[CPLX]

There's all this discussion of these issues, which relate to racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc.

They seem complicated and nuanced and people throw their hands up and say well what can we do. The answer to that question is actually so simple you can say it in four words:

End the drug war.

Someone far more eloquent than me, The Wire creator David Simon, can flesh that out a little:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rweb/commentary/want-to-fix-ba...

[ams6110]

I'll agree that the drug war is out of control and as a "cure" it's worse than the disease. But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty. The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail.

By blaming the war on drugs we are also completely ignoring the other elephant in the room, and that is the massive breakdown in family structure that has occurred amongst the impoverished.

This is particularly the case for African-Americans but I don't claim that it's a racial thing, directly. It's part of the cycle of poverty. In DC, which is a large focus of the original piece, over half of babies are born out of wedlock. For African Americans it's close to 70%.

With no parents working, and fathers typically absent, children do not learn the behaviors and responsibilities that are required to be a productive and self-supporting member of society. They then perpetuate this in subsequent generations. Our "war on poverty" has, like the war on drugs, been a failure. The poverty rate in 1965 was about 15%, same as today, with trillions of dollars spent.

The war on drugs funds a massive effort to catch and punish drug dealers and users. So of course that happens. The war on poverty rewards disfunctional, irresponsible, and self-destructive life choices.

You get what you pay for.

[sbov]

The problem isn't that we're throwing them in jail for no reason. The problem is we aren't throwing non-poor non-minorities in jail for the same reasons.

Most friends of mine regularly do drugs. Even the self made multi millionaires. None of them have been to jail. They aren't subject to the random ass searches like the poor are.

If things were different - if the millionaires were treated with the same suspect, you bet your ass these laws would change.

But they aren't. So the laws stay the same. And that's a problem.

[enraged_camel]

The laws are terribly flawed, but they do change.

For instance, up until 2010, there was a 100:1 (one hundred to one) disparity between federal criminal penalties for crack cocaine possession vs. powder cocaine possession. Crack possession also carried a mandatory minimum five-year sentence. Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, reducing the disparity to 18:1 and removing the mandatory minimum. The law is still influenced by the incorrect belief that crack is more dangerous than powder, but the legal system is capable of recognizing and fixing its flaws (even if the fix is partial).

[beat]

The relative sentencing is about the choice of customer. Crack is cocaine that poor people can afford.

[mc32]

Growing up I lived in a town where there were hippy dealers and there were dreadlock dealers. They both got harrassed pretty evenly and the users I knew also would get stopped and issued summonses for small possession. The police would also confiscate beer in the car, etc. They were nice enough not to cite us for underage drinking, but I think the police were busy with the car thieves and guys testing out the small time illegal arms trade.

So if the police get complaints from neighbors they respond to that. If your rich neighbors tolerate your coke addiction, they don't come knocking. If you have a noisy neighbor who complains they do come knocking. Police respond very much to community complaints, from my experience with them growing up.

Whenever the police came to "bust" activities, it was mostly due to neighbors calling in "suspicious activity" I.e. Underage drinking and weed.

[theptip]

"They both got harrassed pretty evenly" - If you look at the national statistics, this is definitely not the case, so your anecdote unfortunately isn't representative.

E.g. see http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january_february_2...

"in investigatory stops, a black man age twenty-five or younger has a 28 percent chance of being stopped for an investigatory reason over the course of a year; a similar young white man has a 12.5 percent chance, and a similar young white woman has only a 7 percent chance. And this is after taking into account other possible influences on being stopped, like how you drive. " [in other words, this sample has been corrected for any difference in base-rate of justification for being stopped].

The interesting thing is, profiling like this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy; if the base-rate of drug possession is equal between blacks and whites, but blacks are stopped more often, then there will be a higher number of arrests of blacks per-capita, and it will look like blacks are more likely of committing a crime. This higher crime rate looks like a justification for profiling, when in fact it's just an artifact of the profiling that was done.

[Note I'm not making any claims about the actual base rate of drug possession, just illustrating an effect with an example]

[pyrocat]

>> it was mostly due to neighbors calling in "suspicious activity" i.e. being black

FTFY

[mc32]

We were middle and lower middle class, a majority non black with a few blacks who acted like other middle class kids in the burbs. So in our case it was "underage drinking teenagers" in places we "should not be".

[logfromblammo]

Did you mean "random-ass search", as in searches without reasonable suspicion, or "random ass-search", as in inappropriately adding a body cavity inspection to an otherwise justifiable search?

The fact that I cannot determine this from context may be a problem all by itself.

And while it's true that there is usually a reason for throwing people in jail, that reason is often an arbitrary, capricious, or morally dubious reason. I prefer that people go to jail for doing a specific, non-accidental harm to someone else, rather than doing something that merely offends a moral principle held by someone else.

Get high on a PCP dipper, and you are only hurting yourself. Get high, strip naked, and go out to jump on top of cars, and you might do time for all the auto-body damage, proportional to the cost of repairs. Get high on heroin, and you are only hurting yourself. Share some of your heroin with someone who doesn't know how dangerous it is, who then dies from asphyxiation, and you might go down for negligent manslaughter. Get drunk on alcohol, and you are only hurting yourself. Get drunk, and then try to drive home, taking out 14 mailboxes and one step-down transformer, and you might be doing some time.

...unless you have money, or know the right people. One of my former bosses occasionally mentioned at work that he grew weed inside his house. He probably went months without ever even seeing a cop. No suspicion means no searches, means no evidence, means no prosecution, means no jail. I have known people who drove drunk on at least a weekly basis, and never got cited for it even once. They all either had money or a few cop friends.

It isn't just that the justice system is not enforcing malum prohibitum offenses among that class, but they also look the other way for more serious malum in se crimes. The rich can afford more skillful lawyers. The connected can get the police and prosecutors to back off a bit.

I know someone who quit a prosecutor job because she got tired of putting people in jail for being poor. That's what modern policing is doing. It's packing the prisons with poor people and the jails with the untreated mentally ill. I didn't vote for this. I don't know anybody that would. Yet the people around me keep electing representatives who promise to be "tough on crime" and the "law and order" candidates, without stopping to consider that those people may be inventing new crimes just so they can get tough on them, or that their new laws may encourage more civil disorder.

