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Comment by jivatmanx | Hacker News Reader

This, the Parallel Construction story, and the Patriot act having been principally used for the War on Drugs than terror... has made me consider that the War on Drugs may actually be more dangerous to Liberty than the war on terror.

No doubt it's basic premise, that putting a substance into one's own body is a "crime", is a pernicious lie.

The War on Terror's pernicious lie is twofold: Terrorism isn't a crime, and thus isn't subject to any laws, that this war is eternal, and the whole world is a battlefield.

Certainly in practical effects the Drug war is worse: Minorities whose communities are regularly raided by soldiers, depopulated, and placed into our glorious, humane prison system with the highest incarceration rate in the world, than stripped of voting rights and essentially blackballed from employment afterwards, would think surely so...

My natural tendency has so far been to see the war on Terror as worse, this may be me I, like many HNers with dissident political opinions, am more likely to see myself as an actual target in the War on Terror. That, and being an Orwell fan...

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The Economist rants on this every couple of months, and I couldn't agree more.

The war on drugs is a terrible misstep. Drugs should never have been a criminal issue, they should be strictly a public health issue. But we're far too entrenched to make that change now.

Watch "The House I Live In" (streaming on Netflix) for a ridiculously detailed picture of the problem

"The House I Live In" was an eye opener for me. Also, one of the directors, David Simon, is the creator of the HBO show 'The Wire' which dealt heavily with the side effects of the war on drugs.

'The Wire' is the first thing I thought of when reading about this story.

The most impressive bit of THILI for me was the two cops that you saw ~15 years ago as young idealistic tough guys in a reality show, and now as jaded cynics who have mostly given up hope.

Read "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander and then start reading up on the history of civil rights activism and the beginning of the war on drugs

And now you know why David Simon was one of the few people speaking up about why PRISM wasn't really a big deal, as he has seen firsthand the effect of the War of Drugs on minorities through his work on The Wire.

If the government should have the power to do these types of investigations (and the people keep voting people in who are 'Tough on Crime' so apparently they feel the government should have that power...), then at least the NSA's abuses are essentially equal opportunity with some form of judicial oversight applied. Minorities don't seem to even get that much when we're talking about DEA, FBI, etc.

> as he has seen firsthand the effect of the War of Drugs on minorities through his work on The Wire

Or rather through his 16 years as journalist on the police beat at the Baltimore Sun, from which he got enough material to write 3 books and 3 TV series, including The Wire.

It's really weird how TV just outshines everything else as soon as it gets in the picture. Simon will forever be "the guy who wrote The Wire", like he was a barista in Hollywood who just sat down at the kitchen table one day and made up all of it in his head and then proceeded to film it for TV.

(And no, I don't agree with him on the subject: the fact that evils come in different forms and shapes doesn't mean we should ignore one or the other.)

> Or rather through his 16 years as journalist on the police beat at the Baltimore Sun

You know I almost mentioned that, but then I had the horrifying thought that he might have had someone on the police beat on his production team and that it may not have been Simon himself with that experience, and I didn't want to spout anything factually incorrect so I left it out completely.

I'm glad to be corrected on that, hopefully I'll remember for the next time it comes up.

The jump from "The War on Drugs is worse than PRISM" to "PRISM really isn't a big deal" is rather large...

"If the government should have the power to do these types of investigations..." See, they obviously shouldn't. Justifying PRISM because the DEA is doing something that they shouldn't is silly. Both deserve criticism, and we should not curtail criticism of PRISM just because the War on Drugs isn't getting nearly the criticism it deserves.

David Simon's complaint is just "hipster outrage" bullshit: "I was upset at something before it was cool!" It is just the flipside of the people who get frustrated with recent attention to surveillance because "Of course this is going on, haven't you heard of Room 641A? I've been talking about this for years! Grrr, I am upset that I am no longer unique for my suspicions."

