[par]

What a wonderful world it will be when we help our sick instead of imprison them. I am looking forward to the rest of the world following suit. I'd also like to add this is a great time for US democracy to shine, as it is through statehood that things like this can be tested on a small scale, before rolling out to 'prod'.

[johnchristopher]

Is this sarcasm ? Because the rest of the world http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-d... is not waiting for the US the show the way and, Russia being the exception, the prison industry isn't as strong as it is in the US.

[martinald]

I'm not an American but I'm equally as happy to hear this as one.

I'd like to argue as a Brit that we did treat these people as sick until Nixon's "war on drugs" made UN policies that the rest of the world had to treat them as criminals.

[thrownaway2424]

That's about the stupidest thing I've heard in a while, so stupid I have to assume it's sarcasm. Of course the great state experiment is how we got here in the first place. Reagan, as governor, defunded mental health care and just said fuckit, throw all the addicts in prison. Then he took his ideas "to prod" by doubling down on Nixon's "war", with the helpful (to his party) side-effect of throwing millions of black people in prisons.

[calibraxis]

As personally attacking as this post is (though the anger is perfectly understandable), it's probably closest to my view, mentioning "the helpful (to his party) side-effect of throwing millions of black people in prisons."

Except I don't consider it a side-effect, nor do I think it's limited to Republicans. For example, prison was one way to control the newly freed slave population. (http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199804--.htm) Being the world's biggest jailer isn't exactly an "oops" thing.

[kirsebaer]

John Ehrlichman, Counsel and Assistant to President Nixon:

"You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Interviewed in 1992 by journalist Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, full quote in "Truth, Lies, and Audiotape" by Dan Baum (2012).

[bashinator]

I find it very telling that prisoners are specifically excepted from the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

[bramgg]

> I am looking forward to the rest of the world following suit.

It's more like the opposite.

[sehr]

I'm not so sure, the world exists outside of Europe and the US. There are some seriously draconian drug laws in Asia for example

[awildone]

Sweden is fucked up as well, and I'd expect Norway to be the same or worse. Sweden jumped on the war on drugs-train head-first and tried to do it better than the US. And I don't think they got the other memo about the whole approach being a complete failure. It doesn't help that the famous German bitch we insist on keeping with "food" and "shelter" is running her own No Drugs-campaign with religious overtones. Or that the politicians in charge believe that overdosing on Cannabis is like overdosing on Heroin.

[mercurial]

As a resident of Denmark who occasionally hears about neighbouring Scandinavian countries, I get the impression that religion (with a puritanical bend) has a stronger influence in Norway and Sweden.