[beat]

I used to think the drug war was the problem. Not anymore. Think about the high-profile police shootings of unarmed black men over the past year. Not a single one of those was over drugs. They were all "walking while black". Ending the drug war would not, on its own, end the "walking while black" problem.

The family structure breakdown among the poor is directly, painfully correlated to the high incarceration rate. Absent fathers are absent because they're in jail, or expect they will be sooner or later, or because they're ashamed because they are unable to provide for their children.

One of my best friends is a doctor in Orlando, who happens to be black. Back during the Trayvon Martin shooting, he told me he would not even drive through Sanford. He didn't feel safe - from the police. In his daily life, he's a key administrator at a large hospital and a radiologist. In Sanford? He's a black man driving a car too nice for him.

That's not about the war on drugs.

[CPLX]

> He's a black man driving a car too nice for him. That's not about the war on drugs.

Actually, it kind of is. What's the implicit assumption in that story? Of course, that he's a drug dealer. What would be the pretext for pulling him over and searching his car? To look for drugs.

It really is the cornerstone of policing in 2015, just try to imagine counterfactuals where there was no such thing as illegal drugs and drug dealers and so on and it becomes obvious.

[beat]

But again, look at the high profile shootings recently. The cops weren't looking for drugs. In all of those cases, they were stopped for basic harassment.

The nice car isn't a reason to pull over the doctor. It's an excuse.

[CPLX]

I think you're saying this is not about drugs. That's correct.

That's a distinct statement from saying it's not about the war on drugs. It's definitely about that.

[beat]

To push it farther, I'm saying the war on drugs is a symptom, not a cause - it's rooted in racism. So it's not about drugs... it's about race.

[darkroasted]

"The family structure breakdown among the poor is directly, painfully correlated to the high incarceration rate. Absent fathers are absent because they're in jail, or expect they will be sooner or later, or because they're ashamed because they are unable to provide for their children."

The Moynihan report decrying the break down of black families was released in 1965, before the drug war, at a time when incarceration per crime committed was approaching all-time lows.

The incarceration rates in America bottomed out around 1973. At that time, about 63% of black and poor persons lived in a single-female headed household. By 1978, with incarceration rates still within their historical range, the rate was nearly 70% (source Losing Ground by Charles Murray). Family structure breakdown came first, it was not caused by incarceration. It is wishful thinking to believe that if all these men were not locked up they would be upstanding and faithful fathers, the problems go far beyond that.

[pyrocat]

It sounds like you have a bone to pick with black men. Try reading some recent data: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing...

[darkroasted]

It's a structural issue and is very hard to fix. Men, everywhere, do what is needed to get sex. If women and the institutions of society do not require a commitment from the man in order to have children, then men will not give such a commitment. Why would they? But traditionally it is the father who restricts access to his daughter, or trains his daughter not to open up so easily. So fatherlessness begets fatherlessness.

[beat]

If you think fathers control the sexuality of their teenage daughters, you've obviously never raised one!

[CPLX]

> The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail.

The reason people are "making it sound like that" is because that's actually what's happening.

Freddy Gray was plucked from a sidewalk, detained, and then killed, for literally no lawful reason.

The context for his story, and the many others like it, is the war on [certain] drugs [when used by some kinds of people] that is current social policy.

This approach to criminal justice appeared at precisely the same time that overtly racist means of policing were outlawed, to accomplish the same goal.

Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not?

Did a country with a few centuries of of legally enshrined racism and violence towards blacks just, you know, stop doing that fifty years ago, suddenly?

Do you know what Ockham's razor is?

[darkroasted]

Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not?

It's more complicated than that. Police are actually much more tolerant of open-air/street corner drug-dealing in black ghetto neighborhoods than in suburbia. If you read books or news articles about these neighborhoods, you see that the dealing gets ignored for months and months, or the dealers are harassed and arrested and then right back out on the street later in the day. This would never be tolerated the same way in suburbia. Then what happens is that there is a shooting, or a gang war with many shootings breaks out. Neighbors demand that the police "do something." Since the police do not know who is responsible and witnesses refuse to talk, the police take the path of least resistance and lock up whoever they can on drug charges. I recommend the books "Ghettoside" and "Don't Shoot" for more on these issues.

Do you know what Ockham's razor is?

The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders. For instance, Ghettoside recounted a story of a 13-year-old, black kid wandering through the back alleys of his neighborhood, stumbling across a gang of older youths, who immediately started shooting at him. That is just insane. Completely insane. And the book is full of examples like that, of street shootings that take out innocent bystanders because the shooter couldn't be bothered to verify that the target was actually in an enemy gang.

If a community does not self-police, then there are two equally bad options: 1) outsiders can impose their own policing, which is always going to be fraught, brutal, and mistake-prone. 2) other communities can just try to contain the problem, ie, they can segregate themselves.

[beat]

Do you really think things are different in wealthier communities because they "self-police"? Calling the police in a poor neighborhood is dangerous business... not because of gang retaliation, but because of the police themselves. And as you observe, the police generally do nothing about street dealers, and what they do is ineffectual. So why even bother calling them?

[darkroasted]

Well, in a "wealthy" community, generally the police are members of the community. They live nearby, go to the same schools, etc. So all policing in a sense is self-policing. There is much less of a sense of the police being the "other", and vice versa, the police have less of sense that the population is all "others" and all "savages". When you are an outside police force, you only deal with the criminals, so you it becomes your sense that the entire community is criminal.

Also, I put "wealthy" in scare quotes, because this dynamic also applies to areas like Chinatown or the Hasidic Jew communities of Brooklyn. These communities are not rich, but have low crime rates and rarely involve the police in their disputes, they mostly take care of problems using internal social sanctions.

More generally, "self-policing" means problems are nipped in the bud early before they escalate to crimes requiring the police, and never have a chance to escalate to murders and retaliation killings. Most "policing" is taken care of by families and parents. Growing up, it was normal for one parent to complain to another parent about the behavior of the second parent's child, and the second parent to enforce discipline on their own children. I cannot remember a single time in my neighborhood where we had to call the police on a neighbor. I cannot actually recall a single instance of crime, such as burglary.

[beat]

This problem, applied racially, leads to an uncomfortable question. If black communities are less effective than white communities at "self-policing", why is that? Is it because of externally imposed social structure issues (the consequences of racism), or is it because of internal nature (blacks are less intelligent and moral than whites)?