> Both deserve criticism, and we should not curtail criticism of PRISM just because the War on Drugs isn't getting nearly the criticism it deserves.

I would agree that both deserve equitable argumentation.

However the choices appear to be to completely upend the way the legal system and law enforcement handles investigations (which the people have voted against time after time), or to keep the systems that exist and tighten the oversight and transparency.

I suppose your choice on that will fall towards whether you are more distrustful of the government or crooks. But essentially the same logic would appear to apply to both.

> However the choices appear to be to completely upend the way the legal system and law enforcement handles investigations (which the people have voted against time after time), or to keep the systems that exist and tighten the oversight and transparency.

So lets say that War on Drugs reform is impractical as it would upend the legal system or whatever bullshit. I disagree, but lets go with it...

How does it follow that we should then make sure the shit is evenly spread on everybody? Is this the Harrison Bergeron school of social justice? We cannot stomach treating this segment of the population decently, so in order to make this fair, we are going to treat the rest of you like shit too?

Well you know, that's just it; I don't agree that scrapping the War on Drugs would upend the legal system. It would presumably clear out the prisons for the most part, but that's not what we should be worried about.

However many of the legal and investigatory techniques used to investigate drug-related "crimes" are perfectly cromulent ways to investigate many other actual crimes. I would like to keep those techniques available, in general. Each technique may or may not have it's place, for sure.

But a useful, cost-effective tool that's not otherwise unconstitutional should be used. We should then make sure that the oversight and transparency measures for each type of tool is in place to ensure that such measures are not abused.

The government is pretty much literally the only thing we the people have any input into... functions which rightly belong to "the people" at large should be placed into the government. Where government screws those up, the answer should be to fix the government, not for the people to completely abdicate that responsibility.

> How does it follow that we should then make sure the shit is evenly spread on everybody?

You're basically asking why a given system should be fairly applied? I would reverse the question completely and say that any given government system should start off completely fair and only deviate from that for very good reason.

Avoiding "Misery Loves Company" is a good reason, mind you. We levy administrative fines on people who actually screw up, for example.

But the Simon logic is, why is it permissible to surveil tens of thousands of cell phone calls within a predominantly poor, black & Hispanic neighborhood for literally years at a time, looking for evidence of small-time drug dealers, but it's not possible to get the same type of court order to surveil other communications (even at larger scale) for something that's actually important to society at large?

There is a difference in scale, that's for sure. But the difference is not really as large as the difference between no surveillance and what the police/FBI/others are already doing (and have been doing) throughout America. And so that's his point, if America agrees that this type of investigatory powers should be used (the kind that have always permitted incidentally collecting too much, or searching through all records reasonably relevant to a case, etc.), where and why does the framework behind those powers actually end here when it didn't there?

There may very well be a good reason, but if that reason is "we don't trust the government" then by what logic do we let the DoJ in general investigate criminal acts? I guess what I'm saying is that I really wish we would get back to a framework of control of government (like the EFF, ACLU, etc. have been pushing to do for years) instead of instinctive distrust of the idea of government.

But whatever we do decide the government rightly has the power to do, we should at least be consistent with it.

I'll try to clarify my position succinctly:

I think that all legal systems should be fairly applied.

I think that when abuse or imbalances become apparent, we should correct that imbalance by pulling back systems and ending enforcement, rather than applying more pressure on other areas.

After the imbalance is corrected, then we can discuss how to reapply the system in a fair balanced manner.

So, in concrete terms: The surveillance/law enforcement techniques being used in the War on Drugs may very well be something that we, as a society, could accept. However the War on Drugs is imbalanced and unfair in a very bad way. We should therefore throttle back on everything, correct the underlying issue, then determine if we still think that those surveillance/law enforcement techniques are still warranted.

Throttling back on these surveillance/law enforcement techniques is extreme, but I think that the accusations leveled against the War on Drugs (basically, that it is a form of class warfare, born of blatant widespread racism) are serious enough to warrant an extreme response.

