8 ms·

How to stop the drug wars

129 points by arjunb 18y ago

swombat 18y ago
Just a thought... You know, I can't help but be reminded of the movie Layer Cake ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375912/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375912/ ), where the main character, a drug dealer kingpin, points out that drugs will be legal some day, and that people like him are just ahead of the curve as far as making a business out of giving people the drugs they want. Thinking of it from this angle, if drugs were to indeed be legalised (as in, like cigarettes - not just decriminalised), the possibilities for innovation, product development, etc, would be pretty enormous. You want to build a product that people just keep coming back to? Here it is. Sure, eventually, this market would become like food or, at best, cigarettes - with smaller margins, and not much innovation. But it would take a while, I imagine, and in the meantime, there would be a lot of potential innovations, experimentations, etc. Just a thought...
- yan 18y ago
  That's an interesting issue. If you take cigarettes into account, notice how much processing and additives companies add to a standard cigarette and how much engineering goes into growing the actual tobacco plant. If drugs were legalized, all that would be rolled into the `drug market'. I don't do anything, but I still think the current drug policy is extremely sub-optimal. What worries me though, is when corporations get the green card to manufacture drugs like pot, all that untested engineering, preservatives and additives that are intended to make it more effective make their way into what people consume. If you think about it, mostly all current drug production is as 'organic' as it gets (as far as I know at least).
  - alecst 18y ago
    You don't think drug manufacturers do this already? Anything that isn't in plant form is practically guaranteed to be cut with something else.
  - Retric 18y ago
    Some fraction of pot all sold includes other drugs to alter it's effect. Still, making pot illegal when over 50% of the US population has tried it to little effect has caused many people to distrust just how dangerous other drugs are. IMO, when people distrust established "drug facts" people fall back on antidotes. If your friend has tried "X" 3 or 4 times at party's and seems fine, then it must not really be that bad... Personally, I think pot should be legal and Cocaine / Heroin / PCP dealers should be shot. But, people tend to dump all "drugs" into the same bin and have zero understanding about how bad some of that stuff really is.
    - nazgulnarsil 18y ago
      it's deeper than that. when you enforce laws that the people routinely break and come to regard as trivial you undermine the legitimacy of your enforcement of other laws. In essence you lose the ability to claim that laws are for the people's own good.
      - Andys 18y ago
        That makes sense, but surely trying to keep to an unenforceable law that clearly is being flouted (eg. pot) everywhere undermines the legal system even more.
        deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
    - mcslee 18y ago
      Your argument seems a bit inconsistent. While I generally understand the spirit of what you're saying, claiming that "over 50% of the US population has tried it to little effect" doesn't seem any less anecdotal than your example of the friend trying "X" 3 or 4 times. All these substances should be assessed scientifically for medical risk, and empirically for societal risk. Asking for dealers to be shot on a drug-by-drug basis is a bit sensationalist. Drug dealers simply respond to demand in the market. They sell whatever people are buying -- they don't have personal agendas about which drugs to sell. Demand for drugs is notoriously inelastic. I'd modify your last statement to say that people tend to dump all illegal drugs into one bin, and legal drugs into another. Most everyone seems to think legal drugs are safe, but people tend to be split on illegal drugs (some think they're all the worst things ever, others seem to falsely presume they are all reasonably safe). Personally, I think there needs to be more and better education across the board. The legal/illegal distinction is rarely meaningful and detracts attention from a proper comparative analysis of drugs and their risks. For example, fentanyl is more powerful than both heroin and morphine, yet is a legally prescribed painkiller. Similarly, Adderall has a family-friendly reputation for helping kids study, yet along with its use come many of the same risks associated with speed. This is not surprising, because they are in fact the same thing -- amphetamines.
