10 ms·

Iron law of prohibition

143 points by luu 10y ago

tomohawk 10y ago
The effects of prohibition are not always easy to predict, or even know in hindsight. Many of the things people think they know about prohibition are incorrect. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibition-was-a-success.html http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibiti...
- virmundi 10y ago
  The analysis in that article showed little to no thought about side effects. Sure, the mobs existed before hand, both Irish and Italian. However, they were initial police forces for the ghettos. What prohibition did is give them a cash infusion, which in turned allowed them to expand. The same is true in modern times with various cartels. As to the benefits, look at cigarettes. We haven't banded them. Instead we've pushed the idea that they are terrible for you. We've put up graphic ads of organs. We've had olympians with mouth cancer talk through machine. As a result the consumption of that product is down. Do we want to have the hamfisted power of the state come down by law on people or do we want people to self-select and improve? Prohibition gets you the former; indoctrination and propaganda get you the later.
- _greim_ 10y ago
  Published in 1989, near the height of America's anti-drug fervor. The article also undermines itself by acknowledging organized crime became "more visible and lurid during Prohibition," and then hand-waving past it with the bland truism that "it existed before and after". Well of course it did. While I agree history lessons are often applied overly-simplistically, I'm inclined to disregard as extremely biased the intended conclusion of the article, which is that we should double down on drug enforcement.
Alex3917 10y ago
Consumer Reports said basically the same thing in 1972: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/CU11.html http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/CU11.... And that was supposedly just paraphrasing something from 1967, although I haven't read the original.
seibelj 10y ago
Similarly, anti-prostitution activists cheer that Backpage removed adult classifieds.[0] If you really want to prevent abuse of sex workers, you need to legalize the trade and bring it into the open. By driving it further underground, you just cause more harm to the people you want to save. I can't understand how people make the same mistake over, and over, and over. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/backpage-ads-sex-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/backpage-ads-sex-traff...
- praptak 10y ago
  This assumes anti-prostitution is about sex workers and not moral outrage at sex being easily available outside marriage.
  - _greim_ 10y ago
    Why can't it be about both? As far as I can tell, large-scale movements comprise a mix of underlying motives.
- sneak 10y ago
  For drugs, anyway, it's because it has nothing to do with harm reduction. The war on drugs was created solely out of white supremacy, and now continues because it is a tremendous flow of cash to those in and adjacent to government that directly profit from a huge (mostly minority) prison population. It has nothing to do with drugs, just simple racism and money.
skybrian 10y ago
I wonder what the effect would be of a mixed strategy where only the relatively safer and lower-concentration forms of a drug are legal?
- prodmerc 10y ago
  That would actually work just as well as full legalization. Except some people would still take too much of that substance and die, and then the banheads will be at it again.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > I wonder what the effect would be of a mixed strategy where only the relatively safer and lower-concentration forms of a drug are legal? The interesting solution is very high taxes, with the tax based on the amount of the substance. Then higher concentrations have higher taxes. The optimal tax amount is just below the amount that would cause the tax-evading black market to be larger than the legal market. And then prosecuting for tax evasion doesn't cost the other taxpayers anything because every prosecution pays for itself through the back taxes and penalties, without having to put anybody in prison.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    We already put people into feedback loops of administrative fines, and jail. You really think this would play out differently? Without incarceration, how exactly do you propose to collect your money? Once you figure that out, be sure to tell all of the parents looking to collect from deadbeats your secret, they need it!
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      The government doesn't need your cooperation to collect a tax debt. If you owe them and you have any money or assets they just seize them, and if you don't have any money they have your employer garnish your wages until you've paid it off. The IRS does not screw around. And the point is to deter people from evading taxes. If they're permanently bankrupt you can't collect anything from them, but they also end up on probation which means the government can search their place and finances without a warrant. If they're stupid enough to violate their probation by committing tax evasion again, even though it's now much easier for the government to catch them, now they can go to jail.
scythe 10y ago
One scheme I like for the decriminalization of party drugs is to invert the ILoD: limit the concentration and dosage forms (I was thinking a beverage) and possibly add bitterants. People are able to dose alcohol quite well, despite a relatively low therapeutic index (~20).
