GIBR: War on Drugs

[ak666]

GIBR: Good Intentions, Bad Results

So much of what I see as having negative effects on society were not necessarily championed by people with foul intentions.

Too often, I seem to find that they were championed by warm-hearted people with perfectly good intentions only to lead to horrible results. I want to zoom in on one such case.

War on Drugs

The War on Drugs was initiated by Richard Nixon in 1971.

Some people have made a case that the war was ultimately intended to give government license to target minorities such as black people and hippies who protested the war. Regardless of the possibility of such sinister intentions, most of the people who supported the cause were probably doing so under the noblest of intentions.

Unfortunately, idealistic intentions often have horrible results when it comes to economic policies.

Casualties

Across Borders

The "war" didn't simply affect those at home.

Lesser of Two Evils

No matter what we think about narcotics, a lot of economic decisions require us to choose between the lesser of two evils. Here is Milton Friedman on the subject.

The one negative feature of legalizing drugs is that there might be some additional drug addicts. However, the child who is shot in a pass-by shooting is an innocent victim in every respect of the term. The person who decides to take drugs for himself is not an innocent victim. He has chosen to be a victim. I must say I have very much less sympathy for him. I do not think it is moral to impose heavy costs on other people to protect people from their own choices.

What is the point of continuing this war?

[goaded]

I agree it's a terrible thing to be doing, this war on drugs, when education and medical help are clearly a better approach (for everyone not making money off it).

While it may have been championed by people with good intentions, though, I think it was sold to them by people with bad intentions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEgCm_yDgmg

John Ehrlichman was the Nixon aide who allegedly said “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.”

Some say Ehrlichman said it because he was angry at Nixon for not pardoning him for Watergate, it seems most likely to me that that that was just the reason he didn't keep silent about it, not that he made it all up.

Whether it's true or not, the fact is blacks are about 10% more likely to use drugs, but over 250% more likely to be arrested for it, so it's working the way Ehrlichman suggested. www.vox.com/.../war-on-drugs-racism-nixon

[COCOCHANEL]

about the homicide graph, if the gov't hadn't done anything it might still be higher than previous years simply because drugs were being developed and becoming more available

[ak666]

All the violence is traced back towards drug-related violence (typically gang violence). It's similar to Al Capone in the Prohibition era when alcohol was made illegal. The source of violence overseas is from wars between governments and drug cartels which wouldn't exist as a criminal group if narcotics were legal.

axisoflogic.com/.../...ar-Zeta_trained_by_US_1.jpg

It's a supply and demand type of problem. If there's a high demand for something and it's illegal, criminals tend to supply it. The violent nature of these criminals often spills out to affect innocent people.

If that's not convincing, consider Mexico which just started its own drug war around 2006. A similar trend happened with homicide rates:

blog.diegovalle.net/.../...H-x0_s1600_historic.png

That one mainly shows the results of a genuine "war". Mexico already accumulated powerful drug cartels, but the Mexican military's attempts to dismantle them lead to an all-out violent war.

[ak666]

It's difficult to pinpoint the exact ratio of homicides were attributed to narcotics becoming illegal but the rise of gang activity seems correlated. One of their primary functions and source of revenue is drug trafficking.

Drug-related incarcerations are also the main source of the massive prison population in the US:

s3.amazonaws.com/.../...d7793ae5ee8798b4528e2d.gif

It's a highly illegal activity involving armed cartel with sophisticated methods of smuggling. Violent people trade and distribute these goods to the people.

Inevitably when the enterprise is run by violent people, the violence spills out.

[ak666]

Now about your point, from what I gather you are trying to correlate drug use to homicide? Typically it's not the casual drug users who are doing drive-by shootings and getting into gang wars. It's the people who distribute the drugs.

It's kind of like how alcohol can create some violence in the population and escalate homicide rates (arguably far more than any other drug), but the reason homicide rates escalated so much during the Prohibition era was not because people were drinking more, per se, but because the criminals distributing it were violent people.

Criminalizing alcohol took its distribution and manufacturing out of the hands of law-abiding citizens and transferred the business to the most violent gangsters. The gang activity was mainly what escalated the homicide rates. Same goes for the war on drugs as far as I can tell.

[Anonymous]

war on drugs is good. its fighting drugs! duhhh. You must be paid by the rug cartels

[ak666]

Derp. You seemed to have missed Friedman's point that it is in the drug cartels' *best interests* to keep narcotics illegal. They would be put out of business if they were legal. That would also make sense if you just stopped to think about for one second, which I doubt you're capable of doing.

[ak666]

Ever heard of Prohibition? Probably not. I recommend you start with that one first.

[goaded]

I've got 5 kilos of best Persian, just lying on the floor downstairs! :)

[Anonymous]

Nixon and people like him...