About the dumbness in the "war on drugs":

There is a nice scene in the documentary "Le route de l'opium", where they interview, I believe the guy responsible for europol drugwar coordination. They ask why the laws and system are like this if they are so incredibly stupid and not working.

His answer: Because this is the way many individuals earn the most money with it. Change anything and manufacturers, dealers, corrupt politicians etc. would lose money.

Economics 101: increased risk = increased reward

Call me cynical, but I don't think it is dumb. I think it is intentional.

Dumb and intentional aren't mutually exclusive here.

What would be truly cynical is to believe it's pragmatic, and not just dumb.

It's dumb because even if they wanted to have that severe of a punishment for LSD specifically, they could do math and just make the sentence greater for smaller amounts of actual drug. Be as cynical as you like, but we'd see equivalent exaggerations for every other drug if your line of thinking made sense.

It depends on the audience for those drugs and their relationship to the people making laws. Take, for example, crack versus cocaine. Crack and cocaine are nearly identical drugs. Crack has the same sentence for one gram as cocaine does for eighteen. (The disparity used to be five times greater before 2010.) But crack users are more likely to be black, low-income, and less educated. I can't imagine why they'd be a preferred target for "tough on crime" legislation. Aside from, y'know, systemic, institutionalized racism (and good old-fashioned poor-stomping, but it is well-known that the War on Drugs was intended to target black people).

Similarly, LSD was widely associated with undesirables in the sixties and seventies--counter-culture movements. Do you have a better way to provide yourself with cover for attacking them?

If you're surprised or skeptical of either claim, I recommend you read Dan Baum's recent report regarding his discussions with John Erlichman and H.R. Haldeman's diaries[1] (themselves available in the Nixon Presidential Library). Both men were deep in the Nixon White House during the formation of the War on Drugs; it's illuminating stuff.

[0] - http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1

[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/18/us/haldeman-diary-shows-ni...

Essentially agree 100%. My minor nitpic is that while I'm willing to be cynical almost whole hog including your examples, we even have similar examples that are more dumb and less insidious than yours. E.g, truffles vs mushrooms in the netherlands (one is banned, the other isn't, I'm not aware of one being the uppity fungi vs the hood shroom)

Even in the LSD example, someone using a fancier stationary could be way more guilty than a cheapo two ply. The whole thing is ridiculous in ways the crack vs cocaine thing is relatively less so. If anything, this law encourages lsd to be made on the most portable medium possible. If you claim this too was intentional, then we enter the realm of the ridiculous.

This might sound like splitting hairs, but I'm just advocating to a caveat to cynicism for things once in awhile being just flat out dumb.

Black politicians championed greater penalties for crack:

http://prisontime.org/2013/08/12/timeline-black-support-for-...

http://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champion...

I'm not arguing that institutionalized racism doesn't exist, but this crack vs cocaine issue comes up all the time and the issue has more to it than "It's because of racism."

Crack and Cocaine are nearly identical from a chemical perspective, but not from how they are used and their effect: http://www.attn.com/stories/2643/crack-vs-cocaine

It's comforting to think it's all just a ploy to get at black people (like how cannabis was rebranded as "marijuana" because it associates it with those pesky Mexicans everybody hates) but there are valid reasons to be more afraid of crack than of cocaine despite both sharing practically the same active ingredient.

EDIT: I'm not saying the War on Drugs doesn't particularly affect people of color more than other groups, or whether that is intentional or not, but pointing at the active ingredients and saying "look, they're the same except racism" is simplistic.

From your article, it certainly does seem like injected powder cocaine and smoked crack cocaine are about the same on the body. And you can trivially make crack from powdered cocaine.

Nobody has said they're 100% the same besides racism. The claim is that racism plays a role in why the sentencing disparities exist.

There's no math to determine the quantity of active ingredient in illicit substances. That requires analysis. Including the carrier keeps it simple. It's also self-aggrandizing, as it's much more impressive for the DEA to announce they've seized 10g of "LSD" than 10mg. Again, this is coming from an agency that is known to weight the root ball when calculating the yield of seized marijuana grows.

Both you and eropple are spot on. I would have admitted both of your points but I'm not as knowledgeable.

The issue is, might_atomic says he is cynical that the reason the law is the case isn't dumb, it's intentional. If we're being cynical, I can think of many ways to be extra punitive against any particular drug you like for any reason. Even if we assume self-aggrandizement, my assumption was we could all be fall more cynically creative as to how a drug enforcement agency could get than arguing about the weight of paper.

For example, why not just call all the precursor chemicals drug as well, we could say they produced 50lbs of lsd because of the running water used in the process.

I'm just advocating for a level of cynicism that looks at a bigger picture to where once in awhile we could say something is dumber than it is insidious. Without doing so, I think it contributes to the persistence of laws that are in fact dumber than even their creators intended.

The carrier weight is significant because its proportional to the amount of substance, the paper is the distribution vector. Someone caught with a sheet of LSD is carrying significantly more than a single tab of LSD. The latter defying "personal consumption. And personal consumption vs intent to distribute is significantly different.

