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Comment by slurry | Hacker News Reader

Other features of the last 40 years, besides the drug war, include the virtual disappearance of urban rioting and the erasure of youth/minority political militancy.

I believe this is not a coincidence.

Arbitrary search and seizure, checkpoints, mass detention are common features of military counterinsurgency. They are also features of the drug war.

I'm not saying the drug war is consciously aimed at youth and minority citizens the way similar tactics were aimed at Communist guerrillas in the Malaya emergency, or Sunni insurgents in Iraq. But I am saying that the effect is about the same.

That's why it's probably a mistake to lean on rational utilitarian arguments against the drug war. The unspoken selling point is its unacknowledged side effects. Sure there are costs, but no more Watts, no more Black Panthers. The calculus of harm reduction is weak against dots that are never connected out loud.

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Wait, last 40 years? What makes that your metric? Marijuana was outlawed in 1937, heroin in 1925. And the Black Panthers were in part a reaction against hamfisted selective enforcement of dumb laws - including drug laws - by the powers-that-be.

IIRC the sort of zealous enforcement of drug laws we see now, didn't really gain traction until the 60s and 70s, which supports slurry's argument.

You don't think drug laws were zealously enforced during Prohibition in the 1920s? Or during the 1950s? I'm just not seeing it. There have been moral panics over drugs leading to ludicrous overreach (at various levels of government) on quite a regular basis since well before "Reefer Madness". It didn't start with "crack babies" and "glue sniffing" - claims that the latest new drug (whatever it is) is different and more addictive and more dangerous than any prior drugs and this makes users extra dangerous to deal with which justifies using extra force or even shooting people with higher caliber weaponry, goes back at least a century.

No, I don't, not to the extent they are now. We didn't send people to jail for life for simple possession of anything, and we didn't have a fucking "Drug Czar" either.

Drug prohibition is old. But the militarized quasi-Schmittian state organs devoted to enforcement them, and their attendant juridical pretexts, are of a more recent vintage.

Just want to chime in and recommend two great documentaries I recently saw regarding inner-city housing in the seventies. It's not hard to imagine the war on drugs stemming from the same racism which caused white flight.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Let the Fire Burn

Hard to tell, but I hope you're not saying this has been a good thing. Locking up kids for being poor and stifling dissent are hardly noble goals.

Love this perspective.

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