  - chris11 18y ago
    I haven't thought much about the effects of big business on a legal drug market. It might be beneficial though. My views on drug policy border Libertarianism. If you want to significantly damage yourself by using hard drugs, that should be your right. If you hurt other people while high I would be in favor of very tough consequences. I'm not totally sure whether that would increase drug related crimes though, so that attitude might not work. But I would be extremely disgusted by any person or company who decided to manufacture hard drugs like meth or cocaine. So I'm not quite sure how comfortable I would be with a multi-billion corporation selling hard drugs. Allowing corporations to sell hard drugs might actually work out well. Right now drugs can be cut with materials such as glass and even cheaper drugs like meth. So legal hard drugs might actually be safer than the illegal version. And any corporation that successfully sells drugs would have to compete with gangs, and other violent organizations. This would mean that criminal organizations would probably lose a lot of market share.
- gcheong 18y ago
  I wonder, would Coca Cola go back to their original formula?
  - patio11 18y ago
    Probably not, because they would be crucified. But you can imagine a well-funded Big Drug company signing up Nelly as a smokesman for the Nelly Blunt (TM) and aggressively marketing it to chuckle adults of legal age who will indulge responsibly. Remember the inner city crack epidemic? Imagine that, with less gang warfare and penetration in the population approaching that of television. There would be widespread support elsewhere in society for just writing them off totally. ("Poor people are just hopeless druggies who can't get a job because they won't stop smoking -- screw 'em").
- baddox 18y ago
  No joke, I watched that movie (for the second time) tonight. It's a must-see. Easily the most "beautiful" crime movie I've ever seen. Every shot is just so aesthetically pleasing, yet you never lose touch with the danger and nastiness of the situations in the film.
newt0311 18y ago
Here is another way: line up all the drug dealers and shoot them. Then line up all the drug users and shoot them. Problem solved. (I am being serious.)
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- moe 18y ago
  Will you be first in line? Then we are talking!
  - newt0311 18y ago
    Nope. I have never used or dealt in drugs. Nor do I plan to. How about you?
    - ajkirwin 18y ago
      Caffeine? Tobacco? Alcohol?
      - arundelo 18y ago
        Aspirin?
      - newt0311 18y ago
        Um... All those are legal. Also, the first and third have known beneficial medical effects which would still be allowed if my proposal is enacted.
        unalone 18y ago
        So in other words, you're persecuting people not based on whether they've done good or not, but based on whether they're obeying drug laws that were often as not passed for political gain? Isn't that a despicable reason to demand somebody's death?
        18y ago
noonespecial 18y ago
My advice would be to stop referring to it with the loaded term "war" and start thinking about dealing with it in the fine grained way a problem with this many aspects requires. Using "war" for drugs both dilutes the term when applied to real horrible armed conflict and turns what should be a measured response to a sociological problem into a comic book farce with swat teams armed like soldiers busting in on teenagers at parties. Most of the problems come from the comical binary approach currently applied that treats pot the same as PCP.
- chris11 18y ago
  That's why I had such a big problem with the "war on terror". It came across as political spin. And implied that America was the superhero saving the world from the evil terrorists, instead of just reacting to a perceived threat.