- titanomachy 10y ago
  > possibly add bitterants No need, most party drugs already taste disgusting.
maxmcd 10y ago
Given this logic, it's interesting that the War On Drugs in the United States didn't lead to earlier large-scale production of marijuana concentrates.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  No comms. The internet is the backbone of changing that, but it's messaging apps and smartphones that have connected even the guys living on a mountaintop in India with everyone else. Now the guy who liked to make some oil for knife hits with is buddies out in Cali, posts a story about that. Viral amplification leads to interest, research, which is made possible by the internet. Now however, you've seen it go from kids with butane cans blowing themselves up, to an industry involving CO2 extraction and lab-grade fractional distillation of individual terpenes. This would simply not have been possible without the ability to rapidly share information between people all over the world.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  In Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan notes that the potency of marijuana did in fact increase tremendously from the 1960s through the 1990s (when the book was written). As did the growth rate and yield, and as the time-to-harvest fell. Selective pressures, biological or otherwise, are ... a hell of a drug.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- rwmj 10y ago
  It selected for things like higher THC:CBD (which is a bad outcome for users), smaller plants, autoflowering plants, shorter growing times, feminized seeds (all easier to grow illegally).
- scythe 10y ago
  I think hashish actually used to be more popular in the old days. Cultural references to it were certainly more common in mid-20th-century contexts. After the brief decriminalization movement of the 1970s, many states had reduced penalties for marijuana while lumping hashish in with harder drugs which may have shifted consumer demand towards the green stuff. These days you see dabs, which serve the different purpose of being easy to conceal while being used, which was never true of hashish.
Kinnard 10y ago
Seems to apply to strong encryption.
M_Grey 10y ago
Don't forget good old fashioned religious fury... you know the people who think 9/11 was "Cuz of the gays" and god "lifting our protection". There are so many flavors of bastard it can be hard to keep track of them all. Edit: To be clear, I don't mean to offend anyone religious, and am not saying this is the usual run of how religious people view the world. Unfortunately, there are many millions who do, and they tend to be loud, and politically organized.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > Unfortunately, there are many millions who do, and they tend to be loud, and politically organized. There are millions of religious people. The ones who view the world that crazy way are a tiny minority and are not particularly politically organized, but are very loud. They're the right's equivalent of the people who advocate the murder of all men as oppressors, or who claim that racism is justified as long as you're not white. The only reason anybody notices them at all is that they're so conspicuously wrong that their opponents find it convenient to elevate their platform because it's so much easier to knock down than the actual positions held by the majority of the other side.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    We're not still fighting over abortion and contraception because of a "tiny minority... not particularly politically organized." The reason we notice is because there is no way to ignore them, and increasingly around the world they're seizing power.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      We're still fighting over abortion and contraception because the other side's position is "people who don't want children should either abstain from sex or give them up for adoption". Reasonable people can disagree with that but that is nowhere near the level of crazy as "9/11 was caused by the gays".
      - 10y ago
M_Grey 10y ago
The underlying issue seems to be that we confuse the empathy we should have with victims and their families, for reverence. We spend so much time listening to their advice, which is pro tanto going to be the most emotionally charged advice you can get. When policy is formed through pathos, nothing good can come of it except purely by chance. It's not just drugs. At all levels of our justice system and society, we confuse the need to listen to victims and respect them, with a need to let them control policy. Of course the mother of the girl who is raped and murdered wants nothing more or less than such behavior to end. Of course the person who takes drugs and spends years in hell because of them has a very particular view of them. We should listen to those views, incorporate them into policy, but they should not be the oracles of policy.
- titanomachy 10y ago
