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I'm not sure I see the "many parallels". I don't think ivory should ever be legal, whether it's squeezed through legislation and regulation or not. Why not sen

• matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  This is the same thinking of those that thing recreational drug use should be illegal. The reality is there will be a huge market for it potentially forever, and burning cash and power to fight it is an exercise in futility. Instead ask yourself what's something we can do right now that will completely take the oxygen out of the illegal ivory trade. Don't you see the legality is part of the mystique around ivory? When it becomes an every day product then morons will stop believing it has secret medicinal powers and move on.
  • adamnemecek 10y ago
    > The reality is there will be a huge market for it potentially forever, and burning cash and power to fight it is an exercise in futility. No there won't. The situation wasn't that bad until 2008 when CITES lifted restrictions on selling ivory which let some African countries sell their ivory to Japan and China. The situation has gotten a lot worse since then. > Instead ask yourself what's something we can do right now that will completely take the oxygen out of the illegal ivory trade. Where do you get 'legal' ivory?
  • melling 10y ago
    That sounds like a lot of ivory. There are 7 billion people on the planet. 1.4 billion in China where ivory is highly coveted. There are not even a million elephants?
  • moosey 10y ago
    The difference here is what is destroyed by a given regulation. Drugs by themselves are typically locally destructive to the user. In the case of legality, they have recourse to eliminate the destruction (rehab and other community sources) vs. the continuing destruction that is available in the modern prison system. The lack of positive recourse is destructive socially too, due to black market competition (which is far more murderous than legal competition). Drugs made legal might cause some destruction of rain forest, but might create instead better conservation. All in all, the regulations around drugs currently are nothing but negative. There is nothing positive about the ivory trade. Legal and illegal ivory trade is largely harmless at the consumer end, but at the production end we are losing an entire species, and that will have ecological costs that we can't even begin to summarize. Even if we cut off the tusks and sold those, poachers would continue to kill of those elephants as well (happened with rhinos, so this is demonstrated in a real world example). These are entirely different real world scenarios and should be treated as such.
  • ssully 10y ago
    I understand and can appreciate the support people have on HN for legalizing all drugs, but you trying to compare it to the Ivory trade is absolutely ludicrous. Just take a minute to compare the source differences between a popular drug like marijuana and Ivory. Any thing you can think of that might be morally wrong or hard to scale when it comes to the source of Ivory?
    • matt_wulfeck 10y ago
      You're confused because ivory is not a mind altering drug. What I'm comparing it to is the global illicit black market that exists because both ivory and drugs are illegal yet are in huge demand.
      • adamnemecek 10y ago
        No you are confused, they are restricted for different reasons.