- drothlis 18y ago
  In Colombia the "war" on drugs _is_ often real horrible armed conflict.
jksmith 18y ago
The problem with these kinds of articles is that they make the assumption that governmental drug fighting efforts are sincere. They probably aren't that sincere to their original intent now. Like most other government agencies, they start out with some presumption of sincerity, but then the old case of "the means becomes the ends" sets in. Reminds me of what Tom Wolfe meant when the lawyer character in Bonfire of the Vanities labelled the line of criminals waiting at the back of the courthouse as "chow." The DEA will probably never go away, because it keeps people employed for one thing, and helps large pharmaceutical companies keep small pharm companies (makers of class II, III drugs with expired patents) from building a legitimate enough business that would help these smaller companies spend money on new drug research. Keeping drugs illegal is good business; it has less to do with discouraging illicit drug use.
- Andys 18y ago
  Some people I know who have tried both legal anti-depressants and illegal drugs, and I can't see the difference, other than the legal one is patented. They both have pretty similar effects including fairly strong addiction.
  - jibiki 18y ago
    Isn't this just BS, physiologically speaking? I have never heard of SSRIs increasing dopamine levels. Wikipedia even claims the opposite: "It is believed that sexual dysfunction is caused by an SSRI induced reduction in dopamine."
    - mnemonicsloth 18y ago
      1. "Anti-depressant" is not synonymous with "SSRI". Benzodiazepines are also used to treat depression and can create a strong chemical dependency. 2. The concept of addiction is hard to define, and is becoming more so. Some drugs (marijuana springs to mind) can be considered addictive, but don't seem to cause the unthinking crave-gratify-repeat cycle you see with cocaine or nicotine. Some have argued that checking email or Facebook, playing MMORPGs, and "consuming" pornography are addictive.
critic 18y ago
Interesting article. I'll probably get downmodded for saying this, but I do believe that this being #1 brings HN one step closer to reddit.
- jrockway 18y ago
  This article is very well-written, well-thought-out, and interesting to hackers. (Do any hackers really want to live somewhere where the government tells you what you can and can't eat?) So while it might appeal to Reddit for the "legalize weed" angle, it appeals to us for the points it brings up, and its explanation thereof.
  - davidw 18y ago
    I agree completely with the article, and like a lot of stuff from that 'newspaper', it is well written. However, I still think it's basically about politics, and would prefer not to see it here. Politics is a poisonous topic. Few governments would tell you what you can and can't eat, but they sure do limit what you can sell to other people to eat, and most people are ok with that (minus a few libertarians who enjoy thinking up creative systems that more or less achieve the same results, minus the government).
- Alex3917 18y ago
  Agreed. The only thing novel here is that it's The Economist saying it. Which means that HN has gotten to the point where people are only upvoting as a way to encourage others to read articles expressing viewpoints they agree with.
  - pg 18y ago
    The only thing novel here is that it's The Economist saying it. But that is in fact huge. This is practically The Establishment saying it.
    - lliiffee 18y ago
      On the other hand, The Economist has been against drug prohibition for a long time. (If I recall correctly) So it is questionable how novel this really is.
critic 18y ago
As long as as an employer, I could test my employees for drug use, and as long as as a patient, I can be assured that my doctor is not a crack addict, and as long as as a driver and a pedestrian, I can be somehow assured that no one is driving or crossing the street while intoxicated, I'm for the legalization.
- moe 18y ago
  Makes no sense. You don't have all these insurances today, why should you get them when drugs can be legally bought?
  - critic 18y ago
