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The drug war is an ugly, corrupt set of policies that were bad when Nixon set it in motion to bash the hippie students who were hounding his ass out of office. It was ugly and corrupt when the medicine marijuana was outlawed early in the 20th century as a way to bash brown-skinned people coming up from Mexico. It was ugly and corrupt when San Francisco passed the first ordinance criminalizing drug use in the 1890s; it outlawed the medicine opium, and was used to bash Chinese immigrants who'd come to build the railroad and then settled in Chinatown. Now 90% of the people serving time for drugs are black or Latino, even though white and asian Americans use drugs in the same proportions as blacks and Latinos. Drug warriors encourage parents to turn in their kids and kids to turn in their parents. It's destroyed most of the Fourth Amendment and is well on the way to destroying freedom of thought, which is even more fundamental and neglected than freedom of movement. They're attempting to outlaw entire modes of thought, by making illegal the tools that get you to those modes.
Open societies have plenty of mechanisms by which truly rotten policies can get discovered and corrected over the years and decades. The people who profit from the drug war (mostly cops, prisons, and forced-"treatment" scams) have managed to avoid this so far.
Greplaw
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link Danny Yee