  > Of course the person who takes drugs and spends years in hell because of them has a very particular view of them. Have you talked to many recovered drug addicts? Everyone I know who has been either addicted or seen friends go through addiction advocates for compassion and harm reduction, not stronger prohibition.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    I have, and I know mostly those kinds of people too. Unfortunately I also know plenty of the other kind, the "Drugs are literally the devil" types. Having an addiction doesn't confer wisdom, and some people get out of active addiction however they can. For some people it's a journey back to who they always were, but some... are very different. When I was younger, I thought I had a real problem with marijuana (truthfully I had a problem with being a putz), and I went to some Narcotics Anonymous meetings. I met some great people there, some I still stay in touch with, but I met some broken, broken people too. One guy in particular had a rough life before addiction, and an even rougher one with it. He made it out alive, but that's about it. I used to call him, "The bag of Jesus man", because he always carried around a bag stuffed with religious pamphlets, papers, books, iconography, etc. This is how he stayed off drugs, and alive, and you have to respect what he did. You don't however, have to form policy based on his recommendations, which were frankly alarming.
backtoyoujim 10y ago
Black market drug manufacturing creates adulterated, weakened, or counterfeit drugs that usually are transported as contraband surrounded by foreign substances like gasoline. During Prohibition alcohol was manufactured to include methyl in the final product just to maim, blind or kill anyone desperate enough to drink it. Prohibition does not make drugs hard. It makes them dirty.
- armenarmen 10y ago
  You are halfway there. Before prohibition in America the go to drinks were beer, cider, and wine. When prohibition came into play people were charged NOT on how much alcohol they had on them but on the volume of the alcoholic beverage they had. Punishment for a pint of whiskey == punishment for a pint of beer. So in other drug markets where it was a naive measurement (weight volume) that ignored the active ingredient drug importers and venders are incentivized to create stronger and stronger products as a hedge against getting busted. Anecdotally a friend in Saudi told me that beer from the informal markets costs more than Johnny Black. So while you are correct that quality does fall often in illegal markets arguing that they have no effect on the potency of drugs would be wrong
  - mc32 10y ago
    I'm going to guess that even if the punishment had been considered per qty volume of alcohol, all but the seller to consumer would have preferred the most efficient carrier of alcohol due to space for transport --of course, now that they have powdered alcohol[1], my guess is they'd have chosen that. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_powder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_powder
- simonh 10y ago
  How to miss the point. Methyl was only added to alcohol that was legally manufactured and sold, not home brew or bootleg alcohol. Smuggled drugs are smuggled pure in order to maximise the amount got through, then adulterated before its sold. There's no point risking your life smuggling 30% soap suds across the border, when you can add it on the other side.
rukuu001 10y ago
A corollary to the law is that when black markets don't exist, substitution takes place, e.g. prohibited alcohol is replaced by gasoline, glue, paint etc.
bjourne 10y ago
It's not true in Europe at least. Amsterdam (where weed is legal) has the strongest strains available on the continent. They are supposed to knock the socks off even very experienced users. Many studies like these only focus on US data and forgets about the rest of the world so they get flawed results. The strongest alcohol you can find is from Northern Europe and Russia, where it never has been illegal. In Islamic countries, where it is illegal, black market alcohol isn't stronger than anywhere else.
- jbhatab 10y ago
  The article didn't seem to mean in terms of the quality within a drug type. It looks like is more about the value density of a drug. So if Amsterdam cracked down on Marijuana, then there would be more potent cocaine, crack, meth, etc. Even the strongest marijuana pales in comparison to the 'potency' of the hard drugs.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    ...And of course Amsterdam is also serving much of the world (pretty much exclusively, until really recently) in terms of breeding new strains. The demand for high strength was global, even though the nexus was small, and in a legal haven.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  You don't offer any citations or evidence or proof for any of your claims. How do you know what kind of alcohol is available in Islamic countries? How do you know the pot in the Netherlands is as strong as you say (given you say "they are supposed to..." without any evidence)?
  - jpatokal 10y ago
    Anecdata: In the Perhentian islands off the coast of Kelantan, a strictly Muslim state in otherwise generally tolerant Malaysia, the only form of alcohol available at most bars/restaurants is bottom-barrel Ukrainian vodka sold under the counter. (Although I gather a few places have finally managed to obtain actual liquor licenses since my last visit.)
JshWright 10y ago
This principle is why we are seeing a massive spike in Fentanyl use. It's many times more potent than Heroin (and therefore many times more profitable). Unfortunately, it's killing a lot of people in the process...
- campers 10y ago
  Even scarier we're starting to see Carfentanil, which is many times stronger again than Fentanyl, and is only used for sedation of large animals like elephants.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
The rise of Fentanyl, and it's more-terrifying relative Carfentanil, certainly speaks to the increase in potency that prohibition can bring. This, combined with the over-prescription of opioids, is a tragic injustice.
squozzer 10y ago
Illegal markets also have a counterforce -- diluting quality ("cutting") makes more product available at the same price.