    Not exactly. If your doctor treated you while on crack, you probably have grounds for a malpractice lawsuit. Overall, I'd expect drug use to increase, once drugs are both legal and cheaper.
    - swillden 18y ago
      If your doctor treated you while drunk you'd also have grounds for a malpractice suit. Making more drugs legal doesn't change the dynamics of irresponsibility.
      - critic 18y ago
        good point, but still drug use would likely go up
        jfarmer 18y ago
        Is it drug use per se we care about, or the negative consequences of drug use? What if more people used drugs but there were fewer drug-related crimes and accidents?
        critic 18y ago
baddox 18y ago
Spoiler: Legalize drugs.
jfornear 18y ago
The thing that irks me most about discussions on the internet like this regarding the illegal drug trade, is that this is just "intellectual" conversation to most. People are dying and families are being destroyed. Blame the system, argue that it's broken, or whatever, but don't even consider taking individual responsibility, which would start with saying no.
nav 18y ago
Legalization though probably not the ideal solution, makes sense. There are some decent examples out there today: ala. Amsterdam. Steven Levitt's book Freakonomics, does a great job of illustrating the elemental business like structures behind the crack-cocain outfits in Chicago; sprinkle in a bit of legitimate legal leeway and you have the potential of creating a regulated industry that pays taxes. The economy is in the gutter; every bit helps?
amohr 18y ago
I have spent a decent amount of time in and around the drug community and one thing I've noticed is that many drug dealers are actually very bright and talented individuals. Were it a legal product, they would be entrepreneurs. There are many aspects of accounting, logistics, and supply chain management that go into being a continually successful purveyor of recreational drugs. It's a fickle industry - made significantly worse by the fear of legal repercussion. Unfortunately, things being how they are, some are forced to continue this risky lifestyle because legitimate jobs are getting harder and harder to come by and "weed dealer" doesn't really look that good on paper. Now I'm not saying dealers are these savants backed into a corner by an oppressive government, but the organization of drug trade is actually deeply interesting, if only because it is illegal. Just my .02
c00p3r 18y ago
This is an academic view of the problems. The reality is different in each region, even in each block. After Soviet Union was collapsing, we've got this so-called free market (free from a regulation of the goverment). First, we got unlimited supply of the low-quality alcohol, after some failed attempts of the soviet goverment to combat drunkness. The result? Almost 1/5 of population were died in 10 years with direct or indirect involvement of alcohol consumption. The cases of the mental degradation and illness were never counted. But the next generations afrer looking at their animal-like fathers and mothers, at least trying to avoid the booze. The heroine problem is almost the same, but more brutal and fast-going. After you saw several tens of the lethal cases you will try to stop, and even with some success. I think (as a person who actually did it) that the most effective solution is the natural one - when you saw the results, you, sooner or later, will try to figure out the cause. And what people or goverment can do is to show the results to the youths, to educate them, because they just trying to imitate an adults - in our case - tired and hopeless creatures, who become happy (actually just relaxed) for very short periods of time with booze and sigarettes. And be sure, there never was a problem to get any stuff among a low-income and uneducated. And never will.
Skizz 18y ago
The article doesn't go far enough! Governments should take the confiscated drugs they seize and give the stuff to addicts for free, with counselling to try and kick the habit. Think about it - devalue the product to the point the illegal importers can't make a profit at worst and not able to pay their suppliers at best and the illegal trade will fade away. Also, if addicts can get it for free, then there is less incentive to commit other crimes to fund the habit. Skizz

