Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This is great, and will lend legitimacy to those pushing for legalization efforts. That said, I'm disappointed to read the, predictable, refrain about drug enforcement and for profit prisons. This is a canard. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7851672.

I don't know what other peoples' experience was, but I grew up in the 1990's in an area that was pretty middle of the road politically. Throughout elementary school, doing drugs was portrayed as something on a par with drunk driving, and got even more attention from parent groups and school administrators. In 1991, 78% of the population thought marijuana should be illegal: http://www.people-press.org/2013/04/04/majority-now-supports.... Only last year did the opinion shift in favor of legalization, and even today a substantial minority (45%) of people think marijuana should be illegal, and probably a majority of actual voters, who skew older and more conservative, feel that way.

Obviously police unions and the like will raise barriers to legalization. But let's not shirk the blame here: we created the drug war, or depending on your age, our parents did.

While your conclusion is true, for-profit prison systems are a clear conflict of interest and certainly influence media and lobbying. Law enforcement has spread its fair share of misinformation and unnecessary violence, as well.

I think for profit prisons are very bad. I'm not a fan of public unions of any sort either. But laying the blame on them is just a cop-out. These policies were implemented with overehelming public support at a time when the for-profit prison industry was essentially non-existent. The for profit prison lobby is opportunist: taking advantage of the policy. They didn't create it.

It's not a cop out. There are many parties which share blame: the Public for its fearful ignorance and fear, the prisons for profiteering and massive media and lobbying influence, law enforcement for enforcing the "lex malla" of drug policy with violence, various government organizations of various nationalities (including to a large degree the US) for using hard drugs as a tool to manipulate political, social, and economic situations, assassinations, cartels and gangs that sell drugs to fund human trafficking and murder, the list goes on…

There's a lot of blame to go around. The prisons share a whole lot of it.

Apportioning the blame properly is crucial to understanding the significance of this call from the WHO. The vast majority of responses to this article focus on for profit prisons, police lobbying, and how the government doesn't do what the people want. If these are the driving forces behind the drug war, then a WHO recommendation is going to have little effect. However, the emprical evidence shows that the drug war arose not from for profit prison lobbying, an industry that really didn't exist when the phrase was coined, but on the back of vast public support. Moreover, the evidence also shows decriminalization policies gaining ground as public opinion shifts.

The bottom line is that the thesis underlying most of the comments in this thread is wrong. For profit prisons, police unions, etc, are not the biggest roadblocks to legalization. They're opportunists, but the backbone of the drug war is massive support from soccer moms and dads, the reliable voters that created the drug war in the first place. And if the medical community starts chipping away at them, change will follow, regardless of what the prison lobbey wants.

The manner in which international drug prohibition began and the manners in which it is sustained are not equivalent. To say public opinion is the most important aspect is reductive.

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