>Contrast to the crack cocaine epidemic in the 80s: fuck'em, throw them all in prison.

That's overly reductive to the point of being wrong. There was never a particularly strong feeling that crack addicts should be thrown in prison any more than other types of addicts. People were strongly in favor of throwing crack dealers in prison because they were turning neighborhoods into war zones as they fought for lucrative turf.

And it wasn't just white people, either. The strongest advocates you'll find of drug criminalization are black people who lived through the crack epidemic in the '80s.

crack vs cocaine sentencing doesn't agree with you. It was clearly making the "black" crime of crack possession worse than the "white" crime of coke possession.

Obama got a whole law passed in 2010 to address it!

Y'all realize that black legislators and community organizers pushed for and voted for those "racist" crack sentences? They were trying to save their own communities.

Edit: for the uninformed down voters: https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...

That's a non-sequitur answer that also manages to concede the point of the comment upthread, which is that there has in fact been a retributive cast to drug policy for black people.

You make a good point.

That article doesn't support your point. The law being referenced here is the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, signed into law 8 years earlier by Reagan [1]. You are correct, though. The Black Congressional Congress and the majority of black congressmen at the time supported the ADAA, even helping draft it.

But, I still think that it would be wrong to assume that there was universal (or even majority) support among the black community. One confounder would be the media; studies have shown that public opinion about drug use and drug crime were/are directly related to media coverage [2]. With Reagan publicly saying drugs "are as much a threat to the United States as enemy planes and missiles", I think it's difficult to disentangle anyone's true personal feelings about the law from the sociopolitical influences that were present at the time.

The view of policing at the time was simply different. Some might have viewed the ADAA as a much more honest form of policing black communities, as opposed to the efforts undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s: stifling civil rights-related protests and other actions, along with actions by high-powered militarized SWAT teams being concentrated in poor black communities [3].

Even in retrospect, the issues are complex and unclear. Is it really difficult to believe that most people at the time, policymakers or not, were simply incapable of fathoming the results of the ADAA? It's clear that the imbalance in policing, partially as a result of the ADAA, has decimated the black community. Most of the damage, I would argue, is due to an ugly amalgamation of the rise of the prison industrial complex and the transparent willingness of policymakers to look past the needs of poor and minority communities in writing criminal law over the last 30 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986 [2] https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article/41/3/425/1671880/Set... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/02/ameri...

It's useful to remember the ADAA in the broader context of the 1980s push towards harsher federal sentencing across the board. It's not a coincidence that federal sentences were revised and federal parole abolished just a few years prior, or that the Willie Horton ad would run in the next Presidential election.

It's true that there was mainstream black support for anti-crime legislation, but that support wasn't distinctive. Blacks weren't leading the charge; they were just another part of it.

I see many of these discussions that focus on federal sentencing laws without considering that state laws and enforcement practices are far more important. State laws are varied and complicated - some states are far harsher than others. Yes the federal laws are and were unfair and stupid, but the large majority of prisoners and drug offenders are in state prisons.

John Pfaff has been on a lot of podcasts, he is the most insightful person on criminal justice that I have found. Surprisingly Vox has a good summary of his book.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15591700/m...

Thanks for the link. I'm working on a post for my site about the recently deposed/pardoned Sheriff (Joseph Arpaio) and will probably quote something like this:

> Pfaff tries his hand at some of the messaging that will be needed here: He argues that incarceration is simply an ineffective way to combat crime, while it imposes all sorts of costs on individuals and society that likely outweigh its benefits.

Have you heard the theory that racism might be institutionalized?

I do not recollect with precision, but there is an article posted on HN few years ago, showing the 80s archives of New York Times, in it NYT was squarely arguing for harsher sentencing and so were African American civic leaders.

May be there is racism that is institutional, but the point is most people even those who are against harsher sentences today thought it was a remedy. We will be failing ourselves if we cannot examine that fact and simply hitch and re-assign every "fucked up" decision to racism.

> May be there is racism that is institutional, but the point is most people even those who are against harsher sentences today thought it was a remedy.

That's exactly the irony of institutional racism: it's so rarely _consciously_ racist. It is often "colorblind".