143 points by luu 10y ago

The effects of prohibition are not always easy to predict, or even know in hindsight. Many of the things people think they know about prohibition are incorrect. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibition-was-a-success.html http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibiti...

virmundi 10y ago
The analysis in that article showed little to no thought about side effects. Sure, the mobs existed before hand, both Irish and Italian. However, they were initial police forces for the ghettos. What prohibition did is give them a cash infusion, which in turned allowed them to expand. The same is true in modern times with various cartels. As to the benefits, look at cigarettes. We haven't banded them. Instead we've pushed the idea that they are terrible for you. We've put up graphic ads of organs. We've had olympians with mouth cancer talk through machine. As a result the consumption of that product is down. Do we want to have the hamfisted power of the state come down by law on people or do we want people to self-select and improve? Prohibition gets you the former; indoctrination and propaganda get you the later.
_greim_ 10y ago
Published in 1989, near the height of America's anti-drug fervor. The article also undermines itself by acknowledging organized crime became "more visible and lurid during Prohibition," and then hand-waving past it with the bland truism that "it existed before and after". Well of course it did. While I agree history lessons are often applied overly-simplistically, I'm inclined to disregard as extremely biased the intended conclusion of the article, which is that we should double down on drug enforcement.

Alex3917 10y ago

Consumer Reports said basically the same thing in 1972: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/CU11.html http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/CU11.... And that was supposedly just paraphrasing something from 1967, although I haven't read the original.

seibelj 10y ago

Similarly, anti-prostitution activists cheer that Backpage removed adult classifieds.[0] If you really want to prevent abuse of sex workers, you need to legalize the trade and bring it into the open. By driving it further underground, you just cause more harm to the people you want to save. I can't understand how people make the same mistake over, and over, and over. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/backpage-ads-sex-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/backpage-ads-sex-traff...

praptak 10y ago
This assumes anti-prostitution is about sex workers and not moral outrage at sex being easily available outside marriage.
- _greim_ 10y ago
  Why can't it be about both? As far as I can tell, large-scale movements comprise a mix of underlying motives.
sneak 10y ago
For drugs, anyway, it's because it has nothing to do with harm reduction. The war on drugs was created solely out of white supremacy, and now continues because it is a tremendous flow of cash to those in and adjacent to government that directly profit from a huge (mostly minority) prison population. It has nothing to do with drugs, just simple racism and money.

skybrian 10y ago

I wonder what the effect would be of a mixed strategy where only the relatively safer and lower-concentration forms of a drug are legal?

prodmerc 10y ago
That would actually work just as well as full legalization. Except some people would still take too much of that substance and die, and then the banheads will be at it again.
AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> I wonder what the effect would be of a mixed strategy where only the relatively safer and lower-concentration forms of a drug are legal? The interesting solution is very high taxes, with the tax based on the amount of the substance. Then higher concentrations have higher taxes. The optimal tax amount is just below the amount that would cause the tax-evading black market to be larger than the legal market. And then prosecuting for tax evasion doesn't cost the other taxpayers anything because every prosecution pays for itself through the back taxes and penalties, without having to put anybody in prison.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  We already put people into feedback loops of administrative fines, and jail. You really think this would play out differently? Without incarceration, how exactly do you propose to collect your money? Once you figure that out, be sure to tell all of the parents looking to collect from deadbeats your secret, they need it!
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    The government doesn't need your cooperation to collect a tax debt. If you owe them and you have any money or assets they just seize them, and if you don't have any money they have your employer garnish your wages until you've paid it off. The IRS does not screw around. And the point is to deter people from evading taxes. If they're permanently bankrupt you can't collect anything from them, but they also end up on probation which means the government can search their place and finances without a warrant. If they're stupid enough to violate their probation by committing tax evasion again, even though it's now much easier for the government to catch them, now they can go to jail.

scythe 10y ago

One scheme I like for the decriminalization of party drugs is to invert the ILoD: limit the concentration and dosage forms (I was thinking a beverage) and possibly add bitterants. People are able to dose alcohol quite well, despite a relatively low therapeutic index (~20).

titanomachy 10y ago
> possibly add bitterants No need, most party drugs already taste disgusting.

maxmcd 10y ago

Given this logic, it's interesting that the War On Drugs in the United States didn't lead to earlier large-scale production of marijuana concentrates.

