far more valuable than normal tax dollars because a small group would get to control it without any oversight or tax distribution (off the books it could be used for anything).

I believe the Federal Government will only legalize pot under one of two circumstances: 1) it becomes more profitable to tax it (the theory being that it's not today) and 2) they can no longer keep the cartels under control and they become a direct security threat

It is a fairly well documented theory. See: "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade" by Alfred McCoy.