Thread: The War on Drugs

My whole point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with drugs. If we have problems with the crimes that drug dealers commit, then clean up the supply chain. If you have a problem with people who rob others to get their fix, then prosecute them for it. The system is already extremely punitive to both users and dealers, and the war on drugs has been a complete and utter failure. People still use drugs no matter what the punishment and no matter what the price. Maybe we should think about making it safer and easier to get drugs for them rather than more difficult and dangerous. Maybe we should eliminate the role of cartels by providing a legal supply chain that is subject to the same laws and regulations that any other legal industry has to adhere to. Then dealers would not even exist and we wouldn't have to worry about the violence that accompanies any black market industry.

Because no matter what you do, there will be a market for drugs. We've tried for decades to eliminate it, spent billions, and it persists. It's not going anywhere.

Originally Posted by Mad Pino Rage

The idea behind legalization is that once drugs become legalized and regulated that it would eliminate the black market. I think that is true, but a real perspective on the situation is that may not come for a long time. Meanwhile, supporters are advocating for better legislation they are still committing crimes and supporting the black market which on stretch supports the slaughter of tens of thousands of people.

Also, I do think drugs are bad because they contribute to long lasting ill effects to poor health and accumulate risks.

That may be true. I probably should have said that drugs intrinsically are not all that bad, and societies treatment of them in a lot of ways makes them worse than they really are. I will readily admit that hard drugs are pretty unequivocally a societal bad. But very rarely do you hear a discussion of whether the negative side effects of criminalizing the drug trade are worse than the negative side effects of the drugs themselves. And at least to me, it seems like the side effects of criminalizing the drug trade are worse.

It doesn't much matter when it comes about, the point is we need to try to get to that point. Whether we attempt to get there or not, the black market for drugs persists, and people commit crimes, murder and get murdered over the drug trade. This will happen whether we attempt to legalize and clean up the supply chain or not. The more harshly and violently we fight the cartels, the more violent and efficient we force them to be. Organized crime should always be criminalized, investigated, and punished. But unless we accept that the reason that organized crime exists in the first place is that there is a market for substances (and in a broader sense beyond the drug trade, products and services in general) without a legal way of obtaining them, we will continue to look at the problem incorrectly. In an ideal world, hard drugs would be illegal and nobody would use them. That's not how the world works, and we do not live in an ideal world. Time to deal with it.