You have to start with this raw, painful question. Either you argue for racial inferiority, or you acknowledge that the problems are truly from external rather than internal sources. Once you acknowledge that, complaining about "self policing" sounds like blaming the victim, because it is.

[r00fus]

> The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders

s/do not/are not allowed to/

Even Oakland won't allow community policing despite the wishes of the community.

[analyst74]

I do believe ams6110's post have some merits.

If you grow up in the ghetto with role models largely being gang members and most your friends have been or are going to jail, it's difficult to grow into a mentality that value education and achievement. It just happens due to historical reasons, especially racism, majority of the ghetto are blacks. This actually perpetuate the unspoken racism, where people consciously or unconsciously associate black people with all the bad things happening in ghetto.

As a counter example, Asian Americans were also highly discriminated against in the past century, immigration from Asia were barred, those who were here cannot acquire citizenship, cannot own land, etc etc. Asians were generally viewed as poor uneducated labours, not too different from blacks. But today Asians are hardly viewed as that, largely thanks to large influx of educated and hard working Asian immigrants in recent years (due to immigration law preference), who changed the public perception of Asians, lifted Asian neighbourhoods from ghetto status and gave positive role model and connections to poor Asian kids (local or immigrants).

Conclusion? Focusing on "helping" visible minority actually reinforce the perception that certain ethnic groups need help. What we need to focus on instead, is to help those in need of help, without regards to skin colors.

[mc32]

Yes these things happen. They should not happen. But they happen in most counties --even homogenous countries. Also, people don't get killed like this everyday, these are exceptions, not acceptable exceptions, but its also not routine as you make it out to be.

The problem is economic and cultural (we allow for guns) so the police take maximum caution, and given the police are the only expression of government in some areas, the negativity falls on them. It's not as if most of the community in a blighted area don't want police - they do, but they also want police to act as if the areas didn't have a violent characteristic. Any area of the world with high crime, be it Russia, china, France, germany, greece will have police act differently in those communities. It's a reaction to the dynamics in such places. It takes effort to overcome and the local Govs typically don't put in the necessary effort.

[CPLX]

> Yes these things happen. They should not happen. But they happen in most counties --even homogenous countries.

What homogenous countries with a comparable level of economic wealth have situations that even remotely resemble our mass incarceration and drug war policies?

[lsniddy]

China is a good example, though they incarcerate less and execute more

[analyst74]

If you do drugs in China, how much you get punishment depends on your skin color and citizenship.

If you are Chinese, you are fucked, with the exception of powerful bureaucrat maybe; but if you are foreigner, you generally get off free, maybe a policeman will give you a stern speech about not breaking law again.

One thing I find funny though, is despite the war on drugs, average Americans, rich or poor, are still doing them, giving police more bodies to send to jail.

[CPLX]

A quick glance at the stats suggests the U.S. incarceration rate is approximately 5x higher than China's. That's a big difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...

[bambax]

> But they happen in most counties

If you meant "countries": no. No other country jails that many people, either compared to its population, or in absolute numbers. Not now, not ever.

The US is not "the land of the free", it's "the land of the jailed".

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"... and I will promplty put those bums in my private prisons where I'll watch them be raped to death.

That should be the quote on the so-called Statue of "Liberty".

We should ask for that statue back.

[mc32]

Oh, there is no question we jail too many people, and we jail rather than treat the mentally ill.

Reform is definitely needed, no question.

What I was saying is that other countries also disproportionately incarcerate their poor. It's not a uniquely American racist thing. Go to Angola, Nigeria, Russia, China, it's no different. Yes, we overdo the incarceration fixes all ills thing, we've got an unhealthy fetish for it, but my point was, the poor everywhere are disproportionately affected.

People seem to take it that I'm okay with that. I'm not, but its not uniquely American and its not a policy to target ethnicities. If America were all white or all black we'd still have a problem of overrepresentation of poor in the system. By overrepresentation I mean normalizing for crimes.

[bambax]

Yes, disproportionately incarcerating the poor is probably universal.

But incarceration-fetish is uniquely American. No other country has ever done that in all of history.

When it is done in such huge numbers it really isn't "law enforcement" anymore, it's just some form of apartheid.

The rest of the world should subject the US to the same kind of shaming that was used against South Africa. But of course, the rest of the world doesn't have the balls to do that, so here we go.

[smtddr]

>>But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

I'd say that institutionalize/systemic racism in America makes it exceedingly more likely that a minority will end up poor and exceedingly more difficult to get out of ---> poor neighborhoods --> more crime ---> broken window policy ---> problems we've been seeing recently.

Conversely, a rich kid in a wealthy neighborhood(that probably doesn't have police at every corner) could be smoking weed right now. Nobody will notice/care, and even if they did some millionaire parents will make sure things work out for the best. And we know the general demographics of rich neighborhoods. It's not that only minorities commit crimes, but the police are always heavily more present where minorities are often located. It's death of a thousand paper-cuts. Housing discrimination, workplace discrimination, poor neighborhoods with horrid schools, war on drugs, excessive police presence/force. Then when they end up poor & desperate, the police are right there waiting for them to step out of line. "See?! We got him committing a crime!" ...without understanding everything in America that led to the event. And when the police jail/kill these people(often black men), you've potential just taken a father away from a family and there's now a young child without a father... and the cycle almost unavoidably continues.

The war on drugs has been a huge driver of this cycle. End it and I think we will see a change for the better. Won't solve everything, but it'll be significant improvement.

[millermp12]

Can we dispense with "minority" and "people of color" when we're talking really about blacks and to a lesser extent hispanics?

This kind of intellectual forgery is why the left (and it's prescriptions) are increasingly viewed with suspicion. Bring yourself to be honest with your words and assessments. Make sure what you say passes the smell test. Otherwise you're just preaching to the converted.

[nmrm2]

It's not just blacks and hispanics. It's a lot of other hues as well. And that's before asking what "black" and "hispanic" even mean, which is highly contextual to culture.

And anyways, "white" isn't even a color -- which is kind of obvious if you think about it for a second because a dark white person and a fair-skinned white person can be as far apart as a dark white person and a latino person. Rather, white is a collection of socio-economic attributes and their indicators, of which color and other physical indicators are only the most obvious/visible. And not all white people have always been white. See e.g. "How the Irish Became White".

