Once I met a guy who worked for some Edward Jones-type company, investing the money of moms and pops, making money from watching various markets for opportunities to make profits.
He was so in love with how effectively the whole world made sense in terms of dollars, contracts, and trades. He liked the meta-economics of the prevailing world economic order. He would think in terms of "is it worth it to me to buy your debt?" if ever you said anything within a mile's distance of implying that you might want money for some economic purpose.
Well, at that time, there was no weed boom. It was illegal for the most part, in the U.S.
And his worldview, which always tried to relate everything -- from national or world news, right on down to the conversations of everyone around him after the workday was done -- everything he related to in terms of how our existing systems of money, contract obligations, and legal decisions was so logical and coherent and wonderful.
What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals.
What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins.
What was the difference before and after? Well, in this one respect, there is no difference: he still goes on effusing self-serving pro-US-capitalist rhetoric everywhere he goes. The one difference is that now he doesn't think weed is bad, it's just another thing for him to try to leverage financial/economic advantage out of, behind his Edward Jones-style desk, while there is a whole 'nother entire class of people mentioned in this article who probably don't dig his own worldview as much as he does.
This reminds me of Iain Bank's books "The Business" where the corporation in question was sitting on the perfect cocaine snorting delivery device ('the Incan'), speculatively developed and just waiting for the day the drug might become legal.
A tail wagging the dog is the notion I wish to deplore the most.
Way too many people think that pure logic (and wisdom of experience) is what leads to their value-judgements and opinions. Like my example mom-and-pop broker above (who is no fat cat in the scheme of things, just someone too invested in the neoliberal capitalist paradigm to think straight anymore), they will switch their value judgements when their one true god (money, joint-stock ownership, and the corporate form of governance) tells them to switch. When weed is blacklisted, they can invent reasons to hate weed. When weed is legal, it's just another glorious benefit of our market system to provide this good/service to all the people who demand it. (And for them to rightfully earn a profit somewhere in the trade, or in the ownership of the business providing the service.) They make up reasons to believe what the markets tell them to believe. A dog wagged by a tail, if you will.
Likewise, when you have central banks and too-big-to-fails in this environment buying up everything in the stock markets with an exponentially growing supply of USD, JPYs, and euros, you wind up in a situation where the market tail is actually trying to wag the economic dog.
We forgot that it was supposed to be the other way around, because of how far we've gone off the rails into our deficit-spending-until-death mode of existence, since year 19XX, for some value of XX, I favor about the time Reagan took over, but you can go back further if you like.
So I was complaining about the tail wagging the dog.
It happens in terms of literal power and ownership, when money is produced and awarded in toxic ways, yet it is all that matters for obtaining power and ownership.
And it happens in terms of the mind: of people working in aid of a status quo which is being driven the wrong way.
Well guess what, you're not going to let some insane human elitists (how close is that guy Donald Trump to them? anything is too close for my comfort) try to drive me through the tail of the dog that is my life. If you have an insane and toxic system, then it's better to start getting radical.
Ah, but now -- how to get radical? There we all explode.
update, with recommended reading:
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer
We either do or don't have people successfully playing at money/power/mind-game for the stakes of controlling the planet from the top down. Either way, I am afraid. Because a bunch of moronic dictators fighting each other unsuccessfully is no better than a single one successfully winning such a game.
> What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals.
> What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins.
Isn't that exactly how we want our businesses to behave? If a businessman who didn't want to get involved in something when it was illegal now wants to get involved now that it's legal, isn't that good business ethics?
Yes, it's good business ethics, but it's not good human ethics to completely base your moral judgments of something on whether or not it's legal and profitable.
If my rhetoric is too grandiose, or my illogic too hazy, then I have to concede that you can parse details out of it which seem to be incorrect.
So, sure, that's exactly how we want our businesses to be, you are right, I concede for the sake of a limited argument under all the rest of the assumptions you have when you make that statement. I have unstated assumptions as well, everywhere.
Overall I was trying to make a hard point. I think that people are a just a little too content with the status quo. I believe only radical changes can fix the brokenness of our systems, and only on a long time line. (Our systems are broken at so many, many different levels, we could start by talking about problematic broken hardware/software systems if we wanted, and probably arrive at the conclusion that the present paradigm needs a radical change in the long run, saying nothing of money, law, or politics.)
I wanted to complain about how we expect our businesses to behave, because I think it's dysfunctional. But in the pragmatic sense, I'm not making any useful complaint. You are being more pragmatic.
The first thing I've come to realize the importance of by now, is that talk is just talk, and radical changes aren't going to happen on any time line, not without a lot of consensus.
I sincerely hope that some aspect of the human nature itself does not prevent us from coming to healthier consensuses than what we currently have. All I see is a system that maximizes paper profits while not counting environment damage or exhaustible resource availablity. Accounting is everything, and I fear for all humanity if we don't come to some better system of accounting value.
At the time that I posted, there were only a handful in this thread, too. Besides, there's no objective indicator of 'interestingness' or a rule that states that all discussion must be interesting, or have a minimum length in order to qualify as such.
It's shocking to me how the comment section is replete with "a felony is a felony!" and "it's not a race issue- it's a criminal record issue!" messages. A few of them even go further and proudly proclaim they only read the first "paragragh". Too bad, they missed a critical point:
> Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, black people are much more likely to have been arrested for it.
The lesson goes much further than the weed-boom, of course. So many people look at the current legal landscape and say "opportunities are equal for equal candidates", with seemingly no ability to observe for the compounded effects of all the preceding inequality.
@
edit: My comments seem to have been flagged so hard that I can't post replies. I guess this place isn't much more sophisticated than BuzzFeed when it comes to race issues.
As for that piece you keep posting, ikeboy, I don't think it's nearly as relevant or convincing as you think it is.
From the choice headline quote from the research SSX cites:
> is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled
The entire controversy here arises due to the racially-biased source of the prior record.
I have a very low opinion of SSX's weasel-word-weaving to pander to his narrow audience, to be honest.
> Summary: Blacks appear to be arrested for drug use at a rate four times that of whites. Adjusting for known confounds reduces their rate to twice that of whites. However, other theorized confounders could mean that the real relative risk is anywhere between two and parity. Never trust the media to give you any number more complicated than today’s date.
Blacks "appear to be", huh? With a couple of sketchy assumptions, suddenly we're "between two and parity", which then gets reproduced by you in this debate as "misleading and basically parity".
Anyway,
> There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.
The comments section here isnt much better than that
Edit:
To follow up your edit, I find the attitudes toward race and gender on HN particularly troubling. Whenever there is an article that discusses legitimate race/gender issues it tends to be downvoted/flagged and drop like a rock off the front page. The comments are often calling into question the credibility of the person making the complaint about racism, and even blaming them / their race.
The reason that I find the attitudes here so troubling is because there are a number of influential people here. Many are entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs. If these attitudes are a reflection of the racial attitudes in the tech industry then woe unto us. We are doomed. We fancy ourselves sophisticated, rational, and benevolent leaders of the future world economy but we are too arrogant to look inward at our own flaws.
The study he references is trying to figure out whether there's bias in "pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults". To determine that, you need to control for anything that should matter to such determinations. Of course prior record matters to sentencing etc.
Whether prior record is itself biased has nothing to do with investigating bias in sentencing etc, and is properly controlled for.
What assumptions are "sketchy"?
"about equally likely to have broken the law" is misleading, when blacks break the law more often. Equally likely in the last year, not the same number of times. If they'd said "blacks are more likely to break the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, but they get arrested at a rate that's between the same or double that of other races, depending on whether you trust their self-reports on whether they've taken drugs, which they're known to lie on at twice the rate of white people", I'd have no problem.
I haven't asserted that it's parity, just that claiming otherwise hasn't been supported. If someone has a good counter-argument to SSC's applying black drug honesty rates to their supposed discrimination by police, I'll be happy to consider it. But just making a blanket statement like buzzfeed is misleading.
>> There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.
That does nothing to justify buzzfeed. Sentence length doesn't change whether someone has a criminal record, which is buzzfeed's mechanism for "racism in drug industry".
The book mentioned in the article "The New Jim Crow" is an extraordinary good read for people more interested in gaining context on the situation between race and crime mentioned in the article. It is also good to gain more insight into how politics can be racially coded without ever mentioning race - great given the current political climate.
"Henderson was more than qualified, so why didn’t he get the gig? ... he has two drug possession felonies on his record"
You know, people with illegal bookmaking convictions are kept out of the gambling industry for good reasons. It started off as a dirty industry, and to the extent you keep anyone with a hint of grime out of it, you avoid it regressing to that state. That keeps regulators off your back and eventually helps you turn it into a family-friendly mass market industry.
It's also really difficult for people with fraud convictions to get job as accountants, no matter how good they are at forensic accounting. Trust is the commodity being sold.
Do you really want someone with a shitload of existing drug connections, being the poster face for the industry you're trying to vanillify? The whole premise of legalization wasn't that your local corner boys get to go industrial after they gain mass market access, it was that the "drug trade" becomes roughly parallel with the "tobacco trade", where the worst thing that happens is penny-ante tax evasion.
> Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, black people are much more likely to have been arrested for it.
And? If Italians are much more likely to be arrested for illegal bookmaking & racketeering due to targeted efforts to take them down, does that mean it's a great idea to let Fat Tony with a felony conviction, a ball-peen hammer and a shitload of shady friends he has unclear relationships with open a casino?
It's a better idea than letting equally-as-dirty-but-white-and-uncaught Joe Trustfund take over in his absence. The former at least equalizes the second-order race issue, whereas yours naively compounds it.
A. the person to have convictions for dealing, not just possession, and
B. mobster-era Italians to be just about as likely to engage in illegal bookmaking and racketeering as the general population, and
C. a history of hundreds of years of imposing underclass status on Italians (like that imposed on African Americans), with modern-day policing skewed very heavily against them.
Another poster has raised the claim that this only holds true for questions related to certain time frames.
But even ignoring that and assuming this was fully for racist reasons, should that have any impact on those choosing to hire people? Even if the justice system is racist, that is a problem that belongs to the justice system.
Word choice is fine. Vanilla means plain, unremarkable, blends in well. To become an unremarkable part of the economy. Taking an altogether different meaning not fitting the context says more about your interpretive frame of reference.
I think it was pointed out because vanilla is also associated with "white". In this case, one reading of the comment is "an industry you're trying to make white".
I read it twice and then saw what he meant. I think he's alluding to how since the flavor vanilla is associated with whiteness, "vanillify" has a cheeky double meaning: make more respectable and make more white skinned.
Funnily enough, vanilla is actually very dark. The bean itself is dark-brown-almost-black, and the extract is also a dark brown liquid. Vanilla ice cream is white because milk is white, and because it doesn't take a lot of vanilla to flavor it. If you have a good vanilla ice cream, you'll see little black specs in it; that's the vanilla.
> Taking an altogether different meaning not fitting the context.
My comment was referring to the fact that the article is about black people being excluded from this new business opportunity.
From the article:
> For now, he explained, California plans to decide whether drug felons like the Distributor can participate in the medical market on a case-by-case basis...White males tend to do better when it’s subjective.
It was a pun to highlight/explore the question: do people feel prefer having white people sell marijuana? In this case my interpretation of the questions was "do you want a black face as the poster for an industry white males are taking over?"
Everything you say is entirely logical, but omits the reality that as a black person in america you are vastly more likely to be arrested for drug crimes. Not more likely to DO drug crimes, just more likely to get caught.
This means profiling and racist policing directly leads to economic exclusion. If the american dream is upward mobility, that means black people get a smaller shot at the american dream.
But all that aside. This is like saying that people who've had DUIs can't work at bars. The guy in the article had possession charges. That means he had nothing to do with selling the stuff, he was just a fan. That's a big difference from being an accountant convicted of fraud or a bookie trying to work at a casino.
But this is more like someone owning a liquor store selling to underage kids, thus breaking the law losing his license then getting denied a job at distillery for prior lapse of judgement.
It doesn't sound like that at all to me. In fact, it sounds a lot more like getting caught drinking underage, and then getting denied a job at a distillery.
If we're being precise, it sounds like getting caught drinking when you're 20, then a few years later the drinking age is lowered to 19 but you still get denied a job at a distillery.
More apt would be getting caught making moonshine and getting denied a job at a distillery. The point is the same. Prior bad judgement may result in diminished future outlook.
The person in the article wasn't growing pot. They had a joint on them and were stopped by the cops. You're trying to escalate it but the point is they did something that we now consider not wrong, served their time, but are still being punished for it.
>For example, all of these “equally likely to have used drugs” claims turn out to be that blacks and whites are equally likely to have “used drugs in the past year”, but blacks are far more likely to have used drugs in the past week – that is, more whites are only occasional users. That gives blacks many more opportunities to be caught by the cops. Likewise, whites are more likely to use low-penalty drugs like hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use high-penalty drugs like crack cocaine. Further, blacks are more likely to live in the cities, where there is a heavy police shadow, and whites in the suburbs or country, where there is a lower one.
...
>Finally, all of this is based on self-reported data about drug use. Remember from a couple paragraphs ago how studies showed that black people were twice as likely to fail to self-report their drug use? And you notice here that black people are twice as likely to be arrested for drug use as their self-reports suggest? That’s certainly an interesting coincidence.
> Likewise, whites are more likely to use low-penalty drugs like hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use high-penalty drugs like crack cocaine
This raises a question about why drugs that whites are more likely to use are penalized less severely than drugs that blacks are more likely to use.
>It would be nice to say that this shows the criminal justice system is not disproportionately harming blacks, but unfortunately it doesn’t come anywhere close to showing anything of the sort. There are still many ways it can indirectly harm blacks without being explicitly racist. Anatole France famously said that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich as well as poor people from begging for bread and sleeping under bridges”, and in the same way that the laws France cites, be they enforced ever so fairly, would still disproportionately target poor people, so other laws can, even when fairly enforced, target black people. The classic example of this is crack cocaine – a predominantly black drug – carrying a higher sentence than other whiter drugs. Even if the police are scrupulously fair in giving the same sentence to black and white cokeheads, the law will still have a disproportionate effect.
But note that this supports very different conclusions from what you'd think only knowing that blacks have higher penalty rates. Is it racist laws, or racist policemen? The response to each is going to be different; e.g. giving policemen "diversity training" or something only helps if they were the problem.
> Likewise, whites are more likely to use low-penalty drugs like hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use high-penalty drugs like crack cocaine.
Why is it, then, that crack cocaine is a high-penalty drug, and hallucinogens are low-penalty drugs?
He mentions this in the summary. Note that this still doesn't support kennywinker's claim that "profiling and racist policing directly leads to economic exclusion". If anything, higher usage, combined with several other factors, possibly including racist laws (but not racist enforcement of those laws), led to this.
> Crack is highly physically addictive. People aren't out robbing houses to get their next acid fix.
Powder cocaine is literally the same drug as crack cocaine, yet the sentencing disparities since the 1980s have been completely out of sync. They've slightly converged in the last ~5 years (crack cocaine sentences have been reduced), but let's not pretend that the sentencing laws[0] have not been radically influenced by perceptions of associations of drugs with race.
> People aren't out robbing houses to get their next _____ fix
LSD is not physically addictive, but in general, I'll encourage you to question this line of thinking. Looking at whether people are "out robbing houses" glosses over the question of why people would commit robbery in order to purchase drugs, and the racial and socioeconomic issues that are inextricably linked to that.
Put another way: who's not committing robbery in order to purchase the drugs that they use, and why aren't they? Is it because their drug (e.g. powdered cocaine) is fundamentally less addictive? Or is it because they are already in a position in society that allows them other opportunities to finance their drug use? Is it a statement about the drug itself, or simply a statement about the social structures that already exist?
[0] If you want a really wonderful example of this, look at the reason that possession of <27g of marijuana was the only drug that was exempted from the Rockefeller drug laws' mandatory minimum sentencing. It was, quite literally, that kids in predominantly white and wealthy suburbs were being sentenced to prison time, and the parents wanted the judges to have discretionary power when sentencing them.
> Powder cocaine is literally the same drug as crack cocaine
Highly incorrect.
Smoking an equivalent amount of cocaine-base (crack) vs snorting cocaine-HCL (powder) is a completely different experience due to purity, ROA, and absorption (surface area of lungs vs nasal passage is 50x), etc.
Not to mention that is not an ionic bond, it is covalent. Different molecule.
> Smoking an equivalent amount of cocaine-base (crack) vs snorting cocaine-HCL (powder) is a completely different experience
This boils down to "the means of ingestion of a drug has a significant effect on the effects of the drug". Anybody who has ever both smoked a joint and consumed THC edibles knows firsthand that this is the case. Insufflation and ingestion are different from inhalation, so yes, the experience, onset, reinforcement mechanisms would be different. That does not change the fact that they are fundamentally the same drug.
> Not to mention that is not an ionic bond, it is covalent. Different molecule.
It's not the form it's transported in that's relevant; it's the form that reaches the CNS that matters[0]. In this case, the pharmacokinetics of the two drugs are the same once they hit the bloodstream.
If that doesn't convince you, the consider that the effects of injecting crack cocaine[1] and powder cocaine are literally chemically identical.
[0] Actually, it's the pharmacokinetic process of the drug that's relevant, since two different molecules can be metabolized identically. (And not all drugs affect the CNS, but that's a side point).
[1] Less common, because smoking is logistically easier, and also results in a sharper onset since it saves half the round trip to the lungs. But it does happen.
> In this case, the pharmacokinetics of the two drugs are the same once they hit the bloodstream.
Highly incorrect.
The amount of the drug and concentration of the drug and the salt or ester of the drug can impact the pharmacokinetics of the drug.
It was used to be thought that morphine and heroin was the same exact thing because the H was converted to morphine quickly. Except H ends up having different metabolites and ratios - not the mention the effects are not the same / even when accounted for the dose and ROA.
Also, to the main point, if one produces 10x the effect of the other, the point is the same...