Simon is pointing out a very clear problem; my suggestion is that we pull over to the side of the road and try to figure out just what the hell went wrong. The sooner we pull over, the better, because we seem to be doing a lot of damage.

> people who get frustrated with recent attention to surveillance because "Of course this is going on, haven't you heard of Room 641A? I've been talking about this for years!

> Grrr, I am upset that I am no longer unique for my suspicions."

The first part is entirely true, but the second part is a misplaced caricature. If one wasn't operating with this threat model pre-Snowden, they mustn't have been analyzing the situation too hard.

The people who saw the Snowden revelations as inevitable had to endure being buzzkills for the past several years while everyone else leaped at the chance to party with the "cool kids" as geeks entered the limelight. It was clear that Apple's/Facebook's/Twitter's advances were primarily in the marketing department, but it was easy to ignore this to avoid being negative when you're finally gaining long-craved social acceptance.

Now that the herdthink has shifted towards privacy, we're seeing the same wishful marketing being applied to a lot of non-solutions to privacy (encrypting servers like Lavabit, remote code like Hushmail, facades of anonymity like Bitcoin, etc), when the reality is that solving (as opposed to merely obfuscating) these problems is extremely hard and any solution requires users to start taking a modicum of responsibility for their computing environment. But lowest-common-denominator faux solutions cannot address this inconvenient truth, so they give people the illusion of doing something while wasting away this iteration's outrage.

The first part does not warrant frustration that the issue is being covered. The first part alone should render you glad that the issue is now being given the attention it deserves.

The people who complain that it is now receiving attention are doing it, I think, out of frustration that they are not being adequately recognized for being ahead of the curve. They feel vindicated but they think that nobody notices that, so they lash out and complain about the wrong thing.

I see a parallel between this and David Simon's stance. He is upset that people are concerned about PRISM not because he has a good reason to be unconcerned about PRISM but because he wants that outrage reserved for his pet issue. He lashes out at the wrong thing; it should not concern him that people are concerned about PRISM, rather it should concern him that they are not also concerned about the War on Drugs.

(I picked the "upset at not being vindicated" example because it is a position I find myself tempted to take. I feel qualified to talk about the mentality behind it because I understand and resist the urge to adopt that mentality myself.)

I know the tack you're referring to, it's similar to dismissing things as "first world problems", and I consider it petty and divisive. But I don't think it encompasses all of the told-you-so reactions either.

Communications freedom is basically my pet issue. I'm glad the issue is getting attention, but don't feel enthusiastic about how the reaction is playing out.

The primary response seems to consist of politically-aimed incredulousness, as if the NSA will ever stop intercepting everything they physically can. It could have purpose if this were going to be the event that caused dismantling of USG, but it's not.

What's really lacking in the popular dialog is self-reflection about how the pervasiveness is entirely due to people's own poor, compulsive, and lazy technology choices. The status quo in the non-privacy threads is still enthusiasm for the latest shiny centralized trap from Google/Apple/Facebook/Dropbox/otherWebStartup.

The tide of awareness has not actually shifted until it starts being socially uncool to use a Gmail.com address, let Facebook mediate your social life, electively upgrade your pocket tracker for a new facade, rely on software that's controlled by someone else, or build new products in walled gardens.

So it seems like dispassionate/condescending "I've been telling you this all along" is an appropriate way to point out that there's been plenty of people who've been preaching the solution before you bothered to realize there was a problem. And if you'd actually like to empower yourself, you really do need to follow their inconvenient advice instead of seeking easy gratification through the latest fad kickstarter campaign or https site with flawed marketing spiel.

See, they obviously shouldn't.

But it's not obvious. Lots of people disagree with you and consistently vote for draconian approaches to law enforcement, immigration etc. I know a lot of people that simultaneously think Obama's a wicked tyrant and that Civil War 2.0 is inevitable, and who are also heartily in favor of the death penalty, mass deportations of illegal immigrants, militarizing the border with Mexico, and (insert hardline view here).

