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Legalizing Drugs — Follow-Up Question
Further to my previous post on this subject, would legalizing all drugs actually eliminate drug related crime or would it create a legal drug industry and an underground drug industry intent on avoiding taxes and regulations?
Published in Culture, General
A couple of things:
1. Of course these things have negative consequences. All free actions have potential negative consequences. If you have cars, some kids are going to get hit by cars. The solution isn’t to ban cars.
2. These negative consequences are nothing new. You’ve spent 25 years staring these consequences in the face. Prohibition hasn’t worked. The reason you see all these problems is because prohibition is a failure. It’s not hard to get drugs. We both know this.
3. Generally speaking, a free society is better equipped to deal with social problems, including those caused by drugs and alcohol. The fact of the matter is that there are already fathers who are drug and/or alcohol addicted and can’t support their children. If that father is addicted from illegal drugs, prohibition makes it more difficult for him to get help and get on his feet. And prohibition imposes additional costs on him and his family in the form of legal expanses and lost income.
It’s a problem, yes, prohibition makes it worse.
And by the way, anybody who supports federal drug prohibition and the War on Drugs should damn well turn in their strict constitutionalist card.
Fred Cole:
“And by the way, anybody who supports federal drug prohibition and the War on Drugs should damn well turn in their strict constitutionalist card.”
LOL. Well said.
The strict constitutionalist/libertarian in me agrees that we should stop this double-mindedness and completely legalize drugs.
But, only if we ALSO completely discard the present entitlement system (another strict constitutionalist/libertarian goal); otherwise, that system will use our tax dollars to “enable” the negative social consequences of legal drug use (welfare, food stamps, Medicare, etc.)
I suppose that the cost/benefit analysis would tell us that the increase in the fiscal cost (to the justice system) due to drug USE-related crimes (e.g., DUI-drugs, DV, etc.) would probably be offset by the decrease in costs resulting from the end of the prosecution of the actual act of selling, possessing, using drugs. But, what do we tell the victims of those crimes? “This is the cost of doing business?” I suppose that we could increase the penalty for driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs, to try to deter that type of antisocial behavior.
We will never be as serious about driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol as the danger of such demands. If there are, say, 15,000 deaths due to drunk driving, and driving while under the influence of drugs would increase that number substantially, that is a holocaust that demands very strict remedies.
I recommend life in prison (actually, I prefer the death penalty but that opens up another can of worms). There would not have to be too many actually sentenced for the number of drunk driving deaths to drop precipitately. It would not be a bad trade to sacrifice the freedom of a small number of offenders to save thousands of innocents.
One NEVER does much “to deter such behavior” with laws.
That said, itis also a significant overstatement of the number of cases of drunk driving that occur or result in death. Several reasons cause this.
Police tend to report alcohol as a “contributing cause” in any case where ANY alcohol is in the system, when in fact it may have not been any cause at all.
Second, we have a legal definition of “intoxication”. It rarely matches the actual physical condition of the person. Some ARE intoxicated atless than the legal limit, while others are totally stone cold sober at much higherlevels.
What you say here sounds right to me, but that doesn’t alter the fact that thousands die because of drivers who are intoxicated, and we don’t do much to prevent it. It’s as if we don’t care enough about those deaths to interfere with the fun people get from excessive drinking.