The Economist says (again) to legalize drugs.

[lewmonst 0]

How pragmatic.

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13237193

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Quote

How to stop the drug wars
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

Illustration by Noma BarA HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of failure
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Al Capone, but on a global scale
Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.

What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.

By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.

A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?
This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

http://www.exitshot.com

[akarunway 1]

Quote

How pragmatic.

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13237193

If you don't want to open another tab:

Quote

How to stop the drug wars
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

Illustration by Noma BarA HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of failure
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Al Capone, but on a global scale
Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.

What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.

By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.

A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?
This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

Be nice if I could smoke a good hit of kickass LEGAL hashish after work rather than a bottle of bourbon.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

[virgin-burner 1]

REPOST

“Some may never live, but the crazy never die.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
"No. Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try."
-Yoda

[philh 0]

Why would anyone imagine that drug prohibition would have any different outcome to alcohol prohibition?

[Gawain 0]

As a subscriber to The Economist, I read them to keep tabs on smug lines of thought such as this.

Even if you support legalization of drugs, do you really think conditions, such as those found in Mexico, would clear up? Those cartels aren't killing 6000 civilians each year because of government attempts to impede their trafficking.

Quote

In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

This has to do with power. Hundreds of US citizens get kidnapped each year from Arizona and California and Mexico is the number one place to put a foreigner at risk.

Mexico needs to man-up soon, and mobilize its Army to take over Tijuana, from what I understand, that place is all but completely under control of the cartels.

Again, it has to do with power. It has to do with money. Cartels won't roll over just because their product became "legal".

So I try and I scream and I beg and I sigh
Just to prove I'm alive, and it's alright
'Cause tonight there's a way I'll make light of my treacherous life
Make light!

[philh 0]

You dont think huge profits avilable in an illegal industry might make them more likely to behave in a criminal way?

[TomAiello 25]

Hey, at least they'd all move to Las Vegas. Then we could find a sort of biblical end to the issue by just nuking the place.

In all seriousness, I think that the example of prohibition pokes some holes in your gut feeling on this issue. When prohibition ended we really did see a reduction in violent crime related to smuggling. Legalization reduced the margins to the point that it became a more "normal" business--one people weren't willing to kill and die for.

Basically, what The Economist is saying (and I tend to agree with them on this issue) is that legalization will greatly reduce the funding available to organized crime, and that will reduce the size and scope of the criminal networks, and create a "better" (from our point of view) mismatch of power between the criminals and law enforcement.

-- Tom Aiello

[email protected]
SnakeRiverBASE.com

[riddler 0]

Quote

Even if you support legalization of drugs, do you really think conditions, such as those found in Mexico, would clear up? Those cartels aren't killing 6000 civilians each year because of government attempts to impede their trafficking.

I didn't read in the article that legalization would fix the problem - I read that it is the least bad solution (in the opinion of the writer). Countries that have decriminalized certain drugs still have drug problems. The writer asserts that we would have fewer problems with legalization, not none.

Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

[beowulf 1]

The way I see it as long as there is a demand for a product there will be a supplier. The real question here is who do we want to control the drug market? Black Market or the Government??

Right now the Black Market controls the drug trade and with the Black Market comes wars over the profits. The Gov. just chases after and trys to reduce the drug trade.

[AdamLanes 1]

Quote

The way I see it as long as there is a demand for a product there will be a supplier. The real question here is who do we want to control the drug market? Black Market or the Government??

Right now the Black Market controls the drug trade and with the Black Market comes wars over the profits. The Gov. just chases after and trys to reduce the drug trade.

The black market exists because of the government regulation of the drug trade.

[beowulf 1]

I disagree. Banning is not regulating.

[wmw999 2,122]

No, but regulation will still have some black market involved. However, the payoff for illegal activity will probably be a whole lot lower, and therefore there will be fewer people involved.

There is still illegal alcohol activity around (including moonshiners). But it's not the problem that rum runners were during the US Prohibition. The penalty just isn't worth the payoff for most people. If customers can get it marginally more expensively if it's legal, many of them will elect to do exactly that.

Wendy W.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[nanook 1]

Quote

I didn't read in the article that legalization would fix the problem - I read that it is the least bad solution (in the opinion of the writer). Countries that have decriminalized certain drugs still have drug problems. The writer asserts that we would have fewer problems with legalization, not none.

I don't think it will fix the problem. I believe it will move it. We are talking about some really bad people here, not greedy entrepeneurs. Most people who dont deal with these people, like Economist, Rolling-stone, and Wired writers (buying weed from a small-time pusher isn't getting into the belly of the beast here) are concentrating on the product, not the actual people themselves. These guys will just go do something else and ruin some other area of society. Backing away from a problem by legalizing it is like legitimizing bullying because a bunch of wimps are afraid of the the little knocks it takes to stand up to them. Sometimes I get the feeling that the people who are for the legalization-to-avoid-violence types are a bunch of pussies who never fought for anything the believed in in their whole lives

_____________________________

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

[beowulf 1]

Right, I agree with you. I don't think the black market for drugs will ever go away entirely. But like the illegal alcohol production it will go down significantly.

[AdamLanes 1]

Quote

I disagree. Banning is not regulating.

