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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

If only. The War on Drugs is a jobs program. What will all those newly out of work people do? What will all of those local police departments do without the 'easy' money from the government? (I realize that some of them don't need the extra funding and just use it to buy 'toys,' but I'm sure there are other to count on it in their budget)

I'm not saying that it shouldn't end. I'm saying that it is not "as simple as it sounds" and if you try and treat it that way there will be fallout to deal with.

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I think it's important in policy discussions to distinguish "simple" and "easy" as concepts. Needless to say, it would not be easy to end and unravel the drug war. As a concept and goal, however, it is a simple decision.

> What will all of those local police departments do without the 'easy' money from the government?

Perhaps they could attempt to solve and prevent crimes involving violence and fraudulent behavior, which theoretically is the reason they exist in the first place.

And the idea that the war on drugs is a revenue-positive endeavor is so preposterous I am not sure how to even address it.

> Perhaps they could attempt to solve and prevent crimes involving violence and fraudulent behavior, which theoretically is the reason they exist in the first place.

You are assuming that they are not doing that currently.

That's correct they are not. David Simon has spoken at length on that exact issue, and it's referenced in the article I linked to quoting him.

Do you have numbers to backup the claim that those other crimes are occurring at a higher rate than the number of arrests/convictions for them? In other words, would every "War on Drugs" arrest translate into a "more useful" arrest if we eliminated the War on Drugs (and refocused on other crimes)? My feeling is that it wouldn't.

From the article:

American police forces deliberately gorge on the excess of 750,000 marijuana-related arrests every year in order to profit from quotas, grants, and civil forfeiture while allowing hundreds of thousands of rape kits to sit untested for years in police warehouses. Only 4% of all American police arrests are for crimes considered “violent” by the FBI, even though those crimes are offered as the justification for enormous public expenditures, wholesale Orwellian surveillance, and every violent aspect of modern policing.

Only mildly related, but this is a massively underrated point: all too many people conflate "simple" and "easy", not just here but in many other things.

>What will all those newly out of work people do?

Making drugs? Selling drugs? Work in treatment? Work in the new recreational environments setup to take drugs? Increase enforcement of public intox/driving issues? Police elsewhere and other issues?

How do you make that transition though? You don't just fire a bunch of people, cast them to the wind with some sort of hand-wavy explanation about how the "invisible hand" will sort everything out in magical fashion.

If you just cut all of those people loose, then you will have to deal with the fallout of a bunch of angry unemployed people, and their friends/family/etc. In addition to <opposing political party> using it as a "you don't love America" field day.

Honestly, screw those people. They profiteered off of human misery and enslavement and their actions directly and indirectly wrought chaos on communities worldwide.

I know it's a pipe dream, but personally I think anyone involved with imprisoning drug users / dealers should see the inside of a jail cell themselves.

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