= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
NancyLebovitz comments on December 2014 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (90)
How about ending or at least toning down the war on drugs?
Prediction: within a decade of drug X, say crack, becoming legal, the same people currently calling for an end to the war on drugs will denouncing the evil crack corporations as "merchants of death".
Will they be wrong? It's possible for those crack corporations to be a) evil merchants of death and b) still better than what we have now. It's even possible that denouncing them will cause them to behave better.
Who ends the war...? It's humans all the way down - there you get into the Hamsterdam arc and the bit I discussed about politicians defecting against each other for fear of public condemnation. Systemic problems are systemic.
Consider marijuana legalization: some months ago after a referendum for legalization passed, I went looking for national level politicians who endorsed legalization. This is a proposition with tremendous support in some demographics, which is succeeding at the electoral ballot, and which comes at little direct cost to the implementing governments (legalization is easy compared to almost any other major issue - most of the work is setting up additional taxes and regulation!), so I figured I should find some prominent politicians endorsing it. Maybe not a President, but surely some Senators and state governors? The entries I found were distinctly underwhelming in prestige and some were questionably endorsements. Some leadership!
There's been some pulling back from the war on drugs, and I hope it will continue, though I'm expecting a fairly slow and incomplete process. (Alcohol is only sold in state stores in Pennsylvania-- every now and then, there's a effort to open up the market, but I assume the state stores are a fairly powerful lobby.)
As for the war on drugs, I keep wondering whether organized crime is bribing politicians to keep it going, but I don't really know.
One of the characters tried that - the politicians basically shat themselves and sacked him mercilessly.
In addition to the public choice theory issues that gwern has already described, many of the problems and most of the severe problems of the war on drugs are path-dependent. Just as the mafia didn't disappear at the end of Prohibition, there's no reason to expect gangs to close up shop because drug funding disappears.
The gangs wont, but the addicts will stop committing crimes to support their habit, which will free up lots of police manhours, and just about all alternative forms of crime the core gangs would turn to are different from the drug trade in one key aspect - The victims will generally cooperate with the law when it comes to putting them behind bars. And without addicts doing stupid stuff and getting caught, lots of empty jail cells to throw the gangs in, too.