[richmarr]

> This kind of intellectual forgery is why the left (and it's prescriptions) are increasingly viewed with suspicion

Tautology. "The left" isn't a thing, other than when viewed with suspicion by "the right".

> Bring yourself to be honest with your words and assessments.

Implying that it's dishonest to use terms like "minority" and "people of color" is a leap that you need to back up to have credibility.

[dragonwriter]

> But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

There've been a number of cases recently where large number of convictions have been thrown in to review because of either evidence of systemic race-based misconduct by law enforcement authorities or systematic falsification of evidence by law enforcement authorities. So, in many cases, either or both the "not being locked up...because they are black" and the "they are committing crimes" part are in considerable doubt.

> By blaming the war on drugs we are also completely ignoring the other elephant in the room, and that is the massive breakdown in family structure that has occurred amongst the impoverished.

The selective targeting for higher penalties an higher prosecution rates for drugs predominantly used in the black community as part of the "War on Drugs" and the correspondingly higher rates of incarceration in that community resulting from it is a directly contributing factor to the "massive breakdown in family structure" in that community (and the war in drugs in general, and the incarceration resulting from it, is likewise a contributing factor to the breakdown in family structure among the impoverished outside of the black community.)

> Our "war on poverty" has, like the war on drugs, been a failure.

Arguably, "like" should be replaced with "in large part due to" in that sentence. The "War on Drugs" largely is a war on the poor. It directly opposes any "war on poverty" (though even as a slogan, much less any substance, the "war on poverty" was largely abandoned shortly after it was announced, and replaced by the War on Drugs.)

[DanBC]

> But people are not being locked up just because they are black,

You're ignoring the fact that black people are more likely than white people to be arrested for minor crime; they're more likely to get prison time for similar crimes; etc.

> or poor.

Ferguson etc showed us that small towns used minor traffic violations as a revenue stream. Someone would have a minor, small, traffic violation and get a fine for it. They would then have to decide between taking time off work to pay he fine (and thus lose their job) or go to pay the fine, if they can pay the fine by the time they have too.

Because many people can't afford to pay the fine they end up in jail.

That's pretty much putting people in jail for being poor, and the US does it a lot.

[throwawcontro3]

A review of the literature reveals that there is little evidence for racial bias in the US justice system as a whole, though there likely is bias in some local jurisdictions:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...

I was as surprised as you likely will be. The exception is with capital punishment. It looks like black people are more likely to get it than others. But otherwise nationwide crime and punishment statistics look mostly fair.

[ZeroGravitas]

Asking someone to turn out their pockets and then arresting them because some marijuana is now "publicly displayed" is as close to "no reason" as you're going to get.

Also, if the father is absent, maybe it's because he's in jail, like some scary number of people in the US? Maybe he can't get employment, because he's a felon, like a scary number of people in the US?

The person you replied to is right, ending the war on drugs makes a lot of things, including all the things you list, better. It's a great place to start.

[aasarava]

> But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

The US is locking up very, very large numbers of young black men for minor crimes that people of other races regularly commit -- i.e., for activities that are only crimes when blacks are found to be doing them. Recent studies have shown that whites use more drugs than blacks, and yet are charged far less. Even the sentencing on perceived "black drugs" (drugs more readily available to the poor) such as crack is far more punitive than sentencing for the equivalent cocaine.

For a good book on the subject, see The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It illuminates, with facts, just how disproportionately our system of laws punishes young black men while young whites are given second and third and fourth chances.

[Steuard]

> people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor

I just said this elsewhere, but I knew many people in college who used illegal drugs, and none of them were ever locked up (or even searched). When we have a set of laws and we choose to enforce them on some communities but not on others, then we are in fact locking people up just because they are black or poor.

Others have already pointed out that high incarceration and felony rates (in part due to the drug war) have contributed a whole lot to the social patterns that you mention here. I'll agree with you on one thing, though: our social programs today are in a particularly ineffective state with some messed-up incentive structures and still not enough resources to actually solve the problem. I'd much prefer something like a universal basic income to the complicated, market distorting system we have today. (But I still think that getting rid of these programs would be far worse than what we have now, even if the incentive structure would be more straightforward.)

[fromtheoutside]

>> I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail.

That's actually not how the Gestapo worked. They were very bureaucratic and followed protocol. Their most misused power, according to Wikipedia, was the "protective custody".

[isaacremuant]

If a crime is "having drugs" then the war on drugs criminalizes something that maybe shouldn't be criminalized.

If the intent is to help combat drug use then putting a user in prison and ruining his and his family's life doesn't seem like the way to do it. Not to talk about the crime it generates when a business that WILL happen doesn't have any other means to compete than with violence.

There's a great discussion between Glenn Greenwald and former Bush Drug Czar:

https://vimeo.com/32110912 (Janus Forum - Should the US Legalize Drugs?)

[kramarao]

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."

Besides the selective enforcement of laws, most laws themselves discriminate against the poor.

[bambax]

> we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail

And that's exactly what you're doing.

Using drugs or selling drugs should not be a reason to put someone in jail.

Tobacco, alcohol or sugar (HFCS) do MUCH more harm to users than illegal substances ever will, and cost much more to society as a result.

> behaviors and responsibilities that are required to be a productive and self-supporting member of society

Define "productive".

If you sell illegal substances at a profit, how aren't you "self-supporting"??

[jrochkind1]

Neither drug use nor drug selling is greater among black people than among white people in the U.S. But arrests, convictions, and jail time are all much greater for black Americans -- at every level, more arrests, higher percentage of those arrested convicted, longer sentences for those convicted.

There is nothing wrong with the 'culture' of Black people in America that ending white supremacy can't fix.

[dismal2]

The war on drugs is directly related to what you are talking about.

[nickbauman]

Are you aware the US criminal justice system is oriented towards profiteering on incarceration and hardly or not at all oriented toward rehabilitation? The percent of GDP that the criminal justice system takes up compared to other OECD nations is the smoking gun. Its modern "American-style" slavery.

[Zigurd]

And if you are wondering how America "outperforms" Europe in GDP growth while lagging in quality of life measures, there you have it. Our GDP is going into military, prisons, cops, financialization, and overpaying for health care. All that counts on the plus side of the GDP ledger.

