3 ms·
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 somebo
by 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