> May be there is racism that is institutional, but the point is most people even those who are against harsher sentences today thought it was a remedy

I didn't. I thought it was racist back then. Many black leaders thought it was racist back then too

Now that's just crazy talk.

Have you studied the crack epidemic or have you simply slurped up some recent liberal political journalism?

> studied the crack epidemic

Your bias is showing. Crack arrest spree is more accurate. I was politically active while it was happening, so no, this isn't a recent observation.

Can I just add how incredibly rude "slurped up some recent liberal political journalism" is? You should be ashamed of the way you talk to strangers on the Internet.

> So what you're saying is that black people can't be trusted to have their own opinions because of institutional racism? Words fail

No, I'm saying that you cannot make an appeal to authority. It is a logical fallacy. Just because some blacks were in favor does not mean it was not racist

If this were a group of white politicians and community leaders seeking tougher sentences for crimes occurring in their neighborhoods, I'm pretty sure we'd be hearing a debate on the merits of the proposal.

But because black politicians and community leaders came to the conclusion that tougher sentences for crack dealers are warranted based on their experience it must be because of institutional racism. It's like they've come to a conclusion you don't agree with so you feel free to dismiss their agency. Help me out here, because it's the only way I can read this.

You keep repeating this argument. Its premise is invalid. It was not in fact black politicians that raised the sentences for crack cocaine in relation to powder cocaine; it was the overwhelmingly white US federal legislature.

That's... completely irrelevant. The harsher sentences had wide support from black leaders and politicians.

It's obviously not completely irrelevant, as your argument depends on a causal link between black support for crack sentencing laws and the adoption of those laws. In fact, no such causality is established, and it is indeed unlikely, given that the laws were passed by an overwhelmingly white legislature in the grip of a nationwide (largely unjustified) freakout about crime.

John Pfaff's "Locked In" is a great source for the background on this stuff (Pfaff would be the first to say that drug sentencing laws are not the reason for mass incarceration in the US, but that's not the question at issue in this thread).

And white politicions supported harsher sentences in the past as well. Do they speak for us today? Did they speak for everyone back then? Last I checked you only needed a simple majority to get elected.

> If this were a group of white politicians... we'd be hearing a debate on the merits of the proposal.

You can't know that.

When was the last time white community leaders and politicians proposed a policy to address a problem in their own neighborhood and were accused of institutional racism?

And thus that's the trap that has been set: if you don't follow the recommendations of black leaders, you're a racist. If you follow the recommendations of black leaders, you're a racist.

Even a poorly powered AI in 1983 figured out the only way to win is to not play the game.

That's not at all what they said.

If you were around back in the 1980's, you'd realize it was because crack was labelled an "epidemic" and ended up on the nightly news often. "Something had to be done"

That wasn't happening with powdered cocaine.

That is the mechanism by which race-biased views of different drugs and crimes and other social problems operate.

Carl Hart has researched this[0]

I found his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast (most recently #698) compelling

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Hart#Research

Crack vs powder sentencing isn't relevant. The violence was all on the crack side, which is what prompted the harsher sentences.

And yes, Obama got a law passed based on a lie. That happens all the time.

EDIT: Most people really don't care what you put into your body until you make them care, and that's what happened. You'd open up the paper and see another eight-year-old on the way to school got shot in the head because crack dealers were spraying bullets at each other again. That happens often enough and the public decides Something Must Be Done.

Personally, I thought a better solution would be to teach the crack dealers how to shoot, but nobody liked my idea.

No, the violence was not "all on the crack side":

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4533860/

Oh, yes, I see they've referenced a study that admits the violence was greater for crack but not if you "controlled" out the relevant variables.

Stupid statisticians with their stupid "controls".

I'll take this opportunity to point out that, right or wrong (obviously: I think you're wrong), you've contradicted your comment rooting this subthread. You began by saying there was never strong feeling that black crack users should be imprisoned, and find yourself here arguing that imprisoned black crack users somehow deserved it.

>Stupid statisticians with their stupid "controls".

I don't have access to the actual study, but the abstract very much reads like a study that came to the conclusion the authors wanted.