[LordKano]

But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

I have a friend, someone that has been my friend for 30 years, who is in prison right now for drugs.

He wasn't incarcerated because he's black. He was incarcerated because he was caught selling marijuana and laundering money.

I, on the other hand, chose a different path in life. I made the decision to not get involved with the things that he was doing. I have no criminal record and I'm every bit as black as he is.

I agree that fatherlessness is the key component here. The best predictor of criminality in young people is the presence of a father in the home. This holds true across racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. The large number of single parent households in the black community has a lot to do with the high levels of crime in the inner cities.

[beat]

There are two somewhat different problems... high levels of crime, and different levels of law enforcement for equivalent crimes. We have both. Moreover, unequal enforcement contributes to the crime rate. People continually harassed and jailed for petty crimes can't hold steady jobs, so they wind up moving up the crime ladder just to make a living.

[Eleutheria]

> They are committing crimes

If you think drug trading and consumption is a crime, you're part of the problem.

[lars]

The drug war is part of it. But the big thing to fix is income inequality. High income inequality is correlated with higher homicide rate, higher robbery rate, lower civic participation, higher mortality, lower social cohesion and lower well-being in children. So many social problems are strongly predicted by this variable, yet many refuse to consider inequality to be a problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality#Effects

[ctdonath]

Many consider inequality a symptom/consequence of one's own chosen behavior, not a cause.

(ETA "chosen behavior" clause.)

[drblast]

I've never been poor in the terminal sense, but there was a time when I had no money. I wasn't desperate, and I was beginning a career with a lot of promise, but I was also too proud to ask for help from friends or family.

During that time my car broke down, and it would cost $3000 to fix it. This was money I didn't have. The car was otherwise reliable, so overall it would have been a good financial decision to fix the car that would have provided me with more than $3000 worth of transportation amortized over its future useful life.

But that didn't matter, I couldn't afford to fix it.

I did need a car though, or I couldn't get to work. What I could afford was to take out a loan to buy a used car, even though that used car was not as reliable as my previous car and cost more than $3000.

I ended up getting the used car. My decision to do that was based on my need to get to work and keep my job. It was the right decision, but had I had an extra $3000 in cash, the right decision would have been to fix my otherwise reliable car.

People without extra cash are constantly one misfortune away from a downward spiral.

[crpatino]

That is a falsifiable statement, you know.

Is there any statistic to show what percentage of today's top 1% earners where born to a bottom 50% family from the previous generation, and viceversa? If less than what you would expect from two non-correlated random variables, this suggest where you start in life has an effect of how far you can go. This does not invalidate your hypothesis, but may suggest that upwards mobility takes more than one generation to lift people from poverty to wealth.

Further more, we can do the same analysis to figure out how many people from bottom 50% families grow to reach 75% percentile or above. I do not know what it would be, but if much lower than expected, that would suggest that upwards mobility is quite limited, invalidating your hypothesis.

[lars]

You seem to be talking about average wealth and social mobility. This is different from inequality, which is about the distance from the bottom to the top.

Some of these results are counter intuitive. For example: There's data to show that the top quartile of earners in low inequality countries live longer than their top quartile counterparts in high inequality countries, even if the high inequality counterparts earn much more both in absolute and relative terms.

Edit: Since this is getting downvoted, here's a talk that spends 17 minutes listing studies showing that this is in fact about inequality, not average income. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ7LzE3u7Bw

[crpatino]

Right, I have seen that research before, and I don't think you should be getting down-votes either.

The relevance of social mobility in the discussion was because the GP assumes the correlation that the problems related to inequality/poverty is the result of a third factor that is cause of the other to: personal choices.

My position is that if this is the case, we should be observing strong social mobility in both ways. Surely there are a number of "deserving poor" that started life in a disadvantaged situation but are able to lift themselves out of that by intelligent choices and hard work, as well as there are privileged folks who make enough ill choices and land themselves in trouble.

IF this is not the case, we should adjust the level of agency that people are capable. To what degree is it personal choice able to influence the well being we enjoy in life.

[gwern]

> If less than what you would expect from two non-correlated random variables, this suggest where you start in life has an effect of how far you can go.

Where you start in life is not independent of innate traits.

[crpatino]

Agreed. But if that's the case, how (or to what degree) can inequality be the consequence of "one's own chosen behavior".

[gwern]

If, for example, things like impulsiveness and self-discipline (cough Conscientiousness cough) have high degrees of heritability, it can be simultaneously true that one's birth place correlates with one's destination and it also be the consequence of one's own chosen behavior. (And to the extent that the environment is equalized and optimal, genetic factors will matter more, not less.)

[beat]

It's usually people who have never been poor that think that.

(I've been poor. I don't think that.)

[mercer]

Same here! I find that when you spend the time to actually inspect this concept of 'chosen behavior', it usually turns out to be much less chosen than it initially seems.

Don't get me wrong, in some ways my opinions on the issue enter the very sensitive topic of genetics. I'm by no means a 'fluffy lefty' who believes education solves everything.

But the mere fact that I need to point that out bothers me. From my perspective, without even getting into genetics and whatnot, the 'chosen behavior' thought in regards to the poor is mostly bullshit. Being poor sucks, and a big part of that is a consequence of the fact that society penalizes poverty. Merit doesn't really enter the equation.

[beat]

It's a privilege argument. I'm getting very sensitive to privilege issues lately.

I lifted myself out of poverty. I grew up in what southerners call "white trash" (albeit upper middle white trash), and my father was more or less a petty criminal. But I'm well aware that being white, male, smart, and American all contributed heavily to my success. I'm the beneficiary of privilege.

Far, far too many people (and you can see it in this discussion) were born on second base and think they hit a double.

[moomin]

Indeed, the City of Ferguson's finances relied on the regular fining of its poorest citizens. Basically backdoor taxation.

[millermp12]

Not unlike the lottery, which the poor regularly spent their meager pittance on. Taxation of the poor as Lincoln noted.

So can be ban lotteries (and casinos, too) unless participants demonstrate they can afford the losses?

[alchemism]

Since you mention it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotterie...