Crack is severely more punished over cocaine because it severely impacts user behavior - much more so than cocaine. The campaign to punish crack possession was also largely due to blacks demanding it to be made as so.
> The amount of the drug and concentration of the drug and the salt or ester of the drug can impact the pharmacokinetics of the drug.
Can, but in the case of crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine, they demonstrably do not[0][1].
> Crack is severely more punished over cocaine because it severely impacts user behavior - much more so than cocaine
It really does not. It can be (but is not always) more habit-forming to smoke a drug than to insufflate it, but this is true of all substances. And intravenous or subcutaneous use of crack cocaine and powder cocaine are literally, 100% identical.
> The campaign to punish crack possession was also largely due to blacks demanding it to be made as so.
No. There was support from within the black community, but to say it is "largely" due to this is overstating the case.
And getting back to the original point, that doesn't actually contradict the original statement, because the reason that black communities felt the impact of violent drug crime and white communities didn't is itself a direct effect of the racial power structures involved.
"However, evidence exists showing a greater abuse liability, greater propensity for dependence, and more severe consequences when cocaine is smoked (cocaine-base) or injected intravenously (cocaine hydrochloride) compared with intranasal use (cocaine hydrochloride).)."
The fact that the effects are different, even with the "same drug".
> the reason that black communities felt the impact of violent drug crime and white communities didn't is itself a direct effect of the racial power structures involved.
Except no matter where you go in the world, no matter its racial break-down, and no matter what it's history is, the pattern is the same: blacks disproportionately commit violent acts. And when those places are near 100% black, it gets even worse.
> And intravenous or subcutaneous use of crack cocaine and powder cocaine are literally, 100% identical.
We are comparing powder cocaine insufflated with crack smoked and how that impacted black communities.
> Except no matter where you go in the world, no matter its racial break-down, and no matter what it's history is, the pattern is the same: blacks disproportionately commit violent acts.
I wish you'd come out and stated that this was your thesis from the very beginning. I now regret having wasted my time with this conversation.
Because of the damage addiction does to communities. When these laws were passed it was people in those affected communities demanding them. People forget there were huge community marches in the 80s/90s crack epidemics with locals demanding police rid their towns of crack dealers.
> People forget there were huge community marches in the 80s/90s crack epidemics with locals demanding police rid their towns of crack dealers.
People also forget why those dealers were in the business in the first place.
(Hint: the US government played a large role in explicitly financing the drug trade that resulted in a stead inflow of crack, predominantly to black communities[0]. Crack cocaine would not have been anywhere nearly as lucrative a business otherwise[1].)
[1] Which isn't to say that it's particularly lucrative either way, as has been demonstrated numerous times by economists - it just happens to be one of the few options available for many people who are trying to scrape together a living under those circumstances.
A steady influx of cocaine, which became too expensive when said shady agencies stopped what they were doing and local dealers decided to boil the expensive coke into crack so it became more affordable to addicts. Now there was a $5 per point addictive drug flooding poor areas with zero law enforcement to control it.
I remember big protests with black community leaders accusing the police of racism for not arresting crack dealers as their neighborhoods had become so dangerous police totally avoided them. They demanded new laws. Their newly elected reps ran on a platform of new tougher laws. The heavy hand of government then solved this by creating mandatory minimum sentencing and other laws that were blanket applied regardless of individual situation and created mass incarceration.
Now, let's think why white neighborhoods were not struggling with the same problems of violent crime due to the drug trade. We know that the answer is not
(a) white people weren't doing drugs
(b) white people were doing drugs that were less addictive
because in reality, white people had (and still have) roughly the same total rates of drug use as everyone else. And in this case, white people were largely using the same drug (cocaine, in powered form) as black people (cocaine, in freebase form).
I'm not saying that black people at the time weren't concerned with violent crime and calling for solutions to it. In fact, I'm usually the person who points this out whenever discussions about 80s and 90s drug law sentencing come up on HN. What I am saying instead is that it's silly to ignore the reason that black communities were concerned with problems that white communities never had to face in the first place.
No, drug usage rates among whites are not and were not substantially lower than drug usage rates for other races. (In some years, they were actually higher, though not substantially so). In fact, in the 1980s, white people were also 45% more likely to sell drugs as well[0].
The difference in the effects of drug trade on black communities and on white communities in the 1980s are emphatically not due to fundamental differences of the drugs themselves, or due to differences in the prevalence of drug trade and drug usage.
>Hindelang, Hirshi, and Weiss (1981) compare police records on
arrests to self-reports for a sample of individuals and find these to be
similar, with the exception of self-reports for young black men, which
appear to understate the amount of crime committed.
If the fraction of drug users are equal, but blacks lie about whether they're drug users more often, then your statistics will show that whites use more.
The reported difference between blacks and whites is less than the known difference in honesty between them with regard to drug questions.
You also don't seem to have responded to my point at all, which is that blacks have a higher rate of reported usage within the last week. This is before taking the self-reported nature into account. See the source originally cited, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf
>Among black drug users, 54%
reported using drugs at least monthly and 32% reported
using them weekly. Such frequent drug use was less
common among white drug users. Among white users, 39%
reported using drugs monthly and 20% reported using
them weekly.
I'll let you do the math to determine how this affects usage rates.
> You don't seem to have responded to my point at all, which is that blacks have a higher rate of reported usage within the last week.
That's completely counter to the results of both the MTF and NSDUH. Since 1975, with the exception of Native Americans, whites consistently have slightly higher usage rates of drugs than any other racial demographic, although the overall drug usage rates are roughly comparable. For example:
> For a number of years, 12th-grade African-American students reported lifetime, annual, 30-day, and daily prevalence rates for nearly all drugs that were lower—sometimes dramatically so—than those for White or Hispanic 12th graders. That is less true [in 2014], with rates of drug use among African Americans more similar to the other groups[0]
The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from the BJS about drug users. That's quite different from usage rates of drugs within the general population.
Finally, you are quite literally begging the question[1] by citing the 1981 analysis (which is itself a rather contested one). Even if we take that data at face value, it concludes that black men understate the crimes they commit, and does so by comparing this to arrest records. The whole point is that arrest records provide a skewed perspective of drug usage for black men (and women), because they are far more likely to be arrested for the behaviors they do.
You're using 12th grade numbers. That's more than enough to account for any difference.
>The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from the BJS about drug users. That's quite different from usage rates of drugs within the general population.
If the same percent of whites use drugs as blacks, then looking at how many drugs are used by each user (or how often each user uses them) matters. If each black user uses more than each white user, the total usage can be more.
>Finally, you are quite literally begging the question[1] by citing the 1981 analysis (which is itself a rather contested one). Even if we take that data at face value, it concludes that black men understate the crimes they commit, and does so by comparing this to arrest records. The whole point is that arrest records provide a skewed perspective of drug usage for black men (and women), because they are far more likely to be arrested for the behaviors they do.
I took that quote out of your jstor source. If you don't like it, use the one from SSC that I linked to:
>Comparisons of several different surveys of drug use find that “nonreporting of drug use is twice as common among blacks and Hispanics as among whites” (Mensch and Kandel). (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749113)
This can't be explained by bias in arrest records. Note that they're looking at how many people who admitted using drugs in 1980 denied ever using drugs in 1984.
> Why is it, then, that crack cocaine is a high-penalty drug, and hallucinogens are low-penalty drugs?
Because black communities in the 1980s pushed for a crackdown (pun intended) on the crack industry, while no-one really cares all that much about the hallucinogen industries.
In this article they attempt to list area stopped and income as factors unrelated to race that should be controlled for. Do you think that's reasonable? Do those things have nothing to do with race in your world?
I am a black person in America and I think you're half right.
White people and black people use illegal drugs at approximately the same rate. Black people, despite being a population only 1/4 the size of the white population, are arrested for drug crimes in both greater numbers and in greater proportion.
Into my mid-to-late 30s, when I would get pulled over by the police, roughly half of the time, the officer would ask me if I had any drugs in my car. My response was usually "No more than you do, officer". The police profile and harass us. There are even rogue officers who plant evidence to manufacture crimes.
We all know this. As a result, many of us are more staunchly against even casual drug use in our personal lives.
It's not fair. It's not right. It's just the way it is.
I have a friend whom I have known since childhood who is currently serving 20 years in a federal prison for marijuana related offenses. He made a choice and it turned out poorly for him.
I'll save my outrage for the people who were falsely convicted. I'll save my outrage for the victims of planted evidence and corrupt cops.
If someone is actually guilty of the crime, their case is far less sympathetic.
> Everything you say is entirely logical, but omits the reality that as a black person in america you are vastly more likely to be arrested for drug crimes. Not more likely to DO drug crimes, just more likely to get caught.
It is true that black people are more likely to be arrested than white people for drug crimes. 57% of arrestees are white, 37% black. That's about 3x the percentage that you'd expect if you just go by the racial distribution of drug users.
However, that's not actually really relevant here because most drug users, white or black, do not get caught at all. There are about 1.2 million drug arrests per year, so roughly 680k whites and 444k blacks.