129 points by arjunb 18y ago

Just a thought... You know, I can't help but be reminded of the movie Layer Cake ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375912/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375912/ ), where the main character, a drug dealer kingpin, points out that drugs will be legal some day, and that people like him are just ahead of the curve as far as making a business out of giving people the drugs they want. Thinking of it from this angle, if drugs were to indeed be legalised (as in, like cigarettes - not just decriminalised), the possibilities for innovation, product development, etc, would be pretty enormous. You want to build a product that people just keep coming back to? Here it is. Sure, eventually, this market would become like food or, at best, cigarettes - with smaller margins, and not much innovation. But it would take a while, I imagine, and in the meantime, there would be a lot of potential innovations, experimentations, etc. Just a thought...

yan 18y ago
That's an interesting issue. If you take cigarettes into account, notice how much processing and additives companies add to a standard cigarette and how much engineering goes into growing the actual tobacco plant. If drugs were legalized, all that would be rolled into the `drug market'. I don't do anything, but I still think the current drug policy is extremely sub-optimal. What worries me though, is when corporations get the green card to manufacture drugs like pot, all that untested engineering, preservatives and additives that are intended to make it more effective make their way into what people consume. If you think about it, mostly all current drug production is as 'organic' as it gets (as far as I know at least).
- alecst 18y ago
  You don't think drug manufacturers do this already? Anything that isn't in plant form is practically guaranteed to be cut with something else.
- Retric 18y ago
  Some fraction of pot all sold includes other drugs to alter it's effect. Still, making pot illegal when over 50% of the US population has tried it to little effect has caused many people to distrust just how dangerous other drugs are. IMO, when people distrust established "drug facts" people fall back on antidotes. If your friend has tried "X" 3 or 4 times at party's and seems fine, then it must not really be that bad... Personally, I think pot should be legal and Cocaine / Heroin / PCP dealers should be shot. But, people tend to dump all "drugs" into the same bin and have zero understanding about how bad some of that stuff really is.
  - nazgulnarsil 18y ago
    it's deeper than that. when you enforce laws that the people routinely break and come to regard as trivial you undermine the legitimacy of your enforcement of other laws. In essence you lose the ability to claim that laws are for the people's own good.
    - Andys 18y ago
      That makes sense, but surely trying to keep to an unenforceable law that clearly is being flouted (eg. pot) everywhere undermines the legal system even more.
      - deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
  - mcslee 18y ago
    Your argument seems a bit inconsistent. While I generally understand the spirit of what you're saying, claiming that "over 50% of the US population has tried it to little effect" doesn't seem any less anecdotal than your example of the friend trying "X" 3 or 4 times. All these substances should be assessed scientifically for medical risk, and empirically for societal risk. Asking for dealers to be shot on a drug-by-drug basis is a bit sensationalist. Drug dealers simply respond to demand in the market. They sell whatever people are buying -- they don't have personal agendas about which drugs to sell. Demand for drugs is notoriously inelastic. I'd modify your last statement to say that people tend to dump all illegal drugs into one bin, and legal drugs into another. Most everyone seems to think legal drugs are safe, but people tend to be split on illegal drugs (some think they're all the worst things ever, others seem to falsely presume they are all reasonably safe). Personally, I think there needs to be more and better education across the board. The legal/illegal distinction is rarely meaningful and detracts attention from a proper comparative analysis of drugs and their risks. For example, fentanyl is more powerful than both heroin and morphine, yet is a legally prescribed painkiller. Similarly, Adderall has a family-friendly reputation for helping kids study, yet along with its use come many of the same risks associated with speed. This is not surprising, because they are in fact the same thing -- amphetamines.
- chris11 18y ago
  I haven't thought much about the effects of big business on a legal drug market. It might be beneficial though. My views on drug policy border Libertarianism. If you want to significantly damage yourself by using hard drugs, that should be your right. If you hurt other people while high I would be in favor of very tough consequences. I'm not totally sure whether that would increase drug related crimes though, so that attitude might not work. But I would be extremely disgusted by any person or company who decided to manufacture hard drugs like meth or cocaine. So I'm not quite sure how comfortable I would be with a multi-billion corporation selling hard drugs. Allowing corporations to sell hard drugs might actually work out well. Right now drugs can be cut with materials such as glass and even cheaper drugs like meth. So legal hard drugs might actually be safer than the illegal version. And any corporation that successfully sells drugs would have to compete with gangs, and other violent organizations. This would mean that criminal organizations would probably lose a lot of market share.
gcheong 18y ago
I wonder, would Coca Cola go back to their original formula?
- patio11 18y ago
  Probably not, because they would be crucified. But you can imagine a well-funded Big Drug company signing up Nelly as a smokesman for the Nelly Blunt (TM) and aggressively marketing it to chuckle adults of legal age who will indulge responsibly. Remember the inner city crack epidemic? Imagine that, with less gang warfare and penetration in the population approaching that of television. There would be widespread support elsewhere in society for just writing them off totally. ("Poor people are just hopeless druggies who can't get a job because they won't stop smoking -- screw 'em").
baddox 18y ago
No joke, I watched that movie (for the second time) tonight. It's a must-see. Easily the most "beautiful" crime movie I've ever seen. Every shot is just so aesthetically pleasing, yet you never lose touch with the danger and nastiness of the situations in the film.

newt0311 18y ago

Here is another way: line up all the drug dealers and shoot them. Then line up all the drug users and shoot them. Problem solved. (I am being serious.)