Where's the logic in that?

[beowulf 1]

Ahhh yes, the testosterone response. How many thousands of people should die before you admit that the current tactics are useless and are making no head way in reducing drug use or crime???

[AdamLanes 1]

Quote

I don't think it will fix the problem. I believe it will move it.

What do you think the problem is?

Quote

Sometimes I get the feeling that the people who are for the legalization-to-avoid-violence types are a bunch of pussies who never fought for anything the believed in in their whole lives

Why do you think violence is a solution to your problems? Do you use violence to get what you want in your everyday life? How does that work for you?

[nanook 1]

Quote

Ahhh yes, the testosterone response. How many thousands of people should die before you admit that the current tactics are useless and are making no head way in reducing drug use or crime???

AAh yes, the uninformed response. How many thousands of more people will be affected if we let them come in with their product for much cheaper and more plentiful?

The tactics work. You just can't see it because you are at the end aspect of the result. You can't see it work because you are paying attention to the stuff already on the streets. you don't see the stuff that doesn't make it here. Which is huge.

If you think that more drugs on the street are the answer, you are not paying attention to the human population. You have a huge disconnect with everybody else. "Yourself" is not a good indicator of whats going to happen to a change in anything in life.

The "war on drugs" not some ignorant thoughtless assault on something. Everybody but the columnists and you know that it is impossible to completely irradicate all drugs. The "War" is not designed to be a end-all affair. This is not a war. This is a control concept.

_____________________________

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

[beowulf 1]

I don't think the current tactics work at all. It's easy buy illegal drugs in the US.

[TomAiello 25]

Quote

I disagree. Banning is not regulating.

Most of those substances are not, in fact, completely banned. They are just heavily regulated. Regulations generally require that you get a prescription from a state licensed health practitioner or something similar.

-- Tom Aiello

[email protected]
SnakeRiverBASE.com

[nanook 1]

Quote

What do you think the problem is?

I think the problem is really about numbers. How much agents can we really afford to have? Keep in mind though that drug violence comes and goes in cycles and in the up cycle, it is the "in thing" to side with some of the media.
Quit relying on the media for all your sources and start asking police, coast guard, the Navy( especially south-pac VBSS groups) and border patrol agents for information. Check their websites.

Quote

Why do you think violence is a solution to your problems? Do you use violence to get what you want in your everyday life? How does that work for you?

Why do you think passivism is the solution to your problems? Do you think running away will always work like it did at recess? Passivism only works if there are others willing to call "foul" for you. Passivism only works because violence protects your bubble. It only works if both parties ascribe to it.

In the real world, this isn't the Dr. Phil show. Your pop-psychology response does translate well on-line, even if it misses the point, but doesn't ward off the blow. Passivism to confront violence only works in the mind of artists (movies, newspaper columnists, books) and academia (ivory tower types who's largest issues is finding grad students) You see, meeting someone who is trying to hurt you with wit and clever come-backs or outsmarting them sells books and movies but does nothing to ward off the blows.
And just because peace works on some area doesn't mean it works on others. It's best to leave the peace vs. violence debate to be made by those who have experience with both.

_____________________________

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

[nanook 1]

Quote

I don't think the current tactics work at all. It's easy buy illegal drugs in the US.

Like i said, paying attention to the stuff already on the streets.

_____________________________

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

[ryoder 1,384]

Quote

I don't think it will fix the problem. I believe it will move it. We are talking about some really bad people here, not greedy entrepeneurs. Most people who dont deal with these people, like Economist, Rolling-stone, and Wired writers (buying weed from a small-time pusher isn't getting into the belly of the beast here) are concentrating on the product, not the actual people themselves. These guys will just go do something else and ruin some other area of society. Backing away from a problem by legalizing it is like legitimizing bullying because a bunch of wimps are afraid of the the little knocks it takes to stand up to them. Sometimes I get the feeling that the people who are for the legalization-to-avoid-violence types are a bunch of pussies who never fought for anything the believed in in their whole lives

Everything you just said could also apply to an argument against repealing Prohibition.
Should we re-instate that shining example of success?

Where there is a demand, there will be a supply.
The law only determines whether the supplier is a criminal, or not.

"There are only three things of value: younger women, faster airplanes, and bigger crocodiles" - Arthur Jones.

[beowulf 1]

What is on the streets is what matters. It doesn't matter how much drugs the cops confiscate. All that does is raise the cost of what does get to the streets. Take a drug deale off the streets? Another replaces him almost as quickly sometimes quicker.

Yes the war on drugs is failing.

[frequentfaller 0]

nothing about passivism. this "war on drugs" has been going on 30 or 40 years. the drug problem in the U.S. keeps getting worse. legalize and government control distribution. govt makes money off of weed. regulates better quality hard drugs for the abusers cheap even free for homeless. eliminates all drug related robberies, stealing and killing to be able to afford next fix.

the cartels stop making billions of dollars. why go to black market for drugs, when better quality and cheap at govt clinic?

you can keep on fighting the black market, but as long as there is billons of dollars in it, there will never be a shortage of peolple ready to join black market. kill the $$$ value of product and you kill the black market for that product

Born ok 1st time.