If I said "it is obvious that the world is billions of years old", would you object? Plainly there are (many) people that disagree with that statement, but do you think that would change the legitimacy of that statement?

These are things put in the realm of "opinion", but I think we can safely discard fringe notions like "the world is 3000 years old" or "the disparate effect of the War on Drugs on minorities that is accelerated by hard-line stances and rapidly advancing law enforcement technology and techniques is acceptable."[0]

[0] Read: "That stuff that concerns David Simon, @jivatmanx, and myself."

Yes, I would object. It's not obvious that the world is billions of years old, so I think it's a good thing to mention however briefly, that our knowledge of such things is founded on the study of geology, chemistry and so forth, unless you're talking to someone whose views/level of knowledge you're already familiar with.

You weaken your own argument when you go around stating your opinion as fact, and it's not very different from people saying things like 'obviously long prison sentences reduce crime' or 'obviously excluding immigrants will relieve unemployment' or 'obviously the point of prison is punishment.'

I don't think anyone but a loon or a pedant would object to a comment, in a thread about geology, that implied the ancient nature of the earth was obvious. I am afraid that I find it difficult to care about the objections of either loons or pedants. They may think my argument is weakened, and I consider that an acceptable loss. I already go out of my way to qualify much of what I say, I have little interest in further encumbering myself.

(You are the later, of course?)

Way out of line. It is pretty clear from your comments that you automatically think that anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot. That's funny given the lack of depth your thinking demonstrates so far.

Arguing that your opponent's argument is a "fringe notion" and throwing it in with another irrelevant example of a fringe notion is a pathetic excuse for a counter. You actually have to write a direct counter-argument instead of relying on dismissiveness and fallacy. But hey, acting like an asshole is definitely the easier way.

Is anybody here actually arguing that the War on Drugs is not extraordinarily problematic? As far as I can tell nobody is.

anigbrowl is being pedantic about the term "obvious" but does not seem to actually disagree (The thread you are responding to is about effective communication, on which anigbrowl and I disagree, but I do not think that he is an idiot for disagreeing with me on this point.)

mpyne doesn't seem to disagree that it is problematic (he brought up David Simon after all... in fact his response to me makes me think that we both agree that both situations are problematic), but thinks it is not practical to change the state of affairs. I, again, disagree with that, but I certainly do not think that he is an idiot for thinking that the realities of the situation preclude meaningful change.

mindsling takes exception to my caricature of privacy advocates who are frustrated with recent media attention to their cause, but I think I have explained myself there well enough. I do not think that mindsling is an idiot.

(If I've mischaracterized anybodies position here, please correct me, but as I have interpreted everyones' comments currently I don't think that anybody here is an idiot.)

I don't like the "War on Drugs", no. I'm the kind of person who would remove 80% of the safety labels out there if I had my way, so someone choosing to do something stupid with drugs is on them as far as I'm concerned, up and until it starts affecting other people.

And even where it does start affecting other people, there are probably much better ways to regulate that effect than prison, and we should be using those ways instead. And we should switchover yesterday.

It's probably not yet practical politically to fix that (especially as its so tied toward racist tendencies dog-whistle style), but that would not be a reason for me to argue in support of it.

However I also don't presume that shedding the War on Drugs would eliminate crime, or the need to investigate and prosecute such. So we'll still have government enforcing law, protecting public security, and the like. And so I get very, very tired of the argument that government trying to get power $FOO to do such things is necessarily a dystopian power grab.

Don't get me wrong, it may actually be a bad idea for government to do $FOO, but no one is generally going to convince me of that by hyperbole or invoking the Sheeple Mantra (not saying you're doing that here, btw, just remarking on some HN threads I remember in general).