>You began by saying there was never strong feeling that black crack users should be imprisoned, and find yourself here arguing that imprisoned black crack users somehow deserved it.

Eh... no, I never said that second part. You might want to read through the thread again.

I would downvote you if I could.

I would laugh at you if I could.

Oh, wait. I can.

I will eat your billygoat.

to be fair when meth was ravaging poor/rural white people nobody really seemed to care much either. in fact it was something of a joke i.e. the "not even once" memes etc.

i think the real issue is opiates seem to be heavily affecting affluent suburban and urban people, who are predominantly white, and make up a huge amount of the tax base.

Doesn't the fact that the "not even once" ads existed in the public consciousness saliently enough to have a meme show that people did really seem to care?

well you could say the same thing about 'this is your brain on drugs' when crack was going around. that was also a PSA that entered into the public consciousness and then turned into a joke.

That 'this is your brain on drugs' thing with the egg and the skillet was heroin, not crack. I believe they did do a crack update later where the woman took the skillet afterward and destroyed the kitchen with it. To conflate humor and lampooning of those PSAs as not taking the actual drug issue seriously is not wise, though. Many people simply realize how useless, hyperbolic, and ultimately insulting those PSAs were.

If something is scary, you show the thing. You don't make up metaphors. Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream most likely prevented more people from ever trying heroin than any government-sponsored PSA ever did.

There's an update to that ad: "This is your brain on drug policy".

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AKXN6Vdr3g0

Spoiler: same actress.

Sure, but one of these was paired with mass incarceration of a certain group of people, associated with laws that were struck down because of their disparity in sentencing. The other, not.

Never been to the States, but from half a world away and just by reading on reddit about it it all looked more like people were making fun of said meth-addicts, they (the redditors making the jokes) didn't seem to care that much about those meth addicts. This was all happening about 3-4 years ago, I'd say, and it's in very sharp contrast with the present-day opiate-related discussions which can get pretty personal. It's also interesting that the HN crowd has also joined the opiates conversation, I don't remember reading anything about the meth epidemic in the past on HN.

Class and race undeniably intersect in the US, so there's basis for both perspectives, imo

That's mostly wrong in that the opioid crisis overwhelmingly affects the rural white population, not urban.

Yeah, I think my initial comment missed that part of the equation. It isn't straight racism that's driving the differential response as it is indirect racism by way of inequality. The net effect ends up amounting to the same thing though, and ultimately that's what bothers me so much about it.

> fuck'em, throw them all in prison.

We've heard that before. There is a twist there though. A lot of that "tougher on drugs" legislation was pushed by the poor black community leaders because they saw what crack was doing to their children, young adults, whole families. Normally we'd all want to say it's the white man abusing their privilege in a sadistic manner but sometimes there are some subtleties involved.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2016/0...

Another interesting thing there is that CIA was probably involved:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...

Now on paper they "weren't" but given the article from Gary Webb and reading between the lines about what their own Inspector General said "...agency officers were not required to report allegations of drug trafficking involving non-employees, defined as paid and non-paid "assets"—pilots who ferried supplies to the contras, as well as contra officials and others.[49][50]..."

Imho i would guess it is more a markets thing than a racial thing. There probably wasn't a whole lot of money to be made in curing an epidemic to a poor minority in the 80s whereas the opioid crisis is hitting a larger middle class population

That doesn't make it any better. It's also not a simple A/B. Maybe society had to drag it through the aforementioned stages to reach a point of consciousness.

I don't really buy that though. Honestly, I think the problem is simply being on opioids for a week due to post surgery pain or similar is enough to hook people.

My write in ballot would include various forms of legalization and treatment. I've heard DMT can make people quit heroin over night. While a little radical, that's better than the alternatives.

Iboga can help people quit heroin overnight. And Kratom is a great 'maintenance therapy'

It wasn't a "markets thing". Crack hit black communities. Then, black leaders within those communities responded by passing tough laws.

No, that's not at all true. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was passed by an overwhelmingly white Congress and an overwhelmingly white Senate, and signed by overwhelmingly white Ronald Reagan.

This is the whole "dammed if you do, dammed if you don't".