We've got about 320 million people. Let's be generous and knock out people 0-14 (20%) because they are probably too young to have gotten into drugs, and also knock out 55+ (26%) because older people don't seem to get arrested much for casual drug use (perhaps if you are old and a regular drug user you've figured out how to not get caught...). So that leaves us 173 million people who are similar demographically to the people getting arrested for drugs.
That would be about 22 million blacks, 109 million whites.
So...we've got about 680k whites arrested for drugs per year out of 109 million, which means 108.6 million out of 109 million whites are NOT arrested. In percentages, 99.4% of whites are not arrested for drugs in any given year.
For blacks, we've got 444k arrested for drugs out of 22 million, which means 21.6 million out of 22 million blacks are NOT arrested. In percentages, 98.0% of blacks are not arrested for drugs in any given year.
98.0% is lower than 99.4%, and that is something that should be investigated--I'm not trying to argue that there is no bias. I'm just saying that by focusing on those arrested rather than those not arrested, you get a misleading picture.
This kind of mistake is common when people assess risks, and so people tend to overreact when something increases a very low probability risk. For instance, we read that some particular food might increase our chances of getting some particular disease from 1/10^6 over our lifetime to 3/10^6, and we think we need to immediately cut that food even if we like it and it does plenty of good things for us, because it increases our risk 3x and that sounds huge.
Oddly, we don't seem to do this with transportation. Someone trying to decide whether to drive or fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco will probably decide based on cost, time, convenience, things on the driving route they might want to visit, whether they want their car with them in San Francisco, and similar factors. For most people I don't think that the fact that flying (at least on a major airline) is safer than driving would be a factor. They recognize that the chances of dying in an automobile accident on a drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco are so low as to not be worth considering, and so that some other mode of transportation would have even lower chances is not relevant.
A lot of people don't recognize "drug crime" as a crime. Your comparison is actually like comparing apples to oranges. There was no legal drug industry, so how people were going to it legally?
I read the entire article. The man was duly convicted of a crime in Oklahoma. He broke the law, regardless of what anyone thinks. Fast forward to when selling dope in certain places is now legal and this guys want a piece of the action, but... he cannot legally do so because he's a convicted felon. Should we undo his conviction? No. He was tried fairly and found guilty based on the laws of the time and place. His fault. His color has nothing to do with it, and quite frankly, I'm sick to death of everything in this country now revolving around race, homosexuals, feminists.
The man made a choice, he now lives with the repercussions of that choice, whether anyone agrees or disagrees. I realize my outlook is likely unpopular, but like I tell my children -- there are consequences for your actions, and it may take years to see them. This story will be read by my kids tonight to reinforce my good advice.
Besides, the morality of the people involved in a business like legal dope would put me off. Just because they don't have convictions means nothing. The type of people attracted to the dope business are off putting.
The point here is that there are more consequences when you're Black in the US. Statistically speaking people of color, and in particular Black Americans, are arrested and convicted of marijuana related crimes at a much higher rate than any other group [1]. That translates into Black Americans being kept out of the newly legal business because of racist policing policies.
I appreciate your remarks. But -- what I'm saying is that no one should feel sorry for this guy. It pains me to see the vast numbers of Americans who but a few years ago were for tough legislation and tough policies and who now desire to see criminals released from prison because the sentence may be too harsh. Really? If you do the crime, you do the time. We should not undo sentencing. It was all done legally at the time and it should stand.
I don't like the dope industry. It attracts children who think that smoking marijuana is harmless. It's not. The dopeheads can trot out all the industry-inspired crap they like, but it's not healthy. I'm all for ACTUAL medical patients who are in severe pain using it, but so many go to these quack doctors who will give a medical reason for a few dollars. Actual doctors with hospital admitting privileges should be the law.
Marijuana is not harmless and just a few years ago the majority of Americans agreed. The morality in America has slipped precipitously since our heyday as a nation in the 1950s.
>The morality in America has slipped precipitously since our heyday as a nation in the 1950s.
Yea, the 1950's were really America's heyday (/s), while the rest of the world was blown up. I wonder if people in the 1920's were sipping on illegal booze at Gadsby's party thinking "man, the morality in america sure has taken a dive since the gilded age". Is your view so skewed by the media portrayal of the Jones' and white picket fences that you think America was some bastion of morality then? The morals established then were that woman couldn't own credit cards unless their husbands deemed it so, gays should be sent to sanitoriums to prevent the spread of their disease by showing nude pictures to other boys (Lavender Scare anyone?); it took 10+ years for some states to comply with Brown v The Board of Education. So how about you get your kids a history book and let them read that so they don't have to see the world through rose colored bigoted glasses.
edit. The more I think about this the more upset I am. HUAC, being able to LEGALLY beat your wife, this isn't even touching on African-American trials of the time. America was a fucking mess in the 1950's.
This is tacking on an extra penalty for breaking the law after the fact which is generally considered unconstitutional. Further, by living in city's poor black people end up with much harsher punishments for the same crimes. Which set's up cycles of negative consequences we are all stuck with.
Picture this, you apply for a job but now all background checks are required by law to include speeding tickets which prevent you from making more than minimum wage. Further, this applies retroactively. Are you now more or less likely to commit a new crime?
A felony conviction is a far cry from a mere moving violation. A felony conviction means you cannot be trusted. Full stop. Selling dope is a choice. The man made a choice and paid for his actions. Should he now be allowed to profit from the same (now legal) action that got him barred in the first place? No. The legal dope industry, as shady as it is, has established laws that says "felons not welcome", and that's OK. Nothing stops this guys from pursuing some other line of work and making something of himself. The problem here is that the legal dope industry is easy money. Too many people want "easy". They don't want to go and actually work.
Felony's where meant to mean something, but it's become a meaningless label.
Give it 20 years and do 5mph over the speed limit could easily be a felony. Hell you have likely committed a few hundred felony's of one type or another. (3 per day is BS, but several a year is common.)
> His color has nothing to do with it, and quite frankly, I'm sick to death of everything in this country now revolving around race, homosexuals, feminists.
Because it's not that simple. And race seems to play a big part in the probability to get convicted and have a record, especially for something as mundane as selling pot.
I totally agree with you about this guy in particular. He is a felon, with a conviction relating to the industry he wants to work in. Don't let fraudsters become accountants, don't let illegal dealers become legal ones.
But the problem is that there are a lot of white people who are guilty of the same offenses, who are currently operating businesses he isn't allowed to operate, but who were never convicted of those crimes due to previous racial profiling.
Whether or not we do something to right the wrongs of our ancestors against blacks, Native Americans, or other groups, and what that something might be, is a hard problem.
The horrors of genocide, racism, and slavery hundreds of years ago or decades ago are one thing, but this is one guy's lifetime - racism played a part in getting him convicted while the crimes committed by his white competitors were ignored. Does that help the argument make more sense?
What you say is likely very true, but has no bearing on this one man's case. This one man was found guilty and is now paying the price. Some will call foul. Some won't. I don't argue the fact that race relations in the US haven't been pretty and that many people were unfairly treated or even falsely convicted, but this particular man was found guilty of a crime he did commit and is now paying for his crimes. It doesn't matter that his white counterparts did the same and are selling legal dope. They didn't get convicted. This is the crux, not what's fair. He's a convict, they are not. Fair or not, he needs to move on and make something of himself before he becomes afoul of the law again and really ruins his life beyond what damage is already done. Nothing stops this guy from learning how to code and selling his software to the legal dope industry if he wants to be involved that badly.
If your only baromrter for morality is "caught and convicted o a crime", your pronouncements on how to build a society (including how crimes are defined, investigated, and prosecuted) aren't very interesting.
Get a grip. Moral people would not want to sell dope, regardless if there were no penalties. Dope changes lives, and never in a good way.
Morality is absolute. People deep down know right from wrong. America now plays relativism with morality and truth with garbage like, "well, if it's true for you...". It's crap.
A felony conviction means you cannot be trusted. This man sold dope to people. He was convicted. What's not to like? The law did it's job. Now, if only we had Singapore's drug laws, this country would be largely free of immoral dopeheads and their ilk. Selling dope is immoral whether legal or not. It attracts bad people and gets children involved in things that are not healthy and righteous.
I read the entire article. The man was duly convicted of a crime in Oklahoma. He broke the law, regardless of what anyone thinks. Fast forward to when black people owning property in certain places is now legal and this guy wants a piece of the action, but...he cannot legally do so because he fled from his master. Should we undo his conviction? No. He was tried fairly and found guilty based on the laws of the time and place. His fault. His color has nothing to do with it, and quite frankly, I'm sick to death of everything in this country now revolving around the blacks, sodomites, and women.
Laws are made by humans, and there is no guarantee that they are fair or ethical. The man in the article was caught with a couple cigarettes filled with a shredded plant (the illegal one, not that legal yet much more harmful plant). He served a felony for it because we instituted a draconian and racist class war under the guise of "saving the children from reefer madness". This country is finally instituting some sensible drug legislation, but the people that were most disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs are now disproportionately locked out of this new market. That is neither fair nor ethical.
