I’m just curious if making things illegal works as a deterant. Would making abortion illegal change much of anything? It seems to me another approach is needed. I don’t know what, but making abortion illegal, it seems to me, just means that more and more babies are going to be found in dumsters and back alleys.
Is that ridiculous?
With drugs, it seems pretty obvious that that’s not working. I’m from South Carolina, and if I see people doing coke and X on a regular basis, it seems like it could only be more prevalent in other areas. What is making drugs illegal doing?
I’m not saying that we should just make all of this legal, but I’m curious what other approaches are there? What does making something illegal do?
I’m rushing through this question, because it’s late and I’m going to bed (I’m in Paris, not SC).
Many things can be made to work that arent necessarily ‘right’ though, I think sometimes the two are tied together too automatically as an argument.
Eg if abortion could be effectively be made illegal through advances in law enforcement to a level where backyard abortions and abandonments were non-existent that that would make it ‘OK’. My take is it wouldnt as it still takes away a womans control over her body amongst other issues.
In my view making things illegal generally ‘works’ (with the caveat above) best when the majority of the population believe it should be illegal and are willing to assist in enforcing it. It tends to be least effective when the converse is true. Which is why drugs tend to be tricky.
Do you have any sources for before and after information that don’t come from anti-abortion organizations, and which discuss underreporting of what was previously reported as a criminal act as well as adjusting rates to reflect for population increases?
As for drugs, it is market forces that drive it. By making it illegal and enforcing it you limit supply, while demand is initially the same. The price rises to encourage people to risk selling, the rising price will lower demand somewhat, and increase supply unitll a equilibrium is reaches. So the ‘war on drugs’ has:
Reduced demand by increasing prices
Reduced supply by increasing risk
Increased the reward of selling by rasing prices.
As for making abortion illegal, I can’t see it happening. I can see the overturn of Roe, but that is because it was a incorrect decision (IMHO), but that does not outlaw abortion, and gives the chance to do it right and actually put it in the constitution if we the people really want it there.
My credentials are such that this may very well be a WAG, but I’d like to see if these ideas have merit (if so, I’d appreciate some advice as to where I might look to investigate further).
It seems to me that there are three things that allowed organized crime to gain a foothold in the United States in the first half of the 20th century (in no particular order):
1.) Corruption developing within organized labor
2.) Illegality of gambling creating a “power vacuum” that the mob was willing and able to fill in place of government regulation
3.) Bootlegging during prohibition.
The public wanted their bets, they wanted their liquor, but the markets were forced underground by virtue of being illegal. Because of this, consumers couldn’t turn to law enforcement if they were abused or cheated, and as a result the extralegal entities in control of the “industry” were accountable to no one. They could buy officials. They could arrange hits on competitors. They could sell tainted goods*. It happened in the US in the 20’s and 30’s, and look what it’s done to countries like Colombia in more recent decades.
I don’t even know where to begin developing a solution, but that’s not within the scope of this thread. It seems that outlawing things is ineffective at best, and creates a host of other problems at worst. It amounts to sweeping things under the rug, letting shit build up without actually taking care of it. So, in response to the OP, making things illegal doesn’t work.
*This applies to abortion, too. Without government oversight you have no way to make sure practitioners use proper techniques, or are even certified clinicians to begin with. It might deter some unfortunate, shortsighted young women from “killing babies,” but the truly desperate will be at the mercy of some shady characters. Indeed, won’t somebody think of the children?
Somehow I doubt you’d be saying the same thing if someone were to cite a Planned Parenthood article in support of abortion. But hold onto your hat…
There’s always the original article by Syska et al. It’s titled “An Objective Model for Estimating Criminal Abortions and Its Implications for Public Policy” and was published in New Perspectives on Human Abortion (Hilgers, Horan & Mall eds. 1981).
Moreover, the increase in abortions was almost immediate. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions doubled from 1972 to 1977 – way too fast for mere population growth to account for (cite, PDF).
The Alan Guttmacher report shows that abortions increased dramatically as states first started liberalizing the abortion laws in 1970, and continued to increase after the Roe v. Wade decision. Oh, and before you complain about this coming from an “anti-abortion organization” – the Alan Guttmacher Institute is a division of Planned Parenthood. So it is a very biased source indeed, albeit biased toward the pro-choice cause.
That’s not what Planned Parenthood said, though. In an article published in a 1960 issue of The American Journal of Public Health, Planned Parenthood medical director Mary Calderone said,
Do you folks still want to complain about it coming from a biased source? Remember, this was Planned Parenthood’s own representative speaking.
