"What if--stay with me here--we pursued racial equality by making things *worse* for everyone?"

[Nevilledog]

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Tweet text:
Adam Serwer 🍝
@AdamSerwer
Make things better for everyone? What if—stay with me here—we pursued racial equality by making things *worse* for everyone?

Tom Cotton
@TomCottonAR
Crack penalties are harsher than powder cocaine penalties.

Let's fix this by increasing the penalty for selling powder cocaine.

Not by letting drug traffickers out of prison.
12:53 PM · Jun 22, 2021

[Caliman73]

1. Cotton is an idiot.

Aside from the obvious racial elements to the differentiation between crack and powder cocaine, the thing is crack comes in from the major traffickers, as powder cocaine. It is typically turned into rock cocaine (crack) at very close to the street level.

None of this would be happening, at least not to the degree it is happening, if we didn't have a stupid War on Drugs. Drugs are a public health, and social services problem, not a criminal problem. Drug policy has ALWAYS been about people control. You criminalize Cannabis because Mexicans and Black people were using and selling. Criminalize Cocaine and Heroin because Black people started to get into it. Psychedelics were for the Hippie troublemakers. Nixon wanted a way to jail all of the counter culture and Civil Rights people so he started the War on Drugs. We have people in prison for nothing more than possessing recreational drugs, while sex traffickers like Matt Gaetz are still walking around free.

We need to divert all the money wasted on the Drug War into housing, jobs programs, and social services. We may not lower the rate of consumption, but we won't be ruining people's lives by jailing them. They may even continue to be productive members of society and quit using of their own accord when other priorities in life become more important and appealing.

[Chainfire]

2. Well, that is one solution....

from a soulless asshole. Typical Republican thinking that raising people up necessarily brings him and his kind down. I know that he is not talking just about drugs.....

As far as Republicans are concerned, prisons are good businesses, employing hundreds of thousands of workers. Here in Florida, private prisons make big money on the people housing business. The difference in a lot of Florida correctional officers and the prisoners that the guard is that they just haven't been caught. Besides all that, most of the people who are locked up are black or Hispanic so they don't really matter.

Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs." It has been our longest war and has been no more successful than any of our other wars in the same time frame. It may be time to bring the troops home and change our policy from aggression to compassion. Locking people up for selling drugs to pay for a drug addiction makes no sense, and never did. Convert prisons to treatment facilities or vocational schools; it would be a lot cheaper....Reserve cages for violent people.

The roots of addiction can not be be dealt with by policing, we should have learned that by now.

[ProfessorGAC]

3. Isn't This Already The Koch Model?

Turn everyone into serfs for the benefit of the uber rich, and then everyone below the billionaire class is equal.
Seems the plan Koch & his ilk have had in mind for 40 years.

[sop]

4. And cops could start tasing or shooting white people for simply hanging air fresheners in cars.

(Just kidding)