Fair from what perspective? I'm a conservative who hates drugs, homosexuality, feminism, and a whole host of other ills that now plague this once-great nation. We are now awash as a nation in sea of immorality, relativism, and moral corruptness. We have no moral compass. I've said it before and I say it again, America was at her best in the 1950s. Since then, we've lost our conservative moorings to immoral behavior, lifestyles, cheapened sexuality, illicit drugs, what not.
You say "market" like selling dope could be a good thing. If it's a harmless plant, as you say, why have any regulations concerning it. Tea is a "harmless" plant, and as such, I can send my children into Walmart and purchase it without so much as a by-your-leave from the cashier. Harmless plants don't need sensible regulations because harmless things don't need regulating. Morality again, gone astray. I miss my old-school America where Americans were conservatives.
HN isn't the place for strident political rants, so please don't post them here.
Thoughtful conversation is what we're going for. It's possible to have that about inflammatory topics, but it requires a conscious effort at respecting those with opposing views and meeting them where they are. That's not always easy—especially when others appear wrong and disingenuous—but if you can't do it, it's best not to comment until you can.
> But it can’t be someone who got caught. Which for the most part means it can’t be someone who is black.
It's thinking like this that pisses me off. Henderson wasn't hired because of a record. Yes, racism still unfortunately exists, but in order to move towards an equal future we need to stop bringing it up and searching for problems where there are none. Fucking Buzzfeed and Huffington post are constantly using they're over-sensitive audience to start drama.
But how does demonizing the legal weed industry by accusing it of being racists accomplish anything useful?
They are clearly NOT being racist and just following the legal requirements for their industry. The fact that the ones being excluded are mainly black is not some conscious decision to exclude blacks but the result of the current laws and enforcement saddling them with felony drug convictions. The author's time would be better spent addressing the real problem of the disproportionate number of black males with drug felonies for simple possession.
There is a very real problem here, and you don't have to search hard for it. An entire sub-population of this country was disproportionately sentenced to felony convictions. If we don't recognize that for what it was, we are condemning a generation of black people to just "suck it up, because we're thinking about the future now". That is a mistake because these people are part of the future, and they deserve a fair chance in it. Laws preventing felony offenders from finding work in their field only make sense if the felony conviction actually made sense. Preventing non-violent drug offenders from finding work in the burgeoning drug industry is as nonsensical as the offense they were charged with.
You can't just hit a reset button on racism and say all our mistakes our behind us, now we're all on the same level. Especially not when those mistakes were felony charges with lifelong consequences.
Agreed. I don't think we should ignore the problems, I just think we (and especially the heavy-influencing media) should be much more intelligent about crying "racism" when the issue was not a racist one to begin with.
There are far too many publications going out that overreach and point out minor details to make something seem racist or sexist. It's total bullshit and out of context.
If a felony means you can't work in an industry, it's a race issue. Felonies are associated with poverty, and for historic and social reasons poverty is associated with being black. Just because they didn't say "sorry we can't hire you, you're black" doesn't mean it doesn't further the cycle of poverty.
I'm not wagging my finger at the weed places. I get their logic, they're running a business that's already on shaky ground... avoiding any employees who might increase that risk makes sense. I'm wagging my finger at society for providing another example of how we keep perpetuating systemic racism.
This, right here. Felonies are supposed to be crimes which deserve execution: murder, rape — that kind of thing. They shouldn't be things which deserve a slap on the wrist at the absolute most.
Here activists called legalization the new prohibition because of all the regulations like no dispensaries within a X distance from each other, a school, church ect so drove them out or cemented monopolies for the existing dispensaries which can raise prices. Then they created high barriers to entry with massive licensing fees and other regulations. This of course spawned online purchasing and delivery business models that's worked well for now, until more regulations on delivery.
One problem with the distributor in this story is he is constantly getting high off his own supply while in care and control of a vehicle which makes nobody want to work with him. That's heatbag behavior asking for problems. His comment on firearms about pulling out a gun during an argument is also something only heatbags do, the guys with side arms on the farm he went to are only armed to deter getting jacked for their product not win arguments.
You can't have a record and operate a dispensary here either, which was designed to keep bikers and other org crime out but they get around this by partnering with somebody that has a clean record.
Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was only for teenage possession. Friend in Seattle did that to erase his record and open a weed business.
| Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was only for teenage possession
Because that would dilute the click-baity narrative that Buzzfeed is trying to drive home. We wouldn't want their efforts in conflating cause and effect to go to waste now, would we?
Black underemployment is not an issue specific to the weed industry, it's a problem in all industry. Duh.
Also, legal weed is supposed to deal with racial inequalities. Legal weed means less people being caught and jailed. This is good.
Though, to be perfectly honest, I am not into the idea of states using Marijuana as a profit vehicle. It's about as cynical and without class as state run gambling. Hopefully more people will grow their own and once the rest of the US legalizes, weed will be about as profitable, no more or less, than a tomato.
I don't believe for one second that the people running the dispensaries never 'partook'. It takes a fan of the merchandise to run these things and communicate with the clientele. They just weren't caught. Why not? I suspect it still works like this:
Some 10-odd years ago, I had a (white) colleague who really enjoyed smoking mary-j. He lived on the 48th floor of a deluxe high-rise in Manhattan. He, like his wealthy neighbors, didn't have to get their fix off the street. Instead, they called 1-800-greenhouse and ordered two "theatre tickets". Within 30 mins, a bike messenger (African-American) came over to deliver 2 ounces of stuff to his front door. He never left the house. Last I heard, he got a job with the government…
I'd expect states to be strict in this area for now, especially states that legalized recreational use, because the weed business is not legal under Federal law. The Federal government is currently taking a hands off approach to see how this works out. The cleaner the states can keep their weed business, the more likely the Feds are to leave them alone.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadHe was so in love with how effectively the whole world made sense in terms of dollars, contracts, and trades. He liked the meta-economics of the prevailing world economic order. He would think in terms of "is it worth it to me to buy your debt?" if ever you said anything within a mile's distance of implying that you might want money for some economic purpose.
Well, at that time, there was no weed boom. It was illegal for the most part, in the U.S.
And his worldview, which always tried to relate everything -- from national or world news, right on down to the conversations of everyone around him after the workday was done -- everything he related to in terms of how our existing systems of money, contract obligations, and legal decisions was so logical and coherent and wonderful.
What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals.
What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins.
What was the difference before and after? Well, in this one respect, there is no difference: he still goes on effusing self-serving pro-US-capitalist rhetoric everywhere he goes. The one difference is that now he doesn't think weed is bad, it's just another thing for him to try to leverage financial/economic advantage out of, behind his Edward Jones-style desk, while there is a whole 'nother entire class of people mentioned in this article who probably don't dig his own worldview as much as he does.
Way too many people think that pure logic (and wisdom of experience) is what leads to their value-judgements and opinions. Like my example mom-and-pop broker above (who is no fat cat in the scheme of things, just someone too invested in the neoliberal capitalist paradigm to think straight anymore), they will switch their value judgements when their one true god (money, joint-stock ownership, and the corporate form of governance) tells them to switch. When weed is blacklisted, they can invent reasons to hate weed. When weed is legal, it's just another glorious benefit of our market system to provide this good/service to all the people who demand it. (And for them to rightfully earn a profit somewhere in the trade, or in the ownership of the business providing the service.) They make up reasons to believe what the markets tell them to believe. A dog wagged by a tail, if you will.
Likewise, when you have central banks and too-big-to-fails in this environment buying up everything in the stock markets with an exponentially growing supply of USD, JPYs, and euros, you wind up in a situation where the market tail is actually trying to wag the economic dog.
We forgot that it was supposed to be the other way around, because of how far we've gone off the rails into our deficit-spending-until-death mode of existence, since year 19XX, for some value of XX, I favor about the time Reagan took over, but you can go back further if you like.
Thanks for sharing your reference, by the way.
It happens in terms of literal power and ownership, when money is produced and awarded in toxic ways, yet it is all that matters for obtaining power and ownership.
And it happens in terms of the mind: of people working in aid of a status quo which is being driven the wrong way.
Well guess what, you're not going to let some insane human elitists (how close is that guy Donald Trump to them? anything is too close for my comfort) try to drive me through the tail of the dog that is my life. If you have an insane and toxic system, then it's better to start getting radical.
Ah, but now -- how to get radical? There we all explode.
update, with recommended reading:
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer
We either do or don't have people successfully playing at money/power/mind-game for the stakes of controlling the planet from the top down. Either way, I am afraid. Because a bunch of moronic dictators fighting each other unsuccessfully is no better than a single one successfully winning such a game.
/s/broker/asset manager/
> What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins.
Isn't that exactly how we want our businesses to behave? If a businessman who didn't want to get involved in something when it was illegal now wants to get involved now that it's legal, isn't that good business ethics?
So, sure, that's exactly how we want our businesses to be, you are right, I concede for the sake of a limited argument under all the rest of the assumptions you have when you make that statement. I have unstated assumptions as well, everywhere.
Overall I was trying to make a hard point. I think that people are a just a little too content with the status quo. I believe only radical changes can fix the brokenness of our systems, and only on a long time line. (Our systems are broken at so many, many different levels, we could start by talking about problematic broken hardware/software systems if we wanted, and probably arrive at the conclusion that the present paradigm needs a radical change in the long run, saying nothing of money, law, or politics.)
