You have been teaching Econ 102 with a 1970 curriculum. Drugs are illegal, and expensive. The druggie has no money because he spends all he has on drugs. Drugs after legalization, by your estimate, are now 90% cheaper. It follows he will have more money now than he did before and will resort to crime to feed his habit less frequently. But I don't think a large percentage of drug related arrests are of addicts stealing or robbing to pay for their habit. It seems that a great deal of the crime associated with the drug trade comes from turf wars, corruption, and thoses arrested for possession. These crimes would diminish by 98% if drugs were legal. If we draw upon prohibition as a comparison, alcohol related crimes skyrocketed after the passage of prohibition. Capone rose to rule Chicago. People were getting bumped off left and right. Were people's home burgled and their RCAs stolen to pay for booze? I don't know. But I am pretty certain that Hapaboy's great grandfather was calling for the execution of all bootleggers, (although he was forced to do so from a milk carton on Michigan Avenue)
RS7, welcome back..... However, you're assuming because the drug cost is now $5, John Addict is going to only spend that $5. My argument is our beloved groupie will spend the entire $50 and gorge himself on ten times the amount of drugs. If you're an addict, when prices go down, you just buy more. You're like a kid in a candy store whose $1 can now buy ten times as many gummybears. Respectfully disagree. You're in greater personal danger from an addict needing to finance their next fix than from your local kingpin, whose livin' large in a mansion in a nice neighborhood, as far away from the "riffraff" he depends on for a living as possible. Peace.
uh, hello, you people are not very familiar with illegal drug users. It is a myth that all illegal drug users are poor street thugs. Most drugs are consumed by middle class white people that either have jobs or are still being supported by their parents. Furthermore, most illegal drugs are really pot and exctasy which are not addictive and won't cause anybody to steal anything.
You don't know a lot of things. It is a myth that the crime rate rose as a result of Prohibition. What is true is that there was an increase in the homicide rate, BUT this was primarily due to a spike in crime in the African-American community, and that community was not largely involved in alcohol trafficking. Alcohol-related arrests actually decreased, dgabriel, by 50% as a result of Prohibition, and the national suicide rate decreased by half as well. Needless to say, alcohol consumption also decreased significantly during Prohibition, as did cirrhosis of the liver in the national population. Of course there was crime among the bootleggers, i.e. Al Capone. But it was all very much sensationalized by the media, i.e. The Untouchables. Furthermore, there are so many differences between Prohibition and today's drug issue that making an analogy between the two cannot be done legitimately. Prohibition was an attempt by the government to stop the consumption of alcohol although most Americans were in favor, or at least accepted alcohol consumption. You can't say most Americans are today in favor of drug consumption. Marijuana may be more acceptable among a larger populace, but not the hard drugs. Also, the laws governing the two issues are very different. Prohibition didn't make drinking illegal - it made SELLING illegal. Today of course it's illegal to do both. You also had the situation during Prohibition where several states didn't support the federal laws, which hamstrung federal attempts to prosecute the bootleggers in those states. Nowadays, virtually all the states are in line with the federal government's drug policy stance. Penalties were very light during Prohibition. Your average first-time bootlegger faced a maximum fine of about $1000 or six months in prison. We all know that drug trafficking offenses today carry heavy sentences. Finally, Prohibition was a case of the US isolating itself from the rest of the world as far as alcohol policy (basically, the rest of the world liked booze too much to try and prohibit it). A good case in point is Canada, from which so much of the bootleggers got their product. Nowadays though, most of the world is very anti-drug. Actually, great gramps was an amateur boxer and getting lots of poontang - probably from your great-grandma in an alleyway somewhere in Trenton.
What part of "no more money" dont you understand?? If they legalize Cocaine for example.. Do you think prices would remain at current levels ( $50.00/ gram..give or take a couple of bucks )?? After you answer this question with a correct statement everything else I said would fall into place......If the Cartels are not making any more money why would they continue doing business in that field??? ( there are other illegal lucrative projects they would start investing in ).....Think Hapaboy, Think for crying out loud.... But how can we make Cocaine legal??? this just doesnt make sense to me.....thats why its a never ending battle that we lose more and more as time passes us by...
Thanks, always a pleasure! OK, if you can respectfully disagree, I guess I can too. In the case of "soft" drugs, like pot and i guess whatever else is fashionable these days, smoking 10 times as much is unlikely. Now I have no idea about Ecstasy or only of these other designer drugs, but my guess is that like too much LSD (back in the old days) was too much. heroine and crack...take too much, and you overdose. So again, the "kid in the candy store" argument doesn't really seem to hold much water. Here we disagree again. While I may be in danger if I am in the wrong part of town at the wrong time of day or night, yes, maybe I will be mugged today for drug money. But it is highly unlikely I will be murdered. All the junky wants from me is enough to get a "fix".. The real violence, as dgabriel said, is over the control of the distribution, the money. The power. Who gets to live in the big mansion. Drive by shootings happen between rival gangs. What is their motivation? The control of territory. What is on their territory? The "right" to sell drugs. So it is criminals killing criminals. What is so sad is that these criminals hook up with their neighborhood gangs at very young ages. To gain acceptance. To get drugs. Whatever their culture drives them to do. But then the 10 year olds are given guns and given chores of violence because the 20 year old gang leaders know that if the 10 year old is caught, even as a shooter, he will be treated as a juvenile. And so the circle of violence continues. What would decriminalizing do to help this situation? Well, if drugs were cheap (or at least not profitable on the streets), there would be less to fight about. 10 year olds making a thousand dollars a week would cease to exist. So maybe they would go to school instead. 20 year old leaders....well a little late for them, but the same kid given a different set of circumstances from an earlier age, still rises to the top, and is a leader in a legitimate business. Or at least the possibility exists. The girls that sell their bodies for a $50 fix can work at Mcdonalds and afford a $5 fix. Hey, I don't really know. I am making this all up as I go along. Because I was asked to participate. The only thing I know for sure is that some drugs are very dangerous and the people that supply them are hard core criminals. They conduct billion dollar businesses and pay off (sometimes even control) governments. Some drugs are not particularly dangerous. They are grown by farmers right here in Florida and all over America. The drugs (pot) cause no deaths from overdoses, the growers are not particularly desperate criminals, the users are not mugging people on the streets for a "fix", and yeah, I think it should be legal. No more debilitating than alchohol, and certainly easily taxable, just like cigarettes and alchohol. Maybe even use that tax money to treat abusers of harder drugs. In the 13th century, all this stuff was legal right here in the USA. You could get Morphine, cannabis, Cocaine right at the local pharmacist. We did not become a nation of drug addicts. Certainly there were abusers, just like there are now with alchohol. prohibition did not work. These drug laws do not work. Laws against bookmaking don't work (over 80% of tv viewers of NFL games have an "illegal" wager on any particular game). Laws against prostitution don't work. Try and truly legislate morality.....you know what you get? TALIBAN! Peace, rs7
generally, when someone posts lines and lines of supposed "facts" he/she lists their sources for verification. what are your sources for this information ?? surfer
Bingo.....Give this guy the prize behind curtain #1. The only thing an ecstacy user might kill you with is a LOVE HUG......
I agree....legalization is the only way. Our jails are so overcrowded, we need the space for the murderers, rapists and armed robbers.