[mkr-hn]

Lotteries are a symptom of the problem of poor financial education. Lottery-funded scholarships are the only way a lot of kids get to college. Ban the lottery, and their parents will blow it on something else. That something else will probably not allocate most of its funding to scholarships.

edit: If this country were rational enough for the solutions proposed in replies, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

[toomuchtodo]

You don't need lottery-funded scholarships if you have universal education (as most first world countries do).

[angersock]

Or, alternately, we should be funding that education by taxing companies who will ultimately be consuming those employees anyways.

[enraged_camel]

>>Not unlike the lottery, which the poor regularly spent their meager pittance on. Taxation of the poor as Lincoln noted.

Not sure if you're trolling. Assuming you aren't, allow me to point out that your analogy is ridiculous. Fines are mandatory: you have to pay them or you face stiffer fines, and even jail. Lottery is completely voluntary. No one is forcing them to play.

[element4y]

Actually, the two are very related. While one is bound by law enforcement and the other is a "voluntary expenditure" they both accomplish the same goal, taxing those who have the least to give.

And while we are involved in a discussion of human psychology. Maybe consider the mental aspects of extreme poverty and you can see that purchasing lottery tickets is not exactly voluntary but a desperate attempt to change the course of an exasperated existence. Just a thought.

For example. Drinking water is voluntary but if you go without water you might get the feeling it's a little more than a choice...

[prawn]

It'd be funny and practical if money invested in lotteries never resulted in a large win but was later returned to the participant - like a surprise investment scheme.

[psychometry]

Sure, but that's not a particularly interesting or useful observation seeing as how one's choices are a result of economic circumstances.

[analyst74]

large scale inequality is the symptom of lack of social mobility. If poor people are able to work hard and become rich, there wouldn't be such large difference in wealth.

Inequality starts from inequality of opportunities.

[crpatino]

I think it was Warren Buffet who said something along the lines of: if we handled the Olympics the way we handle wealth, we would be looking for the grandchildren of medal winners in the 50's and 60's and sending them to compete today.

[lotsofmangos]

Your environment restricts your available choices and these things are tied back on themselves, so behaviour creates an environment that then influences behaviour. Looking for ultimate causes in current behaviours for social systems that have developed over evolutionary timescales is pretty pointless.

[temujin]

In the US, yes. In China, not so much.

For all the correlations which are greatly attenuated in China, it is safe to conclude that inequality is not a significant cause of the corresponding phenomenon; instead, causation goes the other direction and/or a third factor causes both.

[analyst74]

Since the introduction of capitalism and free market, which marked the start of large income inequality, Chinese society has definitely experienced higher crime rate, lower civic participation, lower social cohesion, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_issues_in_China#Overview

I remember when my home city was still very poor, people treated each other much better. There is a general sense of community and trust. People are always offering a hand to those in need of help, even though helpers themselves are poor. Theft was literally unheard of, let alone more serious crimes.

[darkroasted]

Also Edwardian England is a compelling counter-example. Read "The Classic Slum" by Robert Roberts. British society around 1900 was massively unequal and lots of people were desperately poor. But their homicide rates were 100X lower than the rates seen in the contemporary ghetto. The poor working class areas of England during that period had intact families, schools that provided discipline, strict policing, and strong institutions.

[douche]

It's probably worth noting that the people living in those Victorian slums were largely homogeneous, and also homogeneous with the rest of the culture.

Likewise, the least-diverse states in the U.S. are also at the top of the list for lowest crime-rate.

[CyberDildonics]

That isn't even the deepest issue. Yes, minimum wage and social benefits could be increased.

The real culprit is education. Why is it that the poorest neighborhoods have the poorest schools? If you want income inequality you have to flip that upside down and start teaching students what they need to know to have better income. Things like basic finance, how to negotiate, the realities of what jobs pay etc. They should know about student loans, scholarships, government programs, and how to pick a college that will actually pay off as an investment.

Also kids in desolated neighborhoods need to be counseled. They need to learn how to take care of themselves and how to avoid eating nothing but sugar with no fiber since their parent(s) are too exhausted or beaten down or addicted to make a meal that isn't mac and cheese and sprite.

The drug war is part of that. How can kids learn and grow up properly when their families are being put in jail and they are left with no one to provide for them or take care of them while it costs huge amounts of money from the government to imprison them? It is an almost impossible cycle to break out of when the ods are stacked against you.

[Lawtonfogle]

Looking for simple cause and effect in this field is akin to taking a large recurrent neural network and looking for cause and effect between two neurons firing while not knowing any of the weights or connections.

[rayiner]

The drug war is a symptom of something more basic: Americans lack compassion. Consider something in the non-drug context: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/georgia-probatio.... You can bring up private prisons and probation companies, but the fact is that these laws have been on the books all along. They were passed by part-time state legislators, who are pretty representative of ordinary people in the state.

[MrZongle2]

"The drug war is a symptom of something more basic: Americans lack compassion."

Really?

http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-gi...

[wwweston]

It's probably worth noting that not all charitable giving is compassionate giving. From your link:

>In 2013, the majority of charitable dollars went to religion (31%), education (16%), human services (12%), and grantmaking foundations (11%).2

That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those donations, it just means they might be to keep the lights on at religious, academic, or arts institutions.

It also doesn't mean that Americans aren't at all compassionate givers... I think we are. It's just that we're also all too often anxious to draw lines about deserving or undeserving, though (criminals, of course, being deserving of punishment rather than charity).

[njharman]

I would argue that most people contribute out of guilt rather than compassion.

[MrZongle2]

[Citation needed]

[njharman]

Not for opinion which "I would argue" flags this as such.

[harryh]

This brings to mind the most famous quote from America's Greatest Poet:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

[MrZongle2]

America and Americans (myself included) are full of inconsistencies and contradictions, but then I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a country that couldn't be described similarly to some degree.

My point is that I take issue with Americans being painted with a big, wide brush of "compassionless" when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Is there perhaps less compassion or concern (in general) directed towards criminals or individuals who are perceived to have engaged in criminal activities, here in the United States? Probably. But implying that such mindset reveals a lack of compassion in toto is ignorant.

[gknoy]

In the context of the justice system, I think we tend to lack compassion. Most of the Americans I know (family, etc) seem more intent on __retribution__ and punishing Bad People, rather than compassion. Once someone is a Bad Person (criminal, poor, or even just someone they don't like), compassion seems to go out the window.