M_Grey 10y ago
No comms. The internet is the backbone of changing that, but it's messaging apps and smartphones that have connected even the guys living on a mountaintop in India with everyone else. Now the guy who liked to make some oil for knife hits with is buddies out in Cali, posts a story about that. Viral amplification leads to interest, research, which is made possible by the internet. Now however, you've seen it go from kids with butane cans blowing themselves up, to an industry involving CO2 extraction and lab-grade fractional distillation of individual terpenes. This would simply not have been possible without the ability to rapidly share information between people all over the world.
dredmorbius 10y ago
In Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan notes that the potency of marijuana did in fact increase tremendously from the 1960s through the 1990s (when the book was written). As did the growth rate and yield, and as the time-to-harvest fell. Selective pressures, biological or otherwise, are ... a hell of a drug.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
rwmj 10y ago
It selected for things like higher THC:CBD (which is a bad outcome for users), smaller plants, autoflowering plants, shorter growing times, feminized seeds (all easier to grow illegally).
scythe 10y ago
I think hashish actually used to be more popular in the old days. Cultural references to it were certainly more common in mid-20th-century contexts. After the brief decriminalization movement of the 1970s, many states had reduced penalties for marijuana while lumping hashish in with harder drugs which may have shifted consumer demand towards the green stuff. These days you see dabs, which serve the different purpose of being easy to conceal while being used, which was never true of hashish.

Kinnard 10y ago

Seems to apply to strong encryption.

M_Grey 10y ago

Don't forget good old fashioned religious fury... you know the people who think 9/11 was "Cuz of the gays" and god "lifting our protection". There are so many flavors of bastard it can be hard to keep track of them all. Edit: To be clear, I don't mean to offend anyone religious, and am not saying this is the usual run of how religious people view the world. Unfortunately, there are many millions who do, and they tend to be loud, and politically organized.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> Unfortunately, there are many millions who do, and they tend to be loud, and politically organized. There are millions of religious people. The ones who view the world that crazy way are a tiny minority and are not particularly politically organized, but are very loud. They're the right's equivalent of the people who advocate the murder of all men as oppressors, or who claim that racism is justified as long as you're not white. The only reason anybody notices them at all is that they're so conspicuously wrong that their opponents find it convenient to elevate their platform because it's so much easier to knock down than the actual positions held by the majority of the other side.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  We're not still fighting over abortion and contraception because of a "tiny minority... not particularly politically organized." The reason we notice is because there is no way to ignore them, and increasingly around the world they're seizing power.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    We're still fighting over abortion and contraception because the other side's position is "people who don't want children should either abstain from sex or give them up for adoption". Reasonable people can disagree with that but that is nowhere near the level of crazy as "9/11 was caused by the gays".
    - 10y ago

M_Grey 10y ago

The underlying issue seems to be that we confuse the empathy we should have with victims and their families, for reverence. We spend so much time listening to their advice, which is pro tanto going to be the most emotionally charged advice you can get. When policy is formed through pathos, nothing good can come of it except purely by chance. It's not just drugs. At all levels of our justice system and society, we confuse the need to listen to victims and respect them, with a need to let them control policy. Of course the mother of the girl who is raped and murdered wants nothing more or less than such behavior to end. Of course the person who takes drugs and spends years in hell because of them has a very particular view of them. We should listen to those views, incorporate them into policy, but they should not be the oracles of policy.

titanomachy 10y ago
> Of course the person who takes drugs and spends years in hell because of them has a very particular view of them. Have you talked to many recovered drug addicts? Everyone I know who has been either addicted or seen friends go through addiction advocates for compassion and harm reduction, not stronger prohibition.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I have, and I know mostly those kinds of people too. Unfortunately I also know plenty of the other kind, the "Drugs are literally the devil" types. Having an addiction doesn't confer wisdom, and some people get out of active addiction however they can. For some people it's a journey back to who they always were, but some... are very different. When I was younger, I thought I had a real problem with marijuana (truthfully I had a problem with being a putz), and I went to some Narcotics Anonymous meetings. I met some great people there, some I still stay in touch with, but I met some broken, broken people too. One guy in particular had a rough life before addiction, and an even rougher one with it. He made it out alive, but that's about it. I used to call him, "The bag of Jesus man", because he always carried around a bag stuffed with religious pamphlets, papers, books, iconography, etc. This is how he stayed off drugs, and alive, and you have to respect what he did. You don't however, have to form policy based on his recommendations, which were frankly alarming.

