3 ms·

Considering the amount of violence such cartels cause, I wonder if slow legalization of even the harder illegal drugs is the path we are on...

• pdkl95 13y ago
  Legalizing it all is the only sane solution. Drugs are a product where the demand is roughly constant. People that want drugs will try and get them from somebody; even price does little to change this. Rates of use are surprisingly consistent, and tend to change based only slowly based around changes in "pop-attention", taste, or other social pressures instead of economic or legal pressures. This leaves us with a choice: who should be the supplier for that demand? The catch: there will probably be some sort of profits associated with that exchange. For some time now, we've chosen to hand those profits to the violent gangs and cartels - some of which were effectively created from this vacuum in supply. Alternatively, we can choose to give the job of supplying drugs to something we can regulate and control: a business or other sanctioned organization (co-op? gov agency?). There are, of course, many ways to accomplish this; one of the primary benefits of a regulated business is that we have options on how we choose to regulate it. It may take a few tries to find the best methods (such is life), but even partial-failure or not-quite-working regulation is significantly better than the alternative. I suspect that anybody still choosing to channel money to cartels is either engaging in magical thinking ("if we make things illegal, they will all stop doing it!"[1]), or somehow profiting from the War On (some) Drugs. [1] see "pro-life" for another example of similar "the problem will go away" magical thinking