Hacker News Reader

Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

I suspect they work just fine, its what they are actually supposed to do that most people are unclear on.

I'm not quite tin hat enough to think that they were actually created for these purposes, but I do think they've stabilized on a sub-optimal local maximum where the general populace is complacent because they feel like "something was done" about those awful (counterculture) drugs and they laws themselves have become broadly useful to the political class for all sorts of reasons that have nothing at all to do with the reality of drug use on the street. So here we sit. It will take substantial political force to budge off this local maximum point.

View on HN

I've been having similar thoughts about the purposes behind the prohibition being misunderstood. There are many effects that the war on drugs is having, and the people that are executing the process are more aware than any of us what those effects are. As a clueless civilian, I have been attempting to come up with some completely conjectural ideas about what those might be:

- Strengthen law enforcement through constant practice, and provide revenue to supporting companies

- Siphon money from one industry (drug trade) to help support the government and therefore support other industries that it feels are more beneficial to society

- Stigmatize unproductive habits, conditioning society to more productive/controlled behavior, incarcerating individuals who resist to make the society seem more productive overall

I'm sure there are many intentions that are well known that might overlap with what I'm suggesting, but I think the main point is that the war on drugs is not for the purpose that most people assume: to eliminate drugs from society. I think in a lot of ways it intentionally has the opposite effect. Also I think if society would have tolerated alcohol prohibition that the government would have been happy to keep that going as well for similar reasons.

> Also I think if society would have tolerated alcohol prohibition that the government would have been happy to keep that going as well for similar reasons.

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542155. In fact, at the time prohibition was proposed, alcohol taxes made up fully 1/3 of federal revenue. The money and moneyed interests were aligned against prohibition, not for it.

I think a lot of people look for ways to get around the fact that when you give people self-determination as a group, they might vote for things you don't like with no nefarious undertones in play. The simplest explanation is this one: I don't vote, my mom does. There are more puritanical people who simply don't want to live in a society that condones drug use than the opposite. It's just like how when people in arab countries got the opportunity to vote, they voted-in conservative Islamic governments. Sure they are opportunists taking advantage of those tendencies, but at the end of the day, you have to grapple with the real fact that people have ideas about what their societies should look like, and democracy means that they get to carry those ideas into fruition.

In theory this is why we have a republic rather than a direct democracy. The people say what they want (e.g. less drug use) and the representatives do the hard work of figuring out how best to achieve that result (e.g. discovering that it's empirically more effective to treat it as a medical and social issue rather than a criminal issue, and enacting laws consistent with that result).

But then they don't and we're back to nefarious undertones.

No, that's why you have representative democracy rather than direct democracy.

You have a republic rather than a monarchy. In order to establish its leadership, a republic can use representative democracy, direct democracy, fascism, dictatorship, whatever -- as long as it defines the power of the state as flowing from the entirety of its people, rather than from a subset of the population or by a divinity, it's a republic, end of. "Republic" is not a synonym of "representative democracy".

I wish I had a penny for every time I had to dispel this awful misconception in constitutional studies that only Americans seem to have.

Historically and in political science literature, "republic" IS synonymous with "representative democracy". In the 20th century autocratic/oligarchical/fascist states adopted "Republic" to sound democratic, and that use is becoming more common.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...

A state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.

http://ncsl.typepad.com/the_thicket/2011/09/republic-or-repr...

we regard the terms “republic” and “representative democracy” as being interchangeable, as does the political science literature.

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/163158?redirectedFrom=republic... a. A state in which power rests with the people or their representatives; spec. a state without a monarchy. Also: a government, or system of government, of such a state; a period of government of this type.The term is often (esp. in the 18th and 19th centuries) taken to imply a state with a democratic or representative constitution and without a hereditary nobility, but more recently it has also been used of autocratic or dictatorial states not ruled by a monarch. It is now chiefly used to denote any non-monarchical state headed by an elected or appointed president.

Note how all those definitions are not antithetical to direct democracy, which is the concept I was objecting to and something that only Americans keep repeating -- note how the only source you link with a whiff of support for such dichotomy is American and explicitly covers only "the American republic" (and basically says "yeah we know the terminology is imprecise, but whatever"...).

The word "republic" was coined by Romans, whose political system was a mixture of direct, representative, and oligarchic rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_elements_of_Roman_R... Were they not living in a "republic", despite inventing the name itself?

"Representative democracy" and "republic" have often been used as synonyms to indicate the absence of monarchical or divine intervention in the choice of leaders, not to exclude direct intervention by the people, which is something only Americans say it does not belong in a republic, for whatever reason.

But then it's not really the will of the people, which is what democracy is supposedly all about. I really hope people stop this silly charade of "we the people" and "self-governance" and "the government works for us" when really in a representative democracy you don't really have any of the above.

#Edit: grammar typo

Yeah, the purpose of drug laws is to placate conservatives who want to decide how others lead their lives.

If there was a country without them I would move there.