I wanted to complain about how we expect our businesses to behave, because I think it's dysfunctional. But in the pragmatic sense, I'm not making any useful complaint. You are being more pragmatic.
The first thing I've come to realize the importance of by now, is that talk is just talk, and radical changes aren't going to happen on any time line, not without a lot of consensus.
I sincerely hope that some aspect of the human nature itself does not prevent us from coming to healthier consensuses than what we currently have. All I see is a system that maximizes paper profits while not counting environment damage or exhaustible resource availablity. Accounting is everything, and I fear for all humanity if we don't come to some better system of accounting value.
> Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, black people are much more likely to have been arrested for it.
The lesson goes much further than the weed-boom, of course. So many people look at the current legal landscape and say "opportunities are equal for equal candidates", with seemingly no ability to observe for the compounded effects of all the preceding inequality.
@
edit: My comments seem to have been flagged so hard that I can't post replies. I guess this place isn't much more sophisticated than BuzzFeed when it comes to race issues.
As for that piece you keep posting, ikeboy, I don't think it's nearly as relevant or convincing as you think it is.
From the choice headline quote from the research SSX cites:
> is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled
The entire controversy here arises due to the racially-biased source of the prior record.
I have a very low opinion of SSX's weasel-word-weaving to pander to his narrow audience, to be honest.
> Summary: Blacks appear to be arrested for drug use at a rate four times that of whites. Adjusting for known confounds reduces their rate to twice that of whites. However, other theorized confounders could mean that the real relative risk is anywhere between two and parity. Never trust the media to give you any number more complicated than today’s date.
Blacks "appear to be", huh? With a couple of sketchy assumptions, suddenly we're "between two and parity", which then gets reproduced by you in this debate as "misleading and basically parity".
Anyway,
> There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.
Edit:
To follow up your edit, I find the attitudes toward race and gender on HN particularly troubling. Whenever there is an article that discusses legitimate race/gender issues it tends to be downvoted/flagged and drop like a rock off the front page. The comments are often calling into question the credibility of the person making the complaint about racism, and even blaming them / their race.
The reason that I find the attitudes here so troubling is because there are a number of influential people here. Many are entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs. If these attitudes are a reflection of the racial attitudes in the tech industry then woe unto us. We are doomed. We fancy ourselves sophisticated, rational, and benevolent leaders of the future world economy but we are too arrogant to look inward at our own flaws.
The study he references is trying to figure out whether there's bias in "pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults". To determine that, you need to control for anything that should matter to such determinations. Of course prior record matters to sentencing etc.
Whether prior record is itself biased has nothing to do with investigating bias in sentencing etc, and is properly controlled for.
What assumptions are "sketchy"?
"about equally likely to have broken the law" is misleading, when blacks break the law more often. Equally likely in the last year, not the same number of times. If they'd said "blacks are more likely to break the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, but they get arrested at a rate that's between the same or double that of other races, depending on whether you trust their self-reports on whether they've taken drugs, which they're known to lie on at twice the rate of white people", I'd have no problem.
I haven't asserted that it's parity, just that claiming otherwise hasn't been supported. If someone has a good counter-argument to SSC's applying black drug honesty rates to their supposed discrimination by police, I'll be happy to consider it. But just making a blanket statement like buzzfeed is misleading.
>> There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.
That does nothing to justify buzzfeed. Sentence length doesn't change whether someone has a criminal record, which is buzzfeed's mechanism for "racism in drug industry".
You know, people with illegal bookmaking convictions are kept out of the gambling industry for good reasons. It started off as a dirty industry, and to the extent you keep anyone with a hint of grime out of it, you avoid it regressing to that state. That keeps regulators off your back and eventually helps you turn it into a family-friendly mass market industry.
It's also really difficult for people with fraud convictions to get job as accountants, no matter how good they are at forensic accounting. Trust is the commodity being sold.
Do you really want someone with a shitload of existing drug connections, being the poster face for the industry you're trying to vanillify? The whole premise of legalization wasn't that your local corner boys get to go industrial after they gain mass market access, it was that the "drug trade" becomes roughly parallel with the "tobacco trade", where the worst thing that happens is penny-ante tax evasion.
A. the person to have convictions for dealing, not just possession, and
B. mobster-era Italians to be just about as likely to engage in illegal bookmaking and racketeering as the general population, and
C. a history of hundreds of years of imposing underclass status on Italians (like that imposed on African Americans), with modern-day policing skewed very heavily against them.
But even ignoring that and assuming this was fully for racist reasons, should that have any impact on those choosing to hire people? Even if the justice system is racist, that is a problem that belongs to the justice system.
This seems like a poor choice of words at best.
Where I'm from, vanilla crisps are ready salted. And vanilla ice cream is vanilla.
"vanillify" (exceedingly rare, new jargon "to make bland" doesn't even show up in google ngrams) is too similar to "vilify" (to demonize) to use in a context of "to un-demonize". https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=vanillify&case...
"face of" or "poster boy for", rather than the mixed-up "poster face for". https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=poster+boy%2Cp...
But then, just because nobody says it that way isn't a reason not to...
My comment was referring to the fact that the article is about black people being excluded from this new business opportunity.
From the article:
> For now, he explained, California plans to decide whether drug felons like the Distributor can participate in the medical market on a case-by-case basis...White males tend to do better when it’s subjective.
It was a pun to highlight/explore the question: do people feel prefer having white people sell marijuana? In this case my interpretation of the questions was "do you want a black face as the poster for an industry white males are taking over?"
This means profiling and racist policing directly leads to economic exclusion. If the american dream is upward mobility, that means black people get a smaller shot at the american dream.
But all that aside. This is like saying that people who've had DUIs can't work at bars. The guy in the article had possession charges. That means he had nothing to do with selling the stuff, he was just a fan. That's a big difference from being an accountant convicted of fraud or a bookie trying to work at a casino.
In fact, people with alcohol-related felonies have a really tough time getting liquor licenses.
If we're being precise, it sounds like getting caught drinking when you're 20, then a few years later the drinking age is lowered to 19 but you still get denied a job at a distillery.
>For example, all of these “equally likely to have used drugs” claims turn out to be that blacks and whites are equally likely to have “used drugs in the past year”, but blacks are far more likely to have used drugs in the past week – that is, more whites are only occasional users. That gives blacks many more opportunities to be caught by the cops. Likewise, whites are more likely to use low-penalty drugs like hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use high-penalty drugs like crack cocaine. Further, blacks are more likely to live in the cities, where there is a heavy police shadow, and whites in the suburbs or country, where there is a lower one.
...
>Finally, all of this is based on self-reported data about drug use. Remember from a couple paragraphs ago how studies showed that black people were twice as likely to fail to self-report their drug use? And you notice here that black people are twice as likely to be arrested for drug use as their self-reports suggest? That’s certainly an interesting coincidence.
This raises a question about why drugs that whites are more likely to use are penalized less severely than drugs that blacks are more likely to use.
>It would be nice to say that this shows the criminal justice system is not disproportionately harming blacks, but unfortunately it doesn’t come anywhere close to showing anything of the sort. There are still many ways it can indirectly harm blacks without being explicitly racist. Anatole France famously said that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich as well as poor people from begging for bread and sleeping under bridges”, and in the same way that the laws France cites, be they enforced ever so fairly, would still disproportionately target poor people, so other laws can, even when fairly enforced, target black people. The classic example of this is crack cocaine – a predominantly black drug – carrying a higher sentence than other whiter drugs. Even if the police are scrupulously fair in giving the same sentence to black and white cokeheads, the law will still have a disproportionate effect.
But note that this supports very different conclusions from what you'd think only knowing that blacks have higher penalty rates. Is it racist laws, or racist policemen? The response to each is going to be different; e.g. giving policemen "diversity training" or something only helps if they were the problem.
Why is it, then, that crack cocaine is a high-penalty drug, and hallucinogens are low-penalty drugs?
(I leave this as an exercise to the reader.)
Powder cocaine is literally the same drug as crack cocaine, yet the sentencing disparities since the 1980s have been completely out of sync. They've slightly converged in the last ~5 years (crack cocaine sentences have been reduced), but let's not pretend that the sentencing laws[0] have not been radically influenced by perceptions of associations of drugs with race.
> People aren't out robbing houses to get their next _____ fix
LSD is not physically addictive, but in general, I'll encourage you to question this line of thinking. Looking at whether people are "out robbing houses" glosses over the question of why people would commit robbery in order to purchase drugs, and the racial and socioeconomic issues that are inextricably linked to that.
Put another way: who's not committing robbery in order to purchase the drugs that they use, and why aren't they? Is it because their drug (e.g. powdered cocaine) is fundamentally less addictive? Or is it because they are already in a position in society that allows them other opportunities to finance their drug use? Is it a statement about the drug itself, or simply a statement about the social structures that already exist?
