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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Politicians just by supporting current drug regulations are responsible for "millions of deaths"? Do you have evidence to back up that extraordinary claim?

AFTER EDIT: I note a downvote for disagreement. So I will ask the obvious follow-up question. With what part of the two questions I originally posted do you disagree, and what facts and reasoning should I consider to change my opinion?

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Something many folks fail to realize is that the War on Drugs has origins dating back a century ago: [1]

    Although Nixon declared the War on Drugs public enemy number one in
    1971,[14] the policies that his administration implemented as part of the
    Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 were a
    continuation of drug prohibition policies in the U.S., which started in
    1914

During this time there have been many wars fought where a principle component of the reason for the war was the War on Drugs.

In Mexico, the "official count" (always an underestimate) is now over 100k. [2]

In Afghanistan, Opium has played a major role in almost every war and genocide, where deaths have exceeded several million. [3][4][5]

You can do your own research for the number of deaths that the War on Drugs has caused in just about every country on the planet (Russia, China, all countries in South America, especially Columbia). Summed up "millions of deaths" is easily accounted for by bad drug-related policies.

And that's not even counting all the drug-related deaths that are caused thanks to illicit drugs being illicit. How many people have blamed the deaths of their loved ones on "illegal drugs" when the truth is that it is the War on Drugs that killed their son, spouse, loved one? When you don't know what you're actually ingesting/smoking/injecting (as a consequence of the substances being illegal and not regulated), again the death toll leads to the millions.

And then there's the number of lives ruined (not killed)...

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#History
    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War
    [3] https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/
    [4] http://www.countercurrents.org/polya270611.htm
    [5] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175225

Well, if you want to include the Opium Wars of Chinese history (which I am familiar with as a student of the history of China) as part of the "war on drugs," we have to realize that in those wars, the drug-pushers were the British colonialists, and the drug-prohibitors were the conquered Chinese officials of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty. And if you include all historical wars of that nature in your count, yeah, maybe you can reach a count of "millions" of people who have been killed in "wars on drugs" over the course of history. But then that has nothing to do with online networks related to Silk Road and the comment to which I first replied here has nothing to do with the submitted article. So take your pick. On my part, I have seen no evidence in this thread that a new secret online network for drug dealers will make the world a safer place for the masses.

AFTER EDIT: I'm still not seeing any historical or transnational policy comparison support from reliable sources for the proposition that the original comment to which I asked two follow-up questions is factually correct in the context of this thread, which is about a proposal for a secure online network and not specifically about legalization of the sale of currently prohibited drugs.

I didn't include it, and you don't have to to get to millions within the past decade (it's also something for which accurate stats don't exist, so you have to estimate and combine the externalities). The citations I included are from recent history.

Nor am I saying that this "DarkMarket" will make our lives safer. We need these drugs legalized and regulated on the open market. That would make all the difference.

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