
The War on Drugs Is Far More Immoral Than Most Drug Use (2013) - jseliger
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/the-war-on-drugs-is-far-more-immoral-than-most-drug-use/274651/
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mikece
Not to mention mandatory minimum sentences which robs the judge of his/her
discretion and weighing of circumstances... not to mention crazy disparities
in the sentencing guidelines where possession of crack gets you 18X __the
mandatory sentence as the same weight of powdered cocaine.

 __This used to be 100X until changes were made to drug sentencing laws under
the Obama administration.

~~~
cylon13
No it's okay though because there's no more crack now. Crack addiction was
solved.

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baron816
Government’s policy: to prevent people from ruining their lives with drugs,
we’re going to ruin their lives for them.

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staplers
Imagine funding corporate food research and imprisoning anyone not eating or
distributing the official corporate food.

That is the war on drugs.

If we lowered the barrier to entry for those seeking therapy and medication
this problem would largely disappear.

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lucasmullens
I don't follow that analogy. Mandating a behavior and banning a behavior don't
seem all that related.

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staplers
I'm highlighting the point that corporate interests control the entire chain
of authority on drugs.

The government plays along because it provides a fantastic scapegoat for a
myriad of human rights violations and budget items.

Data collection, large defense budgets, corrections facility occupancy,
fearmongering for elections.

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jbotz
Neither TFA nor any of the comments so far mention what seems to me the single
most damning irony of drug-prohibition... that one of the most dangerous and
harmful drugs of all remains legal through all the drug-war theater: alcohol.

Scientifically today there is really no doubt that alcohol is nearly as or
perhaps even more harmful (considering all forms of harm, such as drug-
specific mortality, drug-related mortality, health problems, dependence,
economic costs to society, etc.) as the most dangerous illegal drugs, such as
heroin and crack cocaine. Not that I think alcohol should be prohibited
either, but if you don't prohibit it where is the logic in prohibiting far
less harmful drugs such as canabis or psychadelics? The _only_ logic is to use
that prohibition as a tool for the arbitrary oppression of selected segments
of society. And that's just plain immoral.

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SamReidHughes
You can see from the racial differences in alcoholism that alcohol already
killed off most of the people that can't handle it, in places that have had it
for millenia. That's the case for legalizing it. The same might be true of
marijuana (I don't know the history).

This hasn't happened with modern drugs that didn't penetrate society the way
alcohol has. Legalizing them means accepting the eugenic removal of
susceptible people and their descendents from the future human population.

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jbotz
Sorry, but no. Alcohol is still killing more people than all the illegal drugs
combined, still causing more traffic accidents and violence, and overall costs
to society, than all the illegal drugs combined. If you want evidence, google
something like 'drugs vs alcohol'... there's lots; from the perspective of
public health there is no doubt about this.

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SamReidHughes
> Alcohol is still killing more people than all the illegal drugs combined,

That's because they're _illegal_.

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macinjosh
So alcohol should be made illegal?

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mamon
The problem with making alcohol illegal is that it is so easy to produce it at
home, with generally available ingredients like sugar or yeast. That's why
prohibition did not work. Banning drugs, especially synthetic ones is orders
of magnitude more effective.

~~~
blackflame7000
The problem is that now a days a chemist can simply attach an inert molecular
group to a banned chemical and viola it's no longer illegal but still the same
drug. There are tons of LSD analogues like 1-acetyl-LSD
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALD-52](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALD-52)

Additionally:

O-Acetylpsilocin (4-AcO-DMT)

AL-LAD (6-allyl-6-nor-lysergic acid diethylamide)

ETH-LAD (6-ethyl-6-nor-lysergic acid diethylamide)

PRO-LAD (6-propyl-6-nor-lysergic acid diethylamide)

1P-LSD (1-propionyl-lysergic acid diethylamide)

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programmarchy
Has any work been done to map out where the money lobbying for prohibition is
coming from? Private prisons? Pharmaceuticals?

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eurasiantiger
The war on drugs was started by the white supremacist Harry J. Anslinger.

One would think any and all institutions tenable to racism would be funding
it.

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programmarchy
Hard to dig up concrete info on this. I’ve found one article on lobbying [1],
but it was pharma lobbying _against_ the DEA, to prevent them going after
opioid distributors.

[1]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/dea-
drug-industry-congress/)

~~~
chasethescream
_Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs_ by Johann
Hari profiles early figures in the drug war including Harry J. Anslinger, the
first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream)

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hownottowrite
I’m not sure what’s more depressing... that some people are surprised by
findings like this or that some people believe laws are moral.

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happytoexplain
What are you implying? That people should not feel negatively about immoral
laws? That people should not have opinions about the morality of laws?

~~~
hownottowrite
I guess I’ll have to eat every chicken in this room.

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mips_avatar
Most cultures assimilates some kind of consciousness altering chemical into
the culture. The US would be a healthier place if we could take a measured
approach to mind altering substances. For example the US does young people a
disservice by banning socially mediated alcohol drinking. The result of our
ban on alcohol is that teens and college students drink in dangerous places.
You find the worst examples of violence and sexual assault on college campuses
in the places where underage students go to get drunk. The fraternities and
houses offering underage students alcohol don't care about the people they're
getting drunk. The most horrible stuff that happened at Penn State wouldn't
have happened if the drinking was organized by responsible caring people.

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GaryNumanVevo
This largely misses the point about the War on Drugs. It wasn't a reaction to
the nation's morality slipping, it was a concerted effort to imprison Black
men. Drug use is highly tied to unemployment and lack of income, the drug
epidemic largely arose from the decades of redlining and blue collar jobs
shifting to the suburbs.

~~~
mips_avatar
Every drug gets banned different though. Alcohol prohibition was a cause
championed by wives and family of alcoholics in the late 1800s and early
1900s. Psychedelics were banned because they got linked with the counter-
culture movement in the 60's. Even coffee got largely excluded from the middle
east in medieval times because it was deemed against the quran's restrictions
on intoxication.

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basch
>imposing more costs on people who never chose to use drugs but suffer from
many harms of the black market, we have achieved a morally dubious
redistribution.

That point could be expanded into a million more. All of the money flowing
into the black market creates intense violence and crime, more violence than
drug use creates. Instead of preventing self harm, it creates piles of
innocent victims, caught in the collateral damage of war between parties
empowered by their respective benefits gained by prohibition.

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apta
Why is it only that the US seemingly has this problem? Other developed nations
(UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Canada, etc.) don't have the so called "war on drugs"
that wasted billions of millions of dollars.

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aoeusnth1
It is a manufactured war started in reaction to the civil rights movement by
Nixon and escalated by Reagan with the explicit intent to disrupt and imprison
as many blacks and leftists as possible.

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apta
This allows people to push the fallacy that the only other available
alternative is to fully allow drugs in all sorts and let people do whatever
they want.

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jeffnv
The New Jim Crow is a great book if you want to learn more.