[0] If you want a really wonderful example of this, look at the reason that possession of <27g of marijuana was the only drug that was exempted from the Rockefeller drug laws' mandatory minimum sentencing. It was, quite literally, that kids in predominantly white and wealthy suburbs were being sentenced to prison time, and the parents wanted the judges to have discretionary power when sentencing them.
Highly incorrect.
Smoking an equivalent amount of cocaine-base (crack) vs snorting cocaine-HCL (powder) is a completely different experience due to purity, ROA, and absorption (surface area of lungs vs nasal passage is 50x), etc.
Not to mention that is not an ionic bond, it is covalent. Different molecule.
This boils down to "the means of ingestion of a drug has a significant effect on the effects of the drug". Anybody who has ever both smoked a joint and consumed THC edibles knows firsthand that this is the case. Insufflation and ingestion are different from inhalation, so yes, the experience, onset, reinforcement mechanisms would be different. That does not change the fact that they are fundamentally the same drug.
> Not to mention that is not an ionic bond, it is covalent. Different molecule.
It's not the form it's transported in that's relevant; it's the form that reaches the CNS that matters[0]. In this case, the pharmacokinetics of the two drugs are the same once they hit the bloodstream.
If that doesn't convince you, the consider that the effects of injecting crack cocaine[1] and powder cocaine are literally chemically identical.
[0] Actually, it's the pharmacokinetic process of the drug that's relevant, since two different molecules can be metabolized identically. (And not all drugs affect the CNS, but that's a side point).
[1] Less common, because smoking is logistically easier, and also results in a sharper onset since it saves half the round trip to the lungs. But it does happen.
Highly incorrect.
The amount of the drug and concentration of the drug and the salt or ester of the drug can impact the pharmacokinetics of the drug.
It was used to be thought that morphine and heroin was the same exact thing because the H was converted to morphine quickly. Except H ends up having different metabolites and ratios - not the mention the effects are not the same / even when accounted for the dose and ROA.
Also, to the main point, if one produces 10x the effect of the other, the point is the same...
Crack is severely more punished over cocaine because it severely impacts user behavior - much more so than cocaine. The campaign to punish crack possession was also largely due to blacks demanding it to be made as so.
Can, but in the case of crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine, they demonstrably do not[0][1].
> Crack is severely more punished over cocaine because it severely impacts user behavior - much more so than cocaine
It really does not. It can be (but is not always) more habit-forming to smoke a drug than to insufflate it, but this is true of all substances. And intravenous or subcutaneous use of crack cocaine and powder cocaine are literally, 100% identical.
> The campaign to punish crack possession was also largely due to blacks demanding it to be made as so.
No. There was support from within the black community, but to say it is "largely" due to this is overstating the case.
And getting back to the original point, that doesn't actually contradict the original statement, because the reason that black communities felt the impact of violent drug crime and white communities didn't is itself a direct effect of the racial power structures involved.
[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8926741
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8918856
"However, evidence exists showing a greater abuse liability, greater propensity for dependence, and more severe consequences when cocaine is smoked (cocaine-base) or injected intravenously (cocaine hydrochloride) compared with intranasal use (cocaine hydrochloride).)."
The fact that the effects are different, even with the "same drug".
> the reason that black communities felt the impact of violent drug crime and white communities didn't is itself a direct effect of the racial power structures involved.
Except no matter where you go in the world, no matter its racial break-down, and no matter what it's history is, the pattern is the same: blacks disproportionately commit violent acts. And when those places are near 100% black, it gets even worse.
> And intravenous or subcutaneous use of crack cocaine and powder cocaine are literally, 100% identical.
We are comparing powder cocaine insufflated with crack smoked and how that impacted black communities.
I wish you'd come out and stated that this was your thesis from the very beginning. I now regret having wasted my time with this conversation.
People also forget why those dealers were in the business in the first place.
(Hint: the US government played a large role in explicitly financing the drug trade that resulted in a stead inflow of crack, predominantly to black communities[0]. Crack cocaine would not have been anywhere nearly as lucrative a business otherwise[1].)
[0] https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/
[1] Which isn't to say that it's particularly lucrative either way, as has been demonstrated numerous times by economists - it just happens to be one of the few options available for many people who are trying to scrape together a living under those circumstances.
I remember big protests with black community leaders accusing the police of racism for not arresting crack dealers as their neighborhoods had become so dangerous police totally avoided them. They demanded new laws. Their newly elected reps ran on a platform of new tougher laws. The heavy hand of government then solved this by creating mandatory minimum sentencing and other laws that were blanket applied regardless of individual situation and created mass incarceration.
Now, let's think why white neighborhoods were not struggling with the same problems of violent crime due to the drug trade. We know that the answer is not
(a) white people weren't doing drugs
(b) white people were doing drugs that were less addictive
because in reality, white people had (and still have) roughly the same total rates of drug use as everyone else. And in this case, white people were largely using the same drug (cocaine, in powered form) as black people (cocaine, in freebase form).
I'm not saying that black people at the time weren't concerned with violent crime and calling for solutions to it. In fact, I'm usually the person who points this out whenever discussions about 80s and 90s drug law sentencing come up on HN. What I am saying instead is that it's silly to ignore the reason that black communities were concerned with problems that white communities never had to face in the first place.
The difference in the effects of drug trade on black communities and on white communities in the 1980s are emphatically not due to fundamental differences of the drugs themselves, or due to differences in the prevalence of drug trade and drug usage.
[0] http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339610?seq=1#page_scan_t...
If the fraction of drug users are equal, but blacks lie about whether they're drug users more often, then your statistics will show that whites use more.
The reported difference between blacks and whites is less than the known difference in honesty between them with regard to drug questions.
You also don't seem to have responded to my point at all, which is that blacks have a higher rate of reported usage within the last week. This is before taking the self-reported nature into account. See the source originally cited, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf
>Among black drug users, 54% reported using drugs at least monthly and 32% reported using them weekly. Such frequent drug use was less common among white drug users. Among white users, 39% reported using drugs monthly and 20% reported using them weekly.
I'll let you do the math to determine how this affects usage rates.
That's completely counter to the results of both the MTF and NSDUH. Since 1975, with the exception of Native Americans, whites consistently have slightly higher usage rates of drugs than any other racial demographic, although the overall drug usage rates are roughly comparable. For example:
> For a number of years, 12th-grade African-American students reported lifetime, annual, 30-day, and daily prevalence rates for nearly all drugs that were lower—sometimes dramatically so—than those for White or Hispanic 12th graders. That is less true [in 2014], with rates of drug use among African Americans more similar to the other groups[0]
The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from the BJS about drug users. That's quite different from usage rates of drugs within the general population.
Finally, you are quite literally begging the question[1] by citing the 1981 analysis (which is itself a rather contested one). Even if we take that data at face value, it concludes that black men understate the crimes they commit, and does so by comparing this to arrest records. The whole point is that arrest records provide a skewed perspective of drug usage for black men (and women), because they are far more likely to be arrested for the behaviors they do.
[0] http://monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/mtf-vol1_2014...
[1] Yes, begging the question, not raising the question.
>The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from the BJS about drug users. That's quite different from usage rates of drugs within the general population.
If the same percent of whites use drugs as blacks, then looking at how many drugs are used by each user (or how often each user uses them) matters. If each black user uses more than each white user, the total usage can be more.
>Finally, you are quite literally begging the question[1] by citing the 1981 analysis (which is itself a rather contested one). Even if we take that data at face value, it concludes that black men understate the crimes they commit, and does so by comparing this to arrest records. The whole point is that arrest records provide a skewed perspective of drug usage for black men (and women), because they are far more likely to be arrested for the behaviors they do.
I took that quote out of your jstor source. If you don't like it, use the one from SSC that I linked to:
>Comparisons of several different surveys of drug use find that “nonreporting of drug use is twice as common among blacks and Hispanics as among whites” (Mensch and Kandel). (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749113)
This can't be explained by bias in arrest records. Note that they're looking at how many people who admitted using drugs in 1980 denied ever using drugs in 1984.
Because black communities in the 1980s pushed for a crackdown (pun intended) on the crack industry, while no-one really cares all that much about the hallucinogen industries.
Because people are much more likely to kill, rob, rape, and do other heinous crimes from crack use than occasional LSD use.
When crack-cocaine hit the black communities, it absolutely destroyed them far much more than any previous drugs did.
White people and black people use illegal drugs at approximately the same rate. Black people, despite being a population only 1/4 the size of the white population, are arrested for drug crimes in both greater numbers and in greater proportion.
Into my mid-to-late 30s, when I would get pulled over by the police, roughly half of the time, the officer would ask me if I had any drugs in my car. My response was usually "No more than you do, officer". The police profile and harass us. There are even rogue officers who plant evidence to manufacture crimes.
We all know this. As a result, many of us are more staunchly against even casual drug use in our personal lives.
It's not fair. It's not right. It's just the way it is.
I have a friend whom I have known since childhood who is currently serving 20 years in a federal prison for marijuana related offenses. He made a choice and it turned out poorly for him.
I'll save my outrage for the people who were falsely convicted. I'll save my outrage for the victims of planted evidence and corrupt cops.
If someone is actually guilty of the crime, their case is far less sympathetic.