[dragonwriter]

> Once someone is a Bad Person (criminal, poor, or even just someone they don't like), compassion seems to go out the window.

More importantly, being a member of some group that is unliked, often because of the actions of some individual(s) that aren't really general to the group, is enough to make someone a Bad Person in many people's eyes.

Even being supported by a person who is viewed as a Bad Person (potentially for the same reason described in the preceding paragraph) is enough to make a person a Bad Person.

[LLWM]

And if you are not a Bad Person, there is plenty of compassion. Sounds like a more efficient system than blindly distributing compassion to everyone regardless of merit.

[e40]

I also think there need to be penalties for Prosecutorial misconduct. Just this morning I was listening to the tale of woe regarding Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle on the Dana Gould podcast[1]. Wow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Arbuckle#The_scandal

Clearly part of it was due to newspapers of the time just flat out publishing lies, but the prosecutor had a huge hand in what happened.

Prosecutors often overreach, even when they are not downright corrupt, and this can lead to destruction of people's lives. There need to be consequences for prosecutors that do this. And if people are to tell me there are laws on the books that cover this, then they need to be enforced a lot more, because don't hear about it happening.

[1] http://www.danagould.com/hot-buttered-shame/

EDIT: added link to Dana's podcast.

[j_m_b]

Few in the media have the courage to state the obvious, end the drug war. A call for the end of the drug war irritates too many governmental and private sector interests and points the finger on exactly what is to blame. Bringing up racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc. allows the blame to be spread, appeals to popular sensibilities and muddles the real issue.

[beat]

I think you have the causality backwards. We have a drug war because we have racism. We don't have racism because we have a drug war. Look up the history of the heroin and marijuana laws... it's depressing.

[blazespin]

This is not a race issue. This is an inner city culture problem. Ending the drug war is a first step. But we still have to give these kids something to do. Pay them to go to school.

[DanBC]

>This is not a race issue. This is an inner city culture problem.

You realise that racist policies around suburb building and home loans cause the inner cities to be mostly black? White people got cheap home loans to move into nice neighbourhoods. And that's one of the reason people are calling it a race issue.

[darkroasted]

What makes a white neighborhood more "nice" than black neighborhoods, outside of the crime rate or the people that live there? Why is Roxbury/Dorchester in Boston "less nice" than Saugus? Dorchester has great homes, near a nice park, has great access to the subway that goes downtown. Why is 50th and Baltimore in Philadelphia "less nice" than Norristown? 50th and Baltimore has great parks, great homes, great public transit access to downtown. If it is the people that live there that make a neighborhood good or bad, than to blame segregation or red lining for bad neighborhoods is to beg the question.

[obstacle1]

Oh look, a sweeping claim about evil Whitey being responsible for Everything Bad backed by absolutely no data or evidence. Shocker, that.

[DanBC]

It's trivially easy to find these policies.

Here's one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

[worklogin]

Like others, I believe that that is one solution, but that a rigorous, objective analysis of policies and the reasons behind why we do things is necessary, and this article presents the problems very well. To shrug off the philosophical roots of the broken system is not ideal.

[Sleaker]

I think the portion of the article which deals with simple fines and incarceration based on not being able to pay highlights why it's not quite as simple as end the drug war, although it is probably a good place to start.

[eevilspock]

I agree that we should end the drug war but you are oversimplifying.

[CPLX]

Not really. Much like "end apartheid" or "US out of Vietnam" we are occasionally presented with government policies so clearly unethical or ineffective that they defy oversimplification. The drug war is one such obvious failure.

[Lawtonfogle]

It is still nuanced in how you do it. For example, what about age limits for drugs? What about adults being banned from getting drugs (say an 18 year old getting alcohol). What about pharmaceuticals being sold without a prescription. What about ensuring safety standards in what was being sold (say ensuring that the crack in the store wasn't cut with anything horrible).

Edit: That said, I do think the argument that even with all this, the argument that legalizing everything now and worrying about the details later is better than keeping it illegal while we work out details does have merit. I'm not convinced it is right, but I'm not convinced it is wrong either.

[sliverstorm]

Yes, but you haven't yet shown it's the root of our struggles with racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc, (which seems to be what you claim in your first post)

[happyscrappy]

It is ending. Legalization of marijuana is the start.

[justaman]

Legalizing marijuana is _very_ different from changing the policy on crack-cocaine. Crack is one of the primary issues in lower income/black communities.

A good first step? Absolutely, but it will be another generation before any policy is passed that results in the taxation of other narcotics. The US needs to sell guns to someone...

[happyscrappy]

Right, crack is illegal so they can sell guns. Are you for real?

[mellavora]

Seconded.

[a8da6b0c91d]

The drug war is a direct consequence of the Warren Court reforms of the 1960s. Equal Protection and Disparate Impact made illegal many local laws and policing methods that had worked to maintain order. Prosecutors needed new tools to get criminals behind bars, hence the war on drugs.

[panglott]

If the problem is racism and brutality in law enforcement, I don't think the right response would be "it was better before the 1960s". Law enforcement was racist before the 1960s because the law was explicitly racist then.

[Zigurd]

"Maintain order?"

After the violence and racism, a big problem with police is the crappy solution rates to violent and serious property crimes. The Drug War just masks that lack of effectiveness.

[mineshaftgap]

Is it your contention that the black cops in Baltimore are racist against black people?

[CPLX]

Yes.

Is your contention that the obvious irony of that situation renders it impossible?

[monochromatic]

I don't think I've heard this theory before. Can you flesh it out a little bit please?

[darkroasted]

It's not just the Warren Court, the other big problem is witness intimidation and the "don't snitch" ethic makes it very hard to convict people for murder, so drug cases are used as a proxy.

From "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America":

-----------

This was how Coughlin did his job on many a night. Coughlin couldn’t do much about all the shooters in Southeast who got away with it. But he could enforce drug laws, gang injunctions, and parole and probation terms relatively easily just by driving around and making “good obs”— good observations, cop lingo for catching, at a glance, a bulge under a shirt, a furtive motion of hands. A chase might ensue, and sometimes ended with the cops shutting down whole neighborhoods as the LAPD “airship,” or helicopter, thumped overhead. Coughlin took extra risks to get guns— this was the gold standard.

Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault.

This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result.

But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant— or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law.

Leovy, Jill (2015-01-27). Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (pp. 140-141). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[JoeAltmaier]

An old story - the gangsters of Chicago were eventually caught on tax evasion. There's some real value to this practice - after all, what ethical problem is there in arresting someone for one crime vs another, if they are guilty of both?

[6d0debc071]

You end up transferring the penalties for more serious crimes onto lesser ones. If you're using jaywalking because you can't do someone for murder, soon enough if you're jaywalking you may as well kill whoever pisses you off while you're about it.

[fluidcruft]

I found this via Google (which isn't much): https://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/the-war-on-drugs/

When the author was asked in the comments to expound on the thesis he just provided a link to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Court#Due_process_and_r...

I think the crux is in the last paragraph of that section, although the link to the War on Drugs is not made explicit:

> Conservatives angrily denounced the "handcuffing of the police." Violent crime and homicide rates shot up nationwide in the following years; in New York City, for example, after steady to declining trends until the early 1960s, the homicide rate doubled in the period from 1964 to 1974 from just under 5 per 100,000 at the beginning of that period to just under 10 per 100,000 in 1974. Controversy exists about the cause, with conservatives blaming the Court decisions, and liberals pointing to the demographic boom and increased urbanization and income inequality characteristic of that era. After 1992 the homicide rates fell sharply.

I think it's entirely reasonable that the War on Drugs began as a reaction to rising crime rates.

My two additional bits: I've often heard that the US is a little exceptional in that it approaches the problem of "police doing bad things" by throwing "tainted" evidence out and mostly not holding the police accountable for their actions, whereas other countries allow the "tainted" evidence to stand but then allow some sort of proceeding against the police to address the bad behavior. It seems from my limited understanding that the US approach stands on the Warren Court.

It's interesting that both aspects of the US approach (War on Drugs, shielding the police from liability) are under fire. I wonder if these things are as controversial in other Western countries -- if not maybe the Warren Court really does deserve some scrutiny. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the Warren Court caused the police protectionism, rather that it tacitly allowed it to persist with frameworks that mostly provide indirect corrective feedback to police misbehavior.

[Bostonian]

Legalize which drugs? Only marijuana, or also crack, heroin, or LSD? If a certain drug causes brain damage and makes its users invalids, who will support them?

I think a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done for each drug.

[thawkins]

If all drugs where legal then they would be made by commercial organisations, instead of illeagal non-accountable crime organisations. Some people will die, and then those commercial organisations will get thier asses handed to them in a law suit, the industry will find ways to make it safer and accountable for thier own proTection. Instead of the current situation, where very large numbers of people die, and the suppliers murder even more directly with virtual impunity.

[ams6110]

"Legalize it and tax it" has been the mantra, with the taxes earmarked to fund treatment. The latter will never happen, because government cannot help itself from spending whatever money it can on whatever it thinks will buy votes.

And there will still be a market for black market drugs. The legal, high-quality, taxed drugs will be more expensive than the underground variants. People will still make and sell homebrew meth, just as people still make and sell homebrew booze.

This isn't to say that I think we should keep things the way they are. There are many intoxicating substances that cause grievious harm to individuals, families, and society in general and I don't think that any of the illegal ones are worse than alcohol in that regard. And I don't think that getting high or being addicted is a criminal act (though it may lead to things that are criminal, such as stealing, driving under the influence, etc.)

I also think that intoxicating oneself is usually a bad idea, particularly if it's done to escape from or avoid some problem or life situation that needs to be dealt with and resolved. My worry is that legalization will be percieved as endorsement, absent any campaign to highlight the ethical, moral and personal responsibility expectations that people will need to live up to. And we seem as a society to have really gotten shy about teaching that certain behaviors and ways of living can be right or wrong, absolutely.

[JonFish85]

If people voluntarily take drugs that make them invalids, fully knowing the risks, what lawsuit would account for that? People still voluntarily smoke now, knowing that there's a very good chance it'll kill them.

[aidos]

It's that people smoke knowing that it will kill them but that's something different. Think about the dangers of illegal drugs - the chemical itself isn't generally the problem, it's the impurities / bad manufacturing.

If you were buying drugs over the counter you wouldn't expect to hit on a batch that contained a poisonous substance. Drug companies would be very careful to make sure that doesn't happen.

Here's a recent case from the UK:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/superman-ecstasy-...

[CPLX]

Other things that make people brain-dead and create invalids include snowboarding and being a pedestrian. Ending the drug war is actually in fact as simple as it sounds.

[pyre]

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.

[CPLX]

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.

[fomojola]

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.

[pyre]

> 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.

[jjaredsimpson]

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.

[CPLX]

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.

[atwebb]

>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?

[pyre]

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.

[yyyyes]

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.

[bambax]

You're so right it hurts to read your comments ;-)

[aidos]

Or you could take totally the opposite approach and say that the cost-benefit doesn't need to be done for any of them. They're all drugs (including tobacco and alcohol), and they can all cause issues in different ways. Let's help the people who have problems with them.

Also, you don't need to totally legalize drugs. Though I'd love to see how that might work out.

If at any point your society thinks it needs to wage a war on the way its own citizens choose to behave you might want to take a nice long introspective look at society.

EDIT Additionally the studies have already been conducted in many cases. Asked to conduct a scientific study for your country into effects of various drugs you might find that you just end up being dismissed for presenting the data [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt

[DanBC]

Currently the US spends billions on law enforcement and criminal justice.

Why not spend some of that money on drug treatment and long term care for the few people who'll suffer permanent harm as a result of drug use?

[Zigurd]

> I think a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done for each drug.

Actually, no. Soft drugs are not a problem. Opiate addiction isn't addressable with prisons. We know treatment is far more effective and less costly. Other drugs don't have a large social impact one way or another. And on top of all that, disemploying narcs will get a lot of thugs off the streets.

[beat]

Alcohol? If you did that kind of analysis, you'd be banning alcohol ASAP. Tobacco too.

LSD is effectively non-toxic. It's not addictive. It's less likely to make people do something dangerously stupid than alcohol, which kills thousands in drunken accidents every year. Marijuana is also non-toxic, and generally makes people cautious rather than risk-prone.