David Brooks says legalizing drugs encourages drug use.
He may or may not be right, but let’s assume he is.
Is it worse to encourage drug use, or to encourage crime?
This is no idle question, especially because the sort of crime that is encouraged by the illegality of drugs is not limited to the crime of drug use, possession, or even dealing.
Some of the crime is not especially nice to read about. A leftist author at Slate has compiled a collection of stories so gruesome that his thesis is this:
It’s a conflation of assumptions, of course, because the mere buying of cocaine is a morally neutral act. What is morally heinous are the tactics of the drug cartels, whose tactics are driven in pursuit of the ridiculously artificial prices which result from government intervention in the marketplace.
I think it a more appropriate thesis would be this:
Why Criminalizing Cocaine Is Like Subsidizing the Nazi Party
Drug laws artificially transform an easy-to-produce substance into a commodity even more valuable than gold.
Via your tax dollars, it’s government alchemy at work:
In the U.S., a gram of pure cocaine is worth roughly four grams of gold. Cocaine is harder to ship but much easier to produce than gold; making it from coca leaves is about as complicated as making corn syrup from corn. The amount of coca needed to supply the global market is relatively small: a plantation of two hundred thousand hectares, roughly half the size of Long Island, would be enough. For thirty years, the U.S. has chased this plantation around the Western Hemisphere.
The chase only assures the growth of the plantation. It is what makes it ever more profitable.
You might think they would learn, but you’d be wrong.
It’s amazing how screwed people can be without their even knowing it.
Comments
14 responses to “Who is encouraging what?”
It’s amazing how screwed people can be without their even knowing it.
Even more, it’s always amazed me how people get angry at the people who are trying to tell them they’re screwed so they can fix it.
I just thought about a solution that even David Brooks can’t be against.
Legalize it (encourage it) and then tax it (discouragoe it).
That way, it would be all neutral and stuff.
All they would really need to do is to change the law to allow doctors to prescribe drugs to whomever they see fit, including addicts. The drugs would then be sold at pharmacies. Of course, Brooks and people like that would argue that this would “encourage” doctors to prescribe to addicts. Much the way bartenders and liquor stores are being “encouraged” to sell liquor.
They seem to think that anything that is not illegal is being “encouraged.”
If they do legalize and tax it I’m sure they will tax it more than enough to make an illegal enterprise highly profitable. They can’t help themselves.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/02/22149509-high-demand-price-of-legal-marijuana-soars-in-colorado?lite
Cigarette smuggling is big business. Alcohol, not so much.
Eric,
I think you’re right. Just look at the number of DEA administrators and AUSA’s that want to make their political bones by calling pain management doctors “Pill Mills.” Anytime something rhymes in political rhetoric, my tyranny meter spikes. (Ditto absurdly constructed acronyms with “meaning.” eg., P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act)
What I would like to do is give these agents and prosecutors a degenerative and PAINFUL disease and then force them to “live” under the regimen that they’ve been enforcing. Now that would truly be an exercise in justice.
I remember Crazy Larry. Crazy Larry was a Senior at my high school, when I was a Frosh. Crazy Larry used a lot of LSD. I guess he was happy.
I never wanted to be like Crazy Larry. Now, I suppose, it’s possible that Crazy Larry is alive and doing well today. He well may be an Healthcare Navigator!
Here’s the point: had I chosen to use drugs, I could have. They were abundantly available. Yes, I “experimented” with marijuana. And if I wanted to continue that experiment I could avail myself of some weed with a phone call, or two. I’ve Oxy in the cupboard. But somewhere along the way I determined that drug use/abuse were options that I didn’t need to exercise. I am responsible for what goes into my body. Now, in terms of young people, let me suggest that kids should have limited or no access to some of these concoctions. At what age? Well, I suppose until the age when young girls can access the Day After pill without their parents’ approval. So, that’s what, the age of twelve?
.
http://veteransformedicalmarijuana.org/content/general-use-cannabis-ptsd-symptoms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_therapy
http://www.maps.org/research/mmj/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1268331/LSD-Ecstasy-used-combat-cancer-anxiety-post-traumatic-stress-disorder.html
People who use drugs a LOT generally have preexisting conditions. PTSD from child abuse mostly.
So naturally to prevent normals from getting drugs we must further abuse abused children.
A surprisingly large number of top Nazis were drug addicts, including Hitler himself. Hitler received daily injections by his doctor of a concoction that includes both morphine and methamphetamine. Herman Goering was also a morphine addict.
Not that it mattered much in the days before modern hysteria had completely set in, but add JFK to the list too.
http://americannewsreport.com/nationalpainreport/jfks-hidden-history-chronic-pain-8822421.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Jacobson
These days, even alcohol and tobacco are frowned on.
Smoke enough dope in high school and you too might become a journalist who can only repeat conventional wisdom.
Do enough morphine and cocaine and you might become a world renowned surgeon – like William Stewart Halsted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted
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