I don't think anyone but a loon or a pedant would object to a comment, in a thread about geology

Wait a minute, you didn't say anything about 'a thread about geology.' In fact, I was the person who brought that into the conversation. Discussions and misapprehensions about the age of the earth seem more likely to crop up in conversations about religion or general science or ancient history.

You've got a nerve critiquing me for being a pedant when you're retroactively redefining the terms of your argument like that.

I can appreciate where you're coming from with regards to the basic premise of the war on drugs. Like the old adage says: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The thing that tears me up about it is that some of these drugs (primarily meth and to a lesser degree heroin) completely obliterate lives and leave a huge cost to the general welfare of society. I don't think that we should be throwing users in jail instead of treatment, but a place where methamphetamine is legal and freely available is a scary place. I think there is a line between legalizing and decriminalizing and I'm not sure I'd want to see some drugs legalized. Weed, MDMA, I can see being legalized, but the hardcore stuff I'd be more comfortable simply decriminalizing usage.

"a place where methamphetamine is legal and freely available is a scary place"

Like the USA in the 1960's? Benzedrine was sold over the counter to children and widely used throughout the country.

Now benzedrine is probably less dangerous than methamphetamine because it's slightly less hydrophobic, which often makes addiction less trouble. Meth showed up as the very similar black market substitute when benzedrine was made prescription only. It turned out methamphetamine was easier to make with household solvents in trailers; users would probably prefer benzedrine.

Both methamphetamine and benzedrine are available with a prescription. Benzedrine is the active substance in Adderall; in fact, Adderall is only a hair's breadth different from methamphetamine.

The difference is that today it's only black market customers that use methamphetamine. If we re-legalized dexedrine or benzedrine over the counter, the trouble would mostly go away.

>If we re-legalized dexedrine or benzedrine over the counter, the trouble would mostly go away.

We'd have:

Rehab for getting women off of diet pills.

Same thing for truckers, just for a different reason.

And we'd read about students abusing diet pills to study with.

Yes, we'd have the same issues with diet and study pills that we have today, but somewhat more of them. You can already get those if you have a pliable doctor and plenty of money, you know.

But we'd also shut down a violent black market industry that gets $50 billion a year and kills 25,000-50,000 people in the USA and Latin America each year. That's most of the trouble. Skinny ladies with diet pill issues are small time in the face of mass death. We'd eventually defund most of the expanding police state, too.

>But we'd also shut down a violent black market industry that gets $50 billion a year and kills 25,000-50,000 people in the USA and Latin America each year.

Yup.

>That's most of the trouble. Skinny ladies with diet pill issues are small time in the face of mass death.

Eaxctly.

>We'd eventually defund most of the expanding police state, too.

I'd love to be able to pry back the Castle Doctrine. I may be crazy but I honestly fear a wrong-address or otherwise mistaken police raid more than hostile activity from illegal drug smugglers/sellers.

You mean the same kinds of medical management we have right now for tapering off certain anti-depressants and maintaining pain and sleep-aid prescriptions for people with money and/or good insurance. Not to mention the problems associated with Big Mac abuse.

The frameworks we would desire in a legalized environment are already here, but for some reason truckers and women make it an insurmountable challenge. Something about tattoos and/or menstruation? I'm not sure I follow the logic at work here.

Basically, a portion of the money currently going to prisons would be redirected to medical assistance, which is not the worst result emerging from recent history that I can imagine.

>You mean the same kinds of medical management we have right now for tapering off certain anti-depressants and maintaining pain and sleep-aid prescriptions for people with money and/or good insurance. Not to mention the problems associated with Big Mac abuse.

Yes, almost nothing would change WRT abuse of drugs.

>I'm not sure I follow the logic at work here.

Logic? In the War on Drugs?

>Basically, a portion of the money currently going to prisons would be redirected to medical assistance, which is not the worst result emerging from recent history that I can imagine.

Hopefully a lot of money would be diverted from law enforcement to mental health treatment.