Situation: Crack use climbs in black communities leading to major social problems.

Option A: Create tough laws to stop crack use. WRONG, YOU ARE RACIST (for singling out the black community).

Option B: Don't create tough laws. WRONG, YOU ARE RACIST (for not caring about the black community).

There are options other than "tough laws" for helping communities struggling with high rates of addiction.

Your breakdown of this situation makes it sound like you think it doesn't matter what you do, because someone will call you a racist no matter what. In other words, that accusations of racism are totally arbitrary. That's not true.

And the majority could just as easily have done the right thing and refused to pass the laws, while lending a helping hand and attempting to preserve these communities.

You're going through this thread and blaming victims for their misfortune. It is, to say the least, unedifying.

Ah, "blaming victims for their misfortune." You seem cool.

I hope you see that this is a problem? Why is our society incapable of doing the right thing when there is a market failure?

Because the moneyed interests have altogether too much power.

Really sad that this is the top comment here. How about instead of immediately making it a racial issue, maybe we consider that we've learned something from the crack epidemic of the 80s on how to better deal with such problems? Or we could also consider that the opioid problem is different because the source of such problems is pharmaceutical companies and the doctors prescribing them, rather than some illegal drug smuggling trade. I'm not saying any of these hypotheses are correct, just that immediately making this a race issue does absolutely no good.

I'd say it does the good of reminding us that where black communities face retributive drug policies, white communities tend instead to get therapeutic drug policy. That seems like an important detail, not an artificial concern.

I agree with your point but that feels like more of a class issue than a race issue, though of course race and class aren't independent unfortunately.

No, it's not. The opiate epidemic, like crack cocaine, is mostly a phenomenon of the lower class. But opiates involve white people and generate therapy, while crack involves black people and generates prison time.

You are "not saying any of these hypotheses are correct," but boy howdy are you really up on making sure he doesn't put forward one you don't like, yeah?

Saying "X is X" does not mean you are "making it X". If you think he's making it a racial issue, you might want to consider that it just might be actually a racial issue.

> but boy howdy are you really up on making sure he doesn't put forward one you don't like, yeah?

What? I made one comment. Not only was parent's comment only loosely relevant to the article itself, but they provided no evidence to support their position, all with an undertone of maliciousness. I'm willing to accept it's a racial issue if you present evidence that reasonably eliminates confounding factors like the ones I brought up. As for the opioid epidemic: I care about as much as I care about the crack epidemic, which is about as much as I can care without having anyone close to me be affected.

> Saying "X is X" does not mean you are "making it X". If you think he's making it a racial issue, you might want to consider that it just might be actually a racial issue.

They are "making it a racial issue" because the article is about how to best help someone with an opioid addiction, not why people write so many articles about opioid addiction, or why so many people care about opioid addiction, or why the method of dealing with the opioid epidemic seems different than that of the crack epidemic. Parent's comment is, again, only marginally relevant to the content of the article.

Given that justice reform for low level drug offenders has gone precisely nowhere in the last 30 years, I'm thinking we haven't really learned anything from the epidemic in the 80s.

I'll let you fill in the blanks: If the 80s epidemic and the current opioid crisis are experiments and the sentencing scheme remains identical, what is the independent variable?

- Ease of obtaining opioids compared to crack as a member of the middle class. - Ease of becoming addicted to opioids when the original intent of use was medical, rather than recreational - Arguably larger reach of opioid epidemic, specifically that it is less isolated to a few geographical areas - Socioeconomic class of people that are affected - More accepting/understanding of addiction and drug use in general, even if the laws yet aren't

I would say on the one side that there is still little science in our current policies around drugs and on the other side I would say that many dedicated individuals and organizations like the Drug Policy Alliance have spent immense amounts of energy and money on attempting to get drug policy to reflect science.

Not to argue that there wasn't and still is racial inequality when it comes to drug enforcement, but how advanced was our understanding on how to treat opiate abuse even by the 1980s? To make things clear, I'm curious about the history of treatment methods involved with addiction. Not about excusing bad policy.