It is true that black people are more likely to be arrested than white people for drug crimes. 57% of arrestees are white, 37% black. That's about 3x the percentage that you'd expect if you just go by the racial distribution of drug users.
However, that's not actually really relevant here because most drug users, white or black, do not get caught at all. There are about 1.2 million drug arrests per year, so roughly 680k whites and 444k blacks.
We've got about 320 million people. Let's be generous and knock out people 0-14 (20%) because they are probably too young to have gotten into drugs, and also knock out 55+ (26%) because older people don't seem to get arrested much for casual drug use (perhaps if you are old and a regular drug user you've figured out how to not get caught...). So that leaves us 173 million people who are similar demographically to the people getting arrested for drugs.
That would be about 22 million blacks, 109 million whites.
So...we've got about 680k whites arrested for drugs per year out of 109 million, which means 108.6 million out of 109 million whites are NOT arrested. In percentages, 99.4% of whites are not arrested for drugs in any given year.
For blacks, we've got 444k arrested for drugs out of 22 million, which means 21.6 million out of 22 million blacks are NOT arrested. In percentages, 98.0% of blacks are not arrested for drugs in any given year.
98.0% is lower than 99.4%, and that is something that should be investigated--I'm not trying to argue that there is no bias. I'm just saying that by focusing on those arrested rather than those not arrested, you get a misleading picture.
This kind of mistake is common when people assess risks, and so people tend to overreact when something increases a very low probability risk. For instance, we read that some particular food might increase our chances of getting some particular disease from 1/10^6 over our lifetime to 3/10^6, and we think we need to immediately cut that food even if we like it and it does plenty of good things for us, because it increases our risk 3x and that sounds huge.
Oddly, we don't seem to do this with transportation. Someone trying to decide whether to drive or fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco will probably decide based on cost, time, convenience, things on the driving route they might want to visit, whether they want their car with them in San Francisco, and similar factors. For most people I don't think that the fact that flying (at least on a major airline) is safer than driving would be a factor. They recognize that the chances of dying in an automobile accident on a drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco are so low as to not be worth considering, and so that some other mode of transportation would have even lower chances is not relevant.
The man made a choice, he now lives with the repercussions of that choice, whether anyone agrees or disagrees. I realize my outlook is likely unpopular, but like I tell my children -- there are consequences for your actions, and it may take years to see them. This story will be read by my kids tonight to reinforce my good advice.
Besides, the morality of the people involved in a business like legal dope would put me off. Just because they don't have convictions means nothing. The type of people attracted to the dope business are off putting.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...
I don't like the dope industry. It attracts children who think that smoking marijuana is harmless. It's not. The dopeheads can trot out all the industry-inspired crap they like, but it's not healthy. I'm all for ACTUAL medical patients who are in severe pain using it, but so many go to these quack doctors who will give a medical reason for a few dollars. Actual doctors with hospital admitting privileges should be the law.
Marijuana is not harmless and just a few years ago the majority of Americans agreed. The morality in America has slipped precipitously since our heyday as a nation in the 1950s.
oh man
Yea, the 1950's were really America's heyday (/s), while the rest of the world was blown up. I wonder if people in the 1920's were sipping on illegal booze at Gadsby's party thinking "man, the morality in america sure has taken a dive since the gilded age". Is your view so skewed by the media portrayal of the Jones' and white picket fences that you think America was some bastion of morality then? The morals established then were that woman couldn't own credit cards unless their husbands deemed it so, gays should be sent to sanitoriums to prevent the spread of their disease by showing nude pictures to other boys (Lavender Scare anyone?); it took 10+ years for some states to comply with Brown v The Board of Education. So how about you get your kids a history book and let them read that so they don't have to see the world through rose colored bigoted glasses.
edit. The more I think about this the more upset I am. HUAC, being able to LEGALLY beat your wife, this isn't even touching on African-American trials of the time. America was a fucking mess in the 1950's.
We changed the law because we thought it had been incorrect. Any convictions from an incorrect law are obvious an error, not a feature.
Picture this, you apply for a job but now all background checks are required by law to include speeding tickets which prevent you from making more than minimum wage. Further, this applies retroactively. Are you now more or less likely to commit a new crime?
Give it 20 years and do 5mph over the speed limit could easily be a felony. Hell you have likely committed a few hundred felony's of one type or another. (3 per day is BS, but several a year is common.)
> His color has nothing to do with it, and quite frankly, I'm sick to death of everything in this country now revolving around race, homosexuals, feminists.
Because it's not that simple. And race seems to play a big part in the probability to get convicted and have a record, especially for something as mundane as selling pot.
But the problem is that there are a lot of white people who are guilty of the same offenses, who are currently operating businesses he isn't allowed to operate, but who were never convicted of those crimes due to previous racial profiling.
Whether or not we do something to right the wrongs of our ancestors against blacks, Native Americans, or other groups, and what that something might be, is a hard problem.
The horrors of genocide, racism, and slavery hundreds of years ago or decades ago are one thing, but this is one guy's lifetime - racism played a part in getting him convicted while the crimes committed by his white competitors were ignored. Does that help the argument make more sense?
Morality is absolute. People deep down know right from wrong. America now plays relativism with morality and truth with garbage like, "well, if it's true for you...". It's crap.
A felony conviction means you cannot be trusted. This man sold dope to people. He was convicted. What's not to like? The law did it's job. Now, if only we had Singapore's drug laws, this country would be largely free of immoral dopeheads and their ilk. Selling dope is immoral whether legal or not. It attracts bad people and gets children involved in things that are not healthy and righteous.
Laws are made by humans, and there is no guarantee that they are fair or ethical. The man in the article was caught with a couple cigarettes filled with a shredded plant (the illegal one, not that legal yet much more harmful plant). He served a felony for it because we instituted a draconian and racist class war under the guise of "saving the children from reefer madness". This country is finally instituting some sensible drug legislation, but the people that were most disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs are now disproportionately locked out of this new market. That is neither fair nor ethical.
You say "market" like selling dope could be a good thing. If it's a harmless plant, as you say, why have any regulations concerning it. Tea is a "harmless" plant, and as such, I can send my children into Walmart and purchase it without so much as a by-your-leave from the cashier. Harmless plants don't need sensible regulations because harmless things don't need regulating. Morality again, gone astray. I miss my old-school America where Americans were conservatives.
Thoughtful conversation is what we're going for. It's possible to have that about inflammatory topics, but it requires a conscious effort at respecting those with opposing views and meeting them where they are. That's not always easy—especially when others appear wrong and disingenuous—but if you can't do it, it's best not to comment until you can.
It's thinking like this that pisses me off. Henderson wasn't hired because of a record. Yes, racism still unfortunately exists, but in order to move towards an equal future we need to stop bringing it up and searching for problems where there are none. Fucking Buzzfeed and Huffington post are constantly using they're over-sensitive audience to start drama.
They are clearly NOT being racist and just following the legal requirements for their industry. The fact that the ones being excluded are mainly black is not some conscious decision to exclude blacks but the result of the current laws and enforcement saddling them with felony drug convictions. The author's time would be better spent addressing the real problem of the disproportionate number of black males with drug felonies for simple possession.
You can't just hit a reset button on racism and say all our mistakes our behind us, now we're all on the same level. Especially not when those mistakes were felony charges with lifelong consequences.
There are far too many publications going out that overreach and point out minor details to make something seem racist or sexist. It's total bullshit and out of context.
I'm not wagging my finger at the weed places. I get their logic, they're running a business that's already on shaky ground... avoiding any employees who might increase that risk makes sense. I'm wagging my finger at society for providing another example of how we keep perpetuating systemic racism.
One problem with the distributor in this story is he is constantly getting high off his own supply while in care and control of a vehicle which makes nobody want to work with him. That's heatbag behavior asking for problems. His comment on firearms about pulling out a gun during an argument is also something only heatbags do, the guys with side arms on the farm he went to are only armed to deter getting jacked for their product not win arguments.
You can't have a record and operate a dispensary here either, which was designed to keep bikers and other org crime out but they get around this by partnering with somebody that has a clean record.
Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was only for teenage possession. Friend in Seattle did that to erase his record and open a weed business.
Because that would dilute the click-baity narrative that Buzzfeed is trying to drive home. We wouldn't want their efforts in conflating cause and effect to go to waste now, would we?
Also, legal weed is supposed to deal with racial inequalities. Legal weed means less people being caught and jailed. This is good.
Though, to be perfectly honest, I am not into the idea of states using Marijuana as a profit vehicle. It's about as cynical and without class as state run gambling. Hopefully more people will grow their own and once the rest of the US legalizes, weed will be about as profitable, no more or less, than a tomato.
Some 10-odd years ago, I had a (white) colleague who really enjoyed smoking mary-j. He lived on the 48th floor of a deluxe high-rise in Manhattan. He, like his wealthy neighbors, didn't have to get their fix off the street. Instead, they called 1-800-greenhouse and ordered two "theatre tickets". Within 30 mins, a bike messenger (African-American) came over to deliver 2 ounces of stuff to his front door. He never left the house. Last I heard, he got a job with the government…
He still has the right to vote too.