By Mary Steichen Calderone, M.D., M.S.P.H., F.A.P.H.A., “Illegal Abortion as a Public Health Problem,” American Journal of Public Health 50:948-954 (July 1960):
I guess there was a good chance a thread like this would turn into an anti-abortion rights/pro-abortion rights thread (if it didn’t morph into a debate on drug laws).
Before leaving the subject of abortion I will note that unfortunately, JThunder’s Guttmacher Institute report link doesn’t do that much for his argument. If you look at the first graph, you see that legal abortions in the U.S. kept increasing at the same rate after* Roe* as they did before it. In fact, there was a steeper rise between 1969-71 (pre-Roe) than after the Supreme Court’s decision. So it’s hard to see that making abortion legally available across the nation (at least in theory) caused a big spike in the number of abortions (of course illegal abortions, with their attendant greatly heightened risk of sepsis, pain, sterility and death, undoubtedly fell sharply).
To get back towards the subject of the OP, I don’t think one can generalize and say that because a law doesn’t stop something from occurring, it has no effective deterrent value. When it comes to “sin” laws, it’s arguable that while one can’t stop illegal drug use, prostitution and gambling, one can keep something of a lid on it and prevent a degree of societal harm. The real debate comes when it’s recognized that some of these laws spawn more trouble than they’re worth in the form of corruption and encouragement of organized crime.
Good question. My first thought is; can the government make money off of it? I am guessing the government doesn’t feel it can make money off of drugs being made legal (and the gov selling and taxing them).
As for abortion, no money can be made from it, but the lobby was powerful. The drug lobby-not so powerful.
Theres a demand for both. If enough people want something bad enough, they will do it regardless of the law.
Making it illegal will not fix anything. If anything, poeple will get more creative in doing it illegally.
It would be nice if the government made things illegal, they would stop. Isn’t the case, even when the death penalty gets involved.
Do you differentiate between the process of making something illegal and the punishments or intimidation factors that enforce the policy? Are those two different things in your question?
“The Alan Guttmacher report shows that abortions increased dramatically as states first started liberalizing the abortion laws in 1970…”
In other words, the increase coincided with the date at which 15 states first legalized abortion. The abortion rate continued to increase in the years to come, even after Roe v. Wade.
Why didn’t the rate increase more dramatically after 1972? Possibly because the remaining 35 states were less supportive of abortion. Or possibly because the number of abortions per annum would have levelled off in 1972 had the Roe v. Wade not been passed. The point remains, though… abortions most certainly increased in frequency after they were legalized, and this trend continued for approximately a decade.
Perhaps you missed my reply to Khan on that matter. Are you suggesting that Planned Parenthood was incorrect when they said that abortions in the 1960s were safe and conducted primarily by licensed physicians?
I’ll bet that there was a significant drop in the number of infanticides after abortion was legalized and made widely available, but I imagine it would be hard to come up with a reasonable estimate as the numbers on infanticides would surely be seriously underreported.
As to the OP: Sure, outlawing things works, from the POV of people who want a cheap hit of moral superiority. They have “done something” about the problem. The bad people will be punished. All is well.
Yes making things illegal does work to some degree. As widespread as drugs currently are, is there any doubt that they’d be vastly more popular if they were perfectly legal? Call me naive, but for the most part I think we’re still a law-abiding society.
The question, as I understood it, is not whether making something illegal is necessarily the best method, but whether or not it does, more or less, work. I don’t know how that system works in the Netherlands, but it may well be a better alternative – or not.
If marijuana, for one example, was made legal but heavily taxed (to fund rehab clinics or whatnot) I still think it would make pot much more widespread than it already is. On a personal level, I can say that if pot was legal, no matter how heavily it was taxed, I’d be more likely to use it. Given its current illegality, even though I’m interested in it, I really don’t feel like going to the bother of finding a dealer, sneaking it around, and risking getting a criminal record on the off-chance I got caught. And that’s just pot, the most common and, increasingly, the most accepted of illegal drugs. But if I could just pop down to the local Eckerds and buy some – sure, I’d probably go for it.
Making a drug illegal does have an effect. For a large number of people, probably a majority in most cases, there’s a huge mental gap between legality and illegality. There are many people who simply set their standards of right and wrong based on what the government does and doesn’t allow. How many people in the United States use any illegal drug on a daily basis? How does that compare to the number of people using legal pleasure drugs (tobacco and alcohol) on a regular basis?