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
moe 18y ago
Will you be first in line? Then we are talking!
- newt0311 18y ago
  Nope. I have never used or dealt in drugs. Nor do I plan to. How about you?
  - ajkirwin 18y ago
    Caffeine? Tobacco? Alcohol?
    - arundelo 18y ago
      Aspirin?
    - newt0311 18y ago
      Um... All those are legal. Also, the first and third have known beneficial medical effects which would still be allowed if my proposal is enacted.
      - unalone 18y ago
        So in other words, you're persecuting people not based on whether they've done good or not, but based on whether they're obeying drug laws that were often as not passed for political gain? Isn't that a despicable reason to demand somebody's death?
      - 18y ago

noonespecial 18y ago

My advice would be to stop referring to it with the loaded term "war" and start thinking about dealing with it in the fine grained way a problem with this many aspects requires. Using "war" for drugs both dilutes the term when applied to real horrible armed conflict and turns what should be a measured response to a sociological problem into a comic book farce with swat teams armed like soldiers busting in on teenagers at parties. Most of the problems come from the comical binary approach currently applied that treats pot the same as PCP.

chris11 18y ago
That's why I had such a big problem with the "war on terror". It came across as political spin. And implied that America was the superhero saving the world from the evil terrorists, instead of just reacting to a perceived threat.
drothlis 18y ago
In Colombia the "war" on drugs _is_ often real horrible armed conflict.

jksmith 18y ago

The problem with these kinds of articles is that they make the assumption that governmental drug fighting efforts are sincere. They probably aren't that sincere to their original intent now. Like most other government agencies, they start out with some presumption of sincerity, but then the old case of "the means becomes the ends" sets in. Reminds me of what Tom Wolfe meant when the lawyer character in Bonfire of the Vanities labelled the line of criminals waiting at the back of the courthouse as "chow." The DEA will probably never go away, because it keeps people employed for one thing, and helps large pharmaceutical companies keep small pharm companies (makers of class II, III drugs with expired patents) from building a legitimate enough business that would help these smaller companies spend money on new drug research. Keeping drugs illegal is good business; it has less to do with discouraging illicit drug use.

Andys 18y ago
Some people I know who have tried both legal anti-depressants and illegal drugs, and I can't see the difference, other than the legal one is patented. They both have pretty similar effects including fairly strong addiction.
- jibiki 18y ago
  Isn't this just BS, physiologically speaking? I have never heard of SSRIs increasing dopamine levels. Wikipedia even claims the opposite: "It is believed that sexual dysfunction is caused by an SSRI induced reduction in dopamine."
  - mnemonicsloth 18y ago
    1. "Anti-depressant" is not synonymous with "SSRI". Benzodiazepines are also used to treat depression and can create a strong chemical dependency. 2. The concept of addiction is hard to define, and is becoming more so. Some drugs (marijuana springs to mind) can be considered addictive, but don't seem to cause the unthinking crave-gratify-repeat cycle you see with cocaine or nicotine. Some have argued that checking email or Facebook, playing MMORPGs, and "consuming" pornography are addictive.

critic 18y ago

Interesting article. I'll probably get downmodded for saying this, but I do believe that this being #1 brings HN one step closer to reddit.

jrockway 18y ago
This article is very well-written, well-thought-out, and interesting to hackers. (Do any hackers really want to live somewhere where the government tells you what you can and can't eat?) So while it might appeal to Reddit for the "legalize weed" angle, it appeals to us for the points it brings up, and its explanation thereof.
- davidw 18y ago
  I agree completely with the article, and like a lot of stuff from that 'newspaper', it is well written. However, I still think it's basically about politics, and would prefer not to see it here. Politics is a poisonous topic. Few governments would tell you what you can and can't eat, but they sure do limit what you can sell to other people to eat, and most people are ok with that (minus a few libertarians who enjoy thinking up creative systems that more or less achieve the same results, minus the government).
Alex3917 18y ago
Agreed. The only thing novel here is that it's The Economist saying it. Which means that HN has gotten to the point where people are only upvoting as a way to encourage others to read articles expressing viewpoints they agree with.
- pg 18y ago
  The only thing novel here is that it's The Economist saying it. But that is in fact huge. This is practically The Establishment saying it.
  - lliiffee 18y ago
    On the other hand, The Economist has been against drug prohibition for a long time. (If I recall correctly) So it is questionable how novel this really is.

