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The street purchase requirement is not totally performative. It requires dealers to be standing around on the street carrying books of tickets that are highly i
by fwlr 4y ago
The street purchase requirement is not totally performative. It requires dealers to be standing around on the street carrying books of tickets that are highly illegal to possess, thus allowing police intervention. Under the extra step proposal, police can continue to arrest ticket-sellers, hypothetically reducing the ticket availability towards zero. Without the extra steps, there is just the user and the dispensary, there’s nobody for the police to arrest and law enforcement loses their lever for pressuring and reducing the illicit drug trade.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> hypothetically reducing the ticket availability towards zero This is prohibition with extra steps. Granted, you deal with the problem of tainted drugs. But that isn’t the chief issue, and creating a giant hole in the budget aimed exclusively at that harm seems political suicide.
- fwlr 4y agoIn case it’s not clear, I am in favor of prohibition! The exact lesson I draw from the failure of alcohol prohibition is that drug harm isn’t a major factor in drug users’ choices; you can’t (ethically) reduce demand by making drugs more harmful, and more modern evidence seems to show that making drugs less harmful doesn’t increase use by much either. I believe that drug distribution should be illegal, and drug consumption should be as safe as practical. If we’re talking about political feasibility, I think replacing harmful street drugs with their pure versions at the point of consumption is politically much closer to “safe injection sites” than it is to “government agents with the job title of Drug Dealer”.