I don't know much about the subject but when I try to do a bunch of cursory searches, most of what I find are histories on alcoholism and the variety of treatment methods. As far as I know, before the crack cocaine epidemic, I don't think people really understood just how pernicious the problem of opiate addiction was. Doesn't excuse mass incarceration of black people, but I'm not sure people had any idea on how to actually approach the problem back then. I'm not sure we have a good approach even now.

It's also worth noting how small the problem with cocaine and other opiates was in the past. The crack cocaine epidemic was probably the first time the nation as a whole had to learn what this stuff actually was.

> I don't know much about the subject but when I try to do a bunch of cursory searches, most of what I find are histories on alcoholism and the variety of treatment methods.

And alcohol is a very strange drug. It doesn't quite work like others. For example, if you block the high, most people quit wanting opioids. That doesn't seem to be true of alcohol. In addition, drying you out from alcohol seems to actually damage the impulse control centers in your brain, so avoiding relapse is much more important. etc.

> It's also worth noting how small the problem with cocaine and other opiates was in the past. The crack cocaine epidemic was probably the first time the nation as a whole had to learn what this stuff actually was.

I think the real issue is that modern production methods at that point started making far more potent drugs.

Cocaine isn't an opioid.

Wow. At the time I'm writing, there are 11 other responses, and they're all unconvinced/opposed/offended regarding the parent comment. I'm embarrassed by the deliberate ignorance on display.

Race was and is a key factor in American politics, and in politics everywhere. (I don't know anything about politics in, say, Cambodia, but I can tell you race is a key factor.) The civil rights movement, 20 years before crack was a political issue, faced such powerful opposition that it reversed the polarity of US political parties (causing the former Confederate states to flip to R from D).

In this light, sibling responses to the tune of "why do you have to make it about race" or "seems like it was more about X" read as worse than ignorant. You'd have to be willful to be this ignorant about politics.

My 2c: Parent comment is so obvious it is inane. But apparently I'm in the wrong here.

How about this? Instead of saying that it's so obvious and that people are "deliberate" in their ignorance, you present some data that support the hypothesis that this is a racial issue.

I'm not saying you're wrong. But turning this into a platform for calling out racial inequality is probably just asking for backlash. Yes, in the future we can apply science more equally to all regardless of race. Yes, we failed in this area in the past. But does that somehow invalidate science, or this research? No.

I think we will find that suburban white folk are backlash-proof. And a good thing too, because they need all the help they can get.

That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to feel regret for society's past (and indeed ongoing) failures.

>That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to feel regret for society's past (and indeed ongoing) failures.

Agreed. And there is no reconciliation for the damage that has been done (and continues to be done). Politicians don't take this seriously enough. It won't be enough just to reform drug policy. It won't be enough just to free people who were wronged by the system. It's going to take society changing heart and supporting people who have been hurt for years. And the people who were hurt trusting a society that threw them and their family away...

I would agree about it being racism, more like classism.

> Now that the opioid crisis is a problem for white people

a lot more people die from opiods than crack. most crack users are white.

Interesting, I hadn't thought of it that way. I wonder if white people are the only racial group that demonstrate some kind of a preference for other members of their racial group, and if not, what the implications would be if one racial group stopped having such a preference and other racial groups did not follow suit.

That reads like a barely veiled attempt to justify racism as something that "everyone does".

Because it's well-known that stereotyping works on everyone. And yes, black people can be racist against whites, or also against other blacks.

But that doesn't justify anything. In the particular case of the US, it also ignores that white (men) overwhelmingly control the levers of power, answering your question with a resounding "nothing bad".

I assure you I'm not trying to justify anything. I'm just speculating on the consequences of people behaving in certain ways.

Would you agree that white men have lost at least some of their control over the levers of power as you call them since the founding of this country when they had total control? Would you agree that it's perfectly possible for white men to lose even more of that power, perhaps even to the point where they are no longer the dominant political force, especially given the changes in demographics in the United States, and especially if white men display a low level of preference for members of their own race? Do you agree that is an outcome which many people consider to be extremely desirable and which many people are working toward achieving?

Assuming that other racial groups also show some preference for members of their own group, what do you expect would be the consequence to white people of this choice to show a low level of preference for other members of their own racial group?