"the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

What good intentions? The war on drugs has never been about good intentions. It has been a combination of racism, power-grabbing, and lobbying by big business from the start. Look at the things that were said in newspapers and to Congress in the early days of drug prohibition, back when cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola, if you do not believe me.

"The thing that tears me up about it is that some of these drugs (primarily meth and to a lesser degree heroin) completely obliterate lives and leave a huge cost to the general welfare of society"

The funny thing about methamphetamine is that it has medical uses -- it is used to treat narcolepsy, obesity, and ADHD. Yes, the same drug that people smoke out of broken light bulks happens to be available by prescription and sold at your local pharmacy. You know what the most important difference is? Quality control.

See, pharmaceutical drugs have regulated purity, dosage, and ingredients. You know that the methamphetamine your doctor prescribe will actually be methamphetamine and that it will not be contaminated with oxidizing agents. Methamphetamine is not the safest drug to use to get high (the dose is higher than it would be for medical uses) but even at medicinal doses the black market version is not safe. Likewise with heroin: adulterants are a bigger problem than the drug itself, and pharmaceutical opiates are safer because their production is nice and clean.

"Weed, MDMA, I can see being legalized, but the hardcore stuff I'd be more comfortable simply decriminalizing usage."

There is a bit of irony in saying that you think MDMA should be legalized but that methamphetamine should not be. MDMA is not all that different from methamphetamine (in terms of chemistry, effects, and danger to users) and quite a few "MDMA" pills actually contain methamphetamine (as a mixture, or maybe just methamphetamine depending on how unscrupulous the producer is). MDMA carries with it all the negative effects on amphetamine withdrawal (the "crash").

Really what we need is to legalize and regulate all recreational drugs. A world where methamphetamine is legal but regulated is better than a world where it is decriminalized and unregulated. If someone checks into the hospital because of a bad reaction to drugs, they should be in a position to tell their doctor exactly what drugs they took -- and their doctor should be able to assume that those drugs were not laced with heavy metals.

Is the War on Drugs just modernised slavery? Privatised prison system with the profit-based incentives to take on more and more prisoners.

Most slaves turn a profit, while most prisons require funding.

Prisons are garbage processors for grinding up as many undesirables as possible, for as long as possible. Whom is chosen is somewhat random, but usually people that are undesirable: ugly or antisocial. As for the minor point of finding guilt: a crime can always be found, so that's not a limiting factor.

The majority have already volunteered to be slaves. Healthcare and visa status the whips for native and immigrant employees respectively, especially in the US. Debt and consumption alike further captivate these unfortunate creatures on an unending treadmill of pseudo-affluence they will never attain.

Require funding or get funding? Doesn't a privatised prison derive a profit from its "use" of prisoners (getting/requiring funding) in the same way that slaveholders once derived a profit from their use of slaves?

Most prisons, whether for profit or not, require money to keep going. The money ultimately comes from society via taxes. But the net effect is it costs society thrice to imprison a person: fewer taxes collected, less goods/services produced and cost to imprison.

Ultimately, private prisons draw funds from those they hold captive, many of whom are imprisoned for minor issues.

The last part is agreed, but the inmates don't pay for their own incarceration (this aint Brazil yet).

The agencies that administer prisons get their funding from taxes, and the the level of funding maybe based on population.

But ultimately, society (taxes, etc.) pays for it.

The other sub-point... There's Korea/s, China, etc.

Have any countries humanely monitized inmates? That is provide a choice to meaningfully work while incarcerated.

> Most slaves turn a profit, while most prisons require funding.

Not even relevant in private prisons, many of which put their prisoners to work and provide third-world wages to their inmates. And the funding comes from the government.

Prisoners beget _revenue_ for the prison system. It is of no consequence that prisoners' labor fails to produce anything marketable that outshines their value to the prison system of only being, existing in a cage, and causing revenue to pour in.

You can also take a look at the worldwide impact it's had through empowering Colombian cartels for instance.

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