I don't think that's a fair characterization. Isn't it liberals who are always saying we're part of a society? Normalizing drug use, just like the normalization of drinking, affects everyone. You can choose not to drink, but when your kid gets into high school, society's normalization of drinking forces you to deal with the social ills that result--their being pressured to drink, their friends drinking around them and the resulting behavioral changes, people driving drunk.

That's a legitimate criticism of conservatives in some areas, but not with regard to drugs. You don't have to look any further than alcohol use to see how drug use can have externalized effects.

According to the "Pump" movie (not sure what their sources are), at the time cars were designed to run on various vegetable oils and (mostly) ethanol (e.g. the Diesel engine was originally designed to run on Peanut oil), and it was actually a Rockefeller initiative behind the curtains to make sure that there is actually no competition for gasoline.

Have not tried to fact-check yet, could be completely wrong - but if it is true, it's certainly an angle to prohibition that I was not aware of.

I agree that the criminalization of drug trafficking is largely a hidden subsidy for law enforcement. Keeping an entire police force busy with controlling borders and neighborhoods creates huge spillover effects in the economy - whether it's for the local donut shop, national firearms and communications industry, prisons or even the car industry.

But as the previous comment mentioned, this can hardly be a global maximum. Right now the local governments are mostly funding a vast array of blue collar workers (prisoner guards, police officers, fast food worker) rather than a smaller set of white collar workers (chemists and physicians) which would manufacture and administer herion/cocaine/etc to those trapped in a severe addiction.

From that point of view the current support for a strong stance against the decriminalization of drugs is neither surprising nor unreasonable for a large portion of society. Although the reasons might be more economical than moral in nature.

Exactly:

article: there is no direct link between being “tough on drugs” and tackling the problem.

Well, what problem is that?

If we define the problem as "property crime and collateral violence", then those tough-on-drugs laws directly cause the problem, beyond the shadow of any doubt.

That is the problem that anyone reasonable cares about, not what "immoral" things other people are doing to their bodies.

It's only a problem so long as it's framed with the question of "should, and can the state fix X". If, however, you state it in state-free terms such as "is there anything wrong with an individual stranger potentially harming his/herself?" then the answer is pretty obvious.

It's much harder to justify things against an individual without the state. E.g. "Those bums down the street repeatedly use drugs, and I think that will lead to them damaging my property / harming me. I'll go ahead and hire some security guards to prevent them from taking drugs, or beating them up if we find out they have drugs on them."

Disclaimer: I'm an anarcho-capitalist.

> I'm not quite tin hat enough to think that they were actually created for these purposes

There doesn't have to be just one purpose. I think a lot of supposedly progressive legislation comes out of a union between genuine well-intended progressives and the special interest groups which will benefit from the actual version of the progressive legislation that ends up getting passed.

In ths US, drugs are basically the opiate of the masses. In particular, minorities. The drug laws are basically the rich white people saying: heads I win, tails you lose. As such, nothing will change. Nobody runs faster from a school with minority over-represenatation faster than a (white, affluent) liberal in an expensive zip-code.

Drugs are not opiates, opiates are drugs.

The parent was quoting Marx, come on!

I think you're clearly wrong. The 'war on drugs' is coming to an end right now. It's almost universally recognized as a failure. The majority of Americans have decided it needs to end, and as such it is ending. Obama has ordered his DOJ to stand down.

The momentum that is already underway cannot be stopped. At this point it's merely a matter of the time it takes for every state to tumble into line, one after another. And as the US is moving rapidly toward that, the rest of the world is as well, and that lock-step will make sure there can be no reversal. So the US goes, the rest of the world will quickly follow, since it was the US war on drugs that was largely responsible for pushing the existing drug criminalization system globally.

Every conservative I know these days supports either legalization or decriminalization, having come to the understanding that the approach that has been used for 40 years does not work.

You can celebrate. It's an early, but great victory for justice and liberty.

No, i'm clearly reading the data. You're simply speculating.

The drugs laws are widely used as pretexts for minority supression. The issue being discussed is the broader sociological function of the drugs laws: namely, to keep the elites in power, to elevate the value of their real-estate, and to provide a weak negotiating position for the under-priveledged in the labour market.

The same people that want to run away from the kids of black people are the same as those that want to throw the parents in jail (for petty drug offences and trivial parole violations).

http://www.businessinsider.com/kent-brewster-analyzes-athert...

http://paloaltofreepress.com/living-in-palo-alto-while-black...

http://www.insidebayarea.com/dailyreview/localnews/ci_110345...

Today, African-Americans are also more likely to spend time in prison for drug related offenses than their white counterparts. According to the Sentencing Project, African-Americans make up 12% of the nation’s drug users, but represent 34% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 45% of those in state prison for such offense as of 2005.

Of course, there's plenty of white collar drug abuse running rampant in high-rent neigborhoods. To wit:

http://dealbreaker.com/2014/10/jefferies-exec-sage-kelly-emp...

Clearly there is a demand for low-level discretionary powers that can serve the social-sorting priorities of those with wealth and power. The drug laws fill those roles today, and whether we like it or not, there seems to be "a demand" that they serve for some people well beyond their "literal" or statuatory meaning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com