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The war on drugs is not winnable, but the cartels can be defeated by legalizing all drugs.
by nextstep 4y ago
The war on drugs is not winnable, but the cartels can be defeated by legalizing all drugs.
- fatherzine 4y ago"Legalize all drugs" is de-facto policy in some large west coast cities. It is also an abject failure. Easier access to drugs is not a solution, it is merely calous / criminal negligence.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoEven in cities where drugs have been somewhat decriminalized, the production and distribution remains illegal enough to allow cartels to flourish. You can disagree that legalization is the answer, but it hasn't been tried and failed.
- fatherzine 4y agoWe fundamentally disagree on what the larger problem is. a. Easy access to drugs. b. Cartels. As terrible as cartels are, easy access to drugs is easily a much bigger problem. Edit: I'm using an admittedly simplistic heuristic: How many people are going to have their lives destroyed by a. compared to b.?
- foogazi 4y agoEasy access to drugs are a personal choice but cartel rule is institutionalized violence Also no one has their life ruined by cartels in the US - somehow they all turn entrepreneurial once they cross the borders
- fatherzine 4y ago"personal choice" is not that personal. Just like "common sense" is not that common. There are herd effects that should be considered, we are not isolated atoms bouncing around subject only to Newton's laws. As a matter of fact, we are highly mimetic creatures.
- foogazi 4y agoOK, but I’d rather have that herd or mimetic choice any day than having violent thugs kidnap me and force me to work for them
- fatherzine 4y agoThe empirical question is what are the chances you (or a loved one) gets hooked on openly available drugs, vs violent thugs kidnapping you (or a loved one). If the empirical chance of 1st is 10x-100x higher than the 2nd, then perhaps we should focus our social efforts on limiting drug availability. Edit. The world is imperfect, and it will always be imperfect. There is no solution, and especially no government policy, that can possibly make everyone's lives perfect. Maybe, asymptotically, an individual aspiration to sainthood / life well lived / nirvana / etc. In the social media era we have lost the concept of tradeoffs, of minimizing harm. We are compelled to attempt to completely eliminate harm, which is impossible.
- foogazi 4y ago> then perhaps we should focus our social efforts on limiting drug availability. I’d rather limit the existence of roving bands of murderous thugs funded by their monopoly on illegal drugs Again, not a reality in the US fortunately - but even with the century old drug war the drugs keep coming in. Readily available to our kids at school. So, we’ve tried that But the devastating consequences of cartel proliferation get externalized to LatAm
- inawarminister 4y agoEast Asia defeated Opium.
- hunterb123 4y agoThen it manufactured fentanyl precursors for the cartels to distribute to the West.
- foogazi 4y agoDo all drugs need to be legalized ? Maybe there’s a Paretto distribution at play here
- _-david-_ 4y agoSeeing how some cartels are moving to legal things like avocados, I don't think you can guarantee you can defeat them just by legalizing drugs.