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> possession for personal use should be decriminalized while drugs should remain illegal in large quantities Your objection is correct, a fundamental issue wit

by zkms 9y ago

> possession for personal use should be decriminalized while drugs should remain illegal in large quantities Your objection is correct, a fundamental issue with "decriminalisation of personal use" is that it's still quite trivial for officers to charge "possession with intent to distribute" for people who don't make a business out of dealing drugs. Talking about giving drugs to a friend / having a scale (to measure your own doses) / whatever else -- the police still have plenty of ways to threaten people with hard time to get you to plea guilty to a lesser offence. Hell, people who share drugs have been prosecuted for homicide after someone OD'd. It's still prohibition, just with better PR. Such a state of affairs still cranks the iron law of prohibition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition, the reason so many people die of fent overdoses), this still leads to police having legal authority to stop and search your car if they claim to smell weed, it still leads to people involved in the drug trade having no options for dispute-settlement outside of violence (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-war-on-drugs-creates-violence/2015/10/16/6de57a76-72b7-11e5-9cbb-790369643cf9_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-war-on-drugs...), it still leads to police focusing on the impossible task of ending the drug trade to the point of trashing the homicide clearance rate (https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/02/why-are-american-cops-so-bad-at-catching-killers https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/02/why-are-americ...).

viridian 9y ago
Thanks for this comment. I wasn't aware of the iron law of prohibition but it makes a ton of sense. The higher the risk, the more you optimize your supply chain to minimize physical contraband in travel, which means optimizing for product value per weight.
- zkms 9y ago
  The other effect is that drug prohibition can (and currently does) function as a subsidy for violent transnational criminal organisations: the difficulty in transporting contraband inflates its price at the destination, and if Alice's drug-trafficking operation can obtain a competitive advantage over Bob's by killing Bob's personnel; she just might. Without the doorkickers of the DEA and friends, there'd be no hyperviolent drug lords. Without prohibition, drug trafficking operations have to compete with fully licit container ships and will get annihilated; because the illicit drug trade's transport methods are optimised to evade detection and without that selection pressure, there's no point for all the violence and the concealment tactics.

by zkms 9y ago

viridian 9y ago

Thanks for this comment. I wasn't aware of the iron law of prohibition but it makes a ton of sense. The higher the risk, the more you optimize your supply chain to minimize physical contraband in travel, which means optimizing for product value per weight.

zkms 9y ago
The other effect is that drug prohibition can (and currently does) function as a subsidy for violent transnational criminal organisations: the difficulty in transporting contraband inflates its price at the destination, and if Alice's drug-trafficking operation can obtain a competitive advantage over Bob's by killing Bob's personnel; she just might. Without the doorkickers of the DEA and friends, there'd be no hyperviolent drug lords. Without prohibition, drug trafficking operations have to compete with fully licit container ships and will get annihilated; because the illicit drug trade's transport methods are optimised to evade detection and without that selection pressure, there's no point for all the violence and the concealment tactics.