critic 18y ago

As long as as an employer, I could test my employees for drug use, and as long as as a patient, I can be assured that my doctor is not a crack addict, and as long as as a driver and a pedestrian, I can be somehow assured that no one is driving or crossing the street while intoxicated, I'm for the legalization.

moe 18y ago
Makes no sense. You don't have all these insurances today, why should you get them when drugs can be legally bought?
- critic 18y ago
  Not exactly. If your doctor treated you while on crack, you probably have grounds for a malpractice lawsuit. Overall, I'd expect drug use to increase, once drugs are both legal and cheaper.
  - swillden 18y ago
    If your doctor treated you while drunk you'd also have grounds for a malpractice suit. Making more drugs legal doesn't change the dynamics of irresponsibility.
    - critic 18y ago
      good point, but still drug use would likely go up
      - jfarmer 18y ago
        Is it drug use per se we care about, or the negative consequences of drug use? What if more people used drugs but there were fewer drug-related crimes and accidents?
        critic 18y ago

baddox 18y ago

Spoiler: Legalize drugs.

jfornear 18y ago

The thing that irks me most about discussions on the internet like this regarding the illegal drug trade, is that this is just "intellectual" conversation to most. People are dying and families are being destroyed. Blame the system, argue that it's broken, or whatever, but don't even consider taking individual responsibility, which would start with saying no.

nav 18y ago

Legalization though probably not the ideal solution, makes sense. There are some decent examples out there today: ala. Amsterdam. Steven Levitt's book Freakonomics, does a great job of illustrating the elemental business like structures behind the crack-cocain outfits in Chicago; sprinkle in a bit of legitimate legal leeway and you have the potential of creating a regulated industry that pays taxes. The economy is in the gutter; every bit helps?

amohr 18y ago

I have spent a decent amount of time in and around the drug community and one thing I've noticed is that many drug dealers are actually very bright and talented individuals. Were it a legal product, they would be entrepreneurs. There are many aspects of accounting, logistics, and supply chain management that go into being a continually successful purveyor of recreational drugs. It's a fickle industry - made significantly worse by the fear of legal repercussion. Unfortunately, things being how they are, some are forced to continue this risky lifestyle because legitimate jobs are getting harder and harder to come by and "weed dealer" doesn't really look that good on paper. Now I'm not saying dealers are these savants backed into a corner by an oppressive government, but the organization of drug trade is actually deeply interesting, if only because it is illegal. Just my .02

c00p3r 18y ago

This is an academic view of the problems. The reality is different in each region, even in each block. After Soviet Union was collapsing, we've got this so-called free market (free from a regulation of the goverment). First, we got unlimited supply of the low-quality alcohol, after some failed attempts of the soviet goverment to combat drunkness. The result? Almost 1/5 of population were died in 10 years with direct or indirect involvement of alcohol consumption. The cases of the mental degradation and illness were never counted. But the next generations afrer looking at their animal-like fathers and mothers, at least trying to avoid the booze. The heroine problem is almost the same, but more brutal and fast-going. After you saw several tens of the lethal cases you will try to stop, and even with some success. I think (as a person who actually did it) that the most effective solution is the natural one - when you saw the results, you, sooner or later, will try to figure out the cause. And what people or goverment can do is to show the results to the youths, to educate them, because they just trying to imitate an adults - in our case - tired and hopeless creatures, who become happy (actually just relaxed) for very short periods of time with booze and sigarettes. And be sure, there never was a problem to get any stuff among a low-income and uneducated. And never will.

Skizz 18y ago

The article doesn't go far enough! Governments should take the confiscated drugs they seize and give the stuff to addicts for free, with counselling to try and kick the habit. Think about it - devalue the product to the point the illegal importers can't make a profit at worst and not able to pay their suppliers at best and the illegal trade will fade away. Also, if addicts can get it for free, then there is less incentive to commit other crimes to fund the habit. Skizz