backtoyoujim 10y ago

Black market drug manufacturing creates adulterated, weakened, or counterfeit drugs that usually are transported as contraband surrounded by foreign substances like gasoline. During Prohibition alcohol was manufactured to include methyl in the final product just to maim, blind or kill anyone desperate enough to drink it. Prohibition does not make drugs hard. It makes them dirty.

armenarmen 10y ago
You are halfway there. Before prohibition in America the go to drinks were beer, cider, and wine. When prohibition came into play people were charged NOT on how much alcohol they had on them but on the volume of the alcoholic beverage they had. Punishment for a pint of whiskey == punishment for a pint of beer. So in other drug markets where it was a naive measurement (weight volume) that ignored the active ingredient drug importers and venders are incentivized to create stronger and stronger products as a hedge against getting busted. Anecdotally a friend in Saudi told me that beer from the informal markets costs more than Johnny Black. So while you are correct that quality does fall often in illegal markets arguing that they have no effect on the potency of drugs would be wrong
- mc32 10y ago
  I'm going to guess that even if the punishment had been considered per qty volume of alcohol, all but the seller to consumer would have preferred the most efficient carrier of alcohol due to space for transport --of course, now that they have powdered alcohol[1], my guess is they'd have chosen that. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_powder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_powder
simonh 10y ago
How to miss the point. Methyl was only added to alcohol that was legally manufactured and sold, not home brew or bootleg alcohol. Smuggled drugs are smuggled pure in order to maximise the amount got through, then adulterated before its sold. There's no point risking your life smuggling 30% soap suds across the border, when you can add it on the other side.

rukuu001 10y ago

A corollary to the law is that when black markets don't exist, substitution takes place, e.g. prohibited alcohol is replaced by gasoline, glue, paint etc.

bjourne 10y ago

It's not true in Europe at least. Amsterdam (where weed is legal) has the strongest strains available on the continent. They are supposed to knock the socks off even very experienced users. Many studies like these only focus on US data and forgets about the rest of the world so they get flawed results. The strongest alcohol you can find is from Northern Europe and Russia, where it never has been illegal. In Islamic countries, where it is illegal, black market alcohol isn't stronger than anywhere else.

jbhatab 10y ago
The article didn't seem to mean in terms of the quality within a drug type. It looks like is more about the value density of a drug. So if Amsterdam cracked down on Marijuana, then there would be more potent cocaine, crack, meth, etc. Even the strongest marijuana pales in comparison to the 'potency' of the hard drugs.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  ...And of course Amsterdam is also serving much of the world (pretty much exclusively, until really recently) in terms of breeding new strains. The demand for high strength was global, even though the nexus was small, and in a legal haven.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
1_2__3 10y ago
You don't offer any citations or evidence or proof for any of your claims. How do you know what kind of alcohol is available in Islamic countries? How do you know the pot in the Netherlands is as strong as you say (given you say "they are supposed to..." without any evidence)?
- jpatokal 10y ago
  Anecdata: In the Perhentian islands off the coast of Kelantan, a strictly Muslim state in otherwise generally tolerant Malaysia, the only form of alcohol available at most bars/restaurants is bottom-barrel Ukrainian vodka sold under the counter. (Although I gather a few places have finally managed to obtain actual liquor licenses since my last visit.)

JshWright 10y ago

This principle is why we are seeing a massive spike in Fentanyl use. It's many times more potent than Heroin (and therefore many times more profitable). Unfortunately, it's killing a lot of people in the process...

campers 10y ago
Even scarier we're starting to see Carfentanil, which is many times stronger again than Fentanyl, and is only used for sedation of large animals like elephants.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago

The rise of Fentanyl, and it's more-terrifying relative Carfentanil, certainly speaks to the increase in potency that prohibition can bring. This, combined with the over-prescription of opioids, is a tragic injustice.

squozzer 10y ago

Illegal markets also have a counterforce -- diluting quality ("cutting") makes more product available at the same price.