The real problem with prohibition is that it is the abdication of regulation and thus the problems we see as a result of prohibition: overdoses, disease transmission, gangs, cartels and terrorists are caused by a lack of sensible government regulations. It would and still should be illegal for armed children to sell unlabeled bags of toxic powder intended for human injection on the street corner without any taxes or permits.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
Even if you had permits and taxes for peddling hard drugs on street corners, you'd still have criminals operating permit-less black markets, if for no other reason than tax evasion. Your logic has already been applied to guns...we are required to jump through several unnecessary hoops just to get a permit to buy a gun...and yet criminals fail to abide by any of those restrictions.
I am sure I didn't suggest that there would be peddling of drugs on street corners, I said that would not be legal. Excessive taxation is indistinguishable from prohibition. Taxes have to be reasonable, you don't see most products on the black market because they have reasonable taxes and avoiding them is a bigger risk than just paying them. We see this effect in states where pot is legal but they have absurd taxes that make it so people just continue to go to the same tax free dealer they went to before. If the taxes were reasonable they would not have better prices. My logic has not at all been applied to guns, that's called a straw man argument. If you applied my logic to guns there would be no black market for them either, the black market for guns is created by prohibiting certain people from being allowed to buy them legally, I am sure I never suggested any such prohibitions.
All the laws and current regulations haven't stopped them. You think add adding more would help, ehh?
All the laws and current regulations have created them. Prohibition created them. I think doing away with those laws and treating drugs like every other product would get rid of them. Walgreens and CVS can sell drugs across the street from one another without their employees shooting it out right?
When was the last time a drug you bought at Walmart was cut with baby laxative?
So...if we legalize street drugs, the criminals will start wearing smocks and stop shooting at each other...?
So if we legalize street drugs, Walmart and Amazon will put the Crips, the cartels and the terrorists out of business. If teenagers want to sell drugs they will need to get a job at Walgreens or CVS.
It's an important distinction, but we need to decriminalize, not legalize. Fuck legalization. It is a control and theft (tax) mechanism.
Control and tax are what is missing in the narcotics market now. Mostly people die because those things are lacking. Either by being killed by a gang member or by being killed by an impure, inconsistent, unlabeled product. Something in a baggie of unknown purity or consistency and you don't even know what it is cannot be safely injected. You get that right?
You just defined damn near everything Big Pharma gets passed through the FDA...you do realize that right?
As @justusagenstum already pointed out, have you heard of the FDA? They have plenty of control, yet they regularly make terrible decisions when it comes to people's health. It is a racket for corporatism and profit regardless of the damage done to an individual's health.
The government taxes and controls tobacco and alcohol and countless other substances that kill untold amounts of people each year. Go look up prescription drug deaths as another example. Doctors prescribing FDA approved pain killers kill thousands of people a year.
Hows all their control working out?
Also, if someone laces a product they sell with poison, some other harmful substance, or sells horse tranquilizers instead of heroin, they should be held criminally liable. The consensual transaction by itself or using the substance you wanted to buy isn't a crime however.