(no subject)

[stevenehrbar]

I get frustrated with people who say things like:  It's time to legalize, or at least decriminalize, drugs.

Look, I am perfectly willing to consider legalizing drugs.  Assuming the end-of-Prohibition model holds out, we'd see an uptick in use, but it would remove the entire business from the hands of criminal enterprises and mark an increase in the product safety of the drugs.

However, decriminalization?  Decriminalization leaves the manufacture and distribution to the black market, which means you still have adulterated drugs sold by warring criminal gangs at inflated prices.  At the same time, eliminating legal pressure on the demand side means an increase in use.  You get the worst of both worlds.

Comments

[dr-kromm.livejournal.com]

Agreed. We have limited decriminalization of pot here, and all that has managed to do is (1) make the dealers more stabby and (2) suck up police resources trying to separate what's criminal from what isn't. Legalization is the only way to go. And on that, there's what the propaganda tells you and then what people who actually work at hospitals and morgues can confirm: Booze wrecks families and lives more cheaply and no less quickly than heroin or speed (and I'm not saying that as some teetotaler who wants Prohibition back). Just about all drugs can be deadly when grossly abused, but the perceived higher deadliness of illegal substances stems almost entirely from laws that put their quality and distribution in the hands of bad people, not from their pharmacology. Shoot, if these things weren't illegal, even the cops wouldn't shoot as many people over them, never mind the other body count.

Then again, I'm a raving social liberal.