While I don't believe that non-violent drug offenders should be locked up for life, this individual failed to appreciate the gravity of being arrested for the serious offense of distribution on two prior occasions! To add to the stupidity , the Seth Faranti case was a huge cause célèbre in 1993 and he was put away for life. It was well known at the time that the Feds were taking a serious view of LSD distribution and were targeting Deadshows. Yet he continued his disregard for consequences well into 1994.

LSD is not physically addictive so this is not like someone who became physically addicted and was arrested as a recidivist offender as a result. This was someone who was financing a lifestyle by selling acid. There were plenty of other Deadheads that financed their road trips without selling drugs. It was a choice he made on at least three different occasions.

While I believe the war drugs is indeed dumb, getting arrested for the same serious crime three times is even dumber.

There is a difference between making a mistake in ones youth and throwing your life away.

Carrier weight is really dumb because someone carrying a 1g crystal has up to 10,000 doses on their person, 1g of paper, not so much.

LSD doses are measured in micrograms so 1 gram is in fact a substantial amount. Do the research. Theres a difference between opinion and fact.

https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_dose.shtml

That's the point!

Yes, doses are in the order of 100-150 micrograms, for a basic dose. 100ug will do as an approximation.

How many doses of 100ug are there in 1g? Oooh... About 10,000.

So yes, 1g of crystal is a substantial amount, that's the point. Compared to a handful of doses on a gram of paper, it makes a mockery of the law if I were to be charged the same way whichever of the two I was carrying.

(Of course the law is an ass anyway, where it comes to drugs)

Completely agreed.

The gram of paper is still mostly paper. Sure it could have varying amounts of actual acid on it, but still mostly paper.

it would be like if the ml in alcohol were measured along with the glass bottle it comes in - and something with low alcohol volume (say beer) would get you just as much time as a 100 proof whiskey or moonshine.

No thats not the point. With LSD the paper is the unit of distribution. Its the dosage vector. A sheet of of acid which is comprised of 100 hits of acid. So by considering the amount of surface area or weight is what allows the law to decide if the amount comprises personal consumption vs distribution.

So when the law is trying to decide how much of a threat the contraband is to society the potential damage of a sheet of acid us much much greater than a hit or a couple of hits(smaller pieces of paper.)

What are you proposing that the acid be recovered from the paper? What would that do? There's no threshold below which you are permitted to posses lysergic acid in the United States.

I'm not proposing anything, I'm suggestig that anything drawing an equivalent between weight of raw LSD and paper blotters is pants-on-head retarded.

Legislate penalty by doses if you want, but the fact remains that someone with ten mg of crystal is carrying with them just as many doses as someone carrying a few g of blotters.

He is saying that 1g of LSD (when including the paper weight) is maybe a couple hundred doses, while 1g of meth in a plastic bag is ~10,000 doses, but they are sentenced as if they are equivalent.

> The carrier weight is significant because its proportional to the amount of substance

This is not true. I can take a clean sheet of paper and dissolve as much LSD (or as little) on it as desired. 1g of near-pure crystal will definitely contain thousands of doses. 1g of paper could contain anything from 0, 1, 10, or 100 doses or more.

Now what would be point in that? Sure you can do that but in practice this is not at all how it works. Drugs are a business. You can also sell pure cocaine but it is never done at the retail level because it would be a completely non-sensical business decision. The unit of purchase is a single tab. More tabs equal more paper.

It most definitely does work this way in practice. If you go buy a sheet of acid from a random person, you can bet there is at least a 50% chance it contains no LSD at all. Why should I give you a sheet with LSD on it when I can give you a clean sheet with nothing on it and you wouldn't know the difference until at least 45-60 minutes after you took it? Plenty of time for me to get away with your money. More likely, it will contain some LSD (or something similar), but not nearly as much as one tab ~= one dose. Just like you say with cocaine, it makes business sense to dilute it; it also makes sense to make sheets of LSD such that 4, 5, or 10 tabs equals one dose, instead of just a single tab.

Your example with cocaine is a good one, people caught with cocaine aren't carrying pure cocaine either. They are usually charged with the weight of the cutting agent as well, which in my view is equally stupid. If you have a pound of baking soda with 1gm of cocaine mixed in it, you shouldn't be charged with having a pound of cocaine.

No it doesn't work that way in practice. LSD is culturally much different that the substance where you are likely to be sold bogus substances.

I'm not saying it can't happen, its just not very common. The culture where acid is prevalent is much more communal.

Right, you must think LSD dealers are so much more enlightened than dealers of other drugs.

According, to the studies shown here on erowid, the blotter tabs examined by labs since '97 range anywhere from 19 micrograms all the way up to 148 micrograms. The older lab tests from the 70s and 80s seem to have a greater range testing at anywhere from 5 micrograms to 500 micrograms per tab!

All of these blotter tabs are going to weigh roughly the same amount. Some of the weaker ones may even weigh more than the stronger ones due to the difference in the type of paper.

https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_article3.shtml