Where did people get this idea that prohibition reduces the supply of narcotics? All the data in the world supports the fact that the supply of almost every major drug has increased over the past 30 years. It’s incontrovertible that gangs like La Familia didn’t exist as wealthy narcotraffickers until after the DEA shut down the Medellin Cartel.
So why is it that people think that legalization will result in a flood of narcotics?
Mexican gangs have taken over whole areas of Mexico, and are making in-roads into the United States, and still people persist in this delusion that prohibition somehow reduces the number of addicts and that legalization would result in a sudden proliferation of drug addicts.
Wherefore does this idea that prohibition has done anything but INCREASE the supply of narcotics over time come from?
I’m tired and not gonna do the data thing tonight, but I’ll look more deeply into it later if people want to challenge me on it. I’d appreciate help with cites from others who find this baffling.
How long do we buy the DEA marketing that they are a necessary and effective agency? As far as I can tell the only effective part of their organization is the PR department that has convinced millions of Americans that they are fighting the good fight and getting drugs off the streets. Sure they catch drug dealers all the time, but all that does is create a hole in the supply chain that some enterprising entrepeneur will rush to fill.
Why does it matter if it does? Hopefully, it will decrease the amount of people going to jail and allow the state to tax the supply like it does with alcohol.
When I first started smoking pot in the mid-80’s, it was £90 for a single oz of resin. Fast-forward to 2009 and the price is £45… that’s how effective prohibition is!
Yeah, I never really got the “OMG, if you make it legal everyone will be on drugs !” argument. To me, it’s the same as saying “if being gay is OK, everyone will be gay !”, which in turn equals to “if murder wasn’t illegal, people would shoot me randomly !” in my mind. Prohibition or no prohibition, if a body wants to find drugs, he will find drugs. That’s just a fact. I know I could score pot, 'shrooms, LSD or coke in two, maybe three phonecalls, tops. Everybody knows a guy who knows a guy. Drugs are easy to come by.
Yet not everybody’s high all the time, and it’s not a question of legality or prohibition or being afraid to get caught. Just like not everybody’s drunk out of their gourds all the time, or even drink at all. So why assume that if pot or meth were as available as whiskey, everybody would suddenly turn into a crackhead ? Makes no sense to me.
I do think there might be an initial influx, though. If nothing else, the media coverage will cause a slight increase. But I suspect there are people who are only resisting drugs because they are illegal.
I think the best way to combat the initial influx would be to make it more expensive at first (forcing the issue with taxes, of course.) Then decrease it until it is competitive with the “black market”. Undersell it as much as you can to get drive the black market out of business. Then, crank the prices back up to get the influx of tax money. If they aren’t going to make money off it, there’s no real reason to decriminalize if everybody can get it anyway.
It’s because they have no fucking clue what “inelastic demand” actually is.
What’s most embarrassing is that we actually went through this with alcohol prohibition. We’ve already seen first-hand how these sorts of bumbling, inept laws help fuel organized crime by making the illicit good the foundation for these violent, but successful, business empires. Because of the inelasticity, market quantity doesn’t drop, but price shoots way the hell up. In a certain sense, it is actually in the drug dealers best interest for their product to remain illegal, because that artificial restriction on market entry is what gives them their market power and makes their illegal enterprise so ridiculously profitable. These drug laws, in essence, are a tax on normal people in order to provide a subsidy to the drug dealers themselves–not to mention all the money wasted on futile enforcement and imprisonment. The drug war is one of the most depressingly naive, short-sighted, ignorant, and downright idiotic things we’ve ever done.
The proper controlled way to evaluate this isn’t whether or not drug trafficking has increased - because that can be the result of things other than degree of prohibition like increased demand and more widespread production - but rather how much would be available if not for the attempts to stop it. Those numbers can be guessed at and extrapolated, but barring another identical earth that we can test alternate policies on, not concretely compared. So with different assumptions and projections, you can make a case that the supply under prohibition is still less than it would be otherwise.
I think it’s a reasonable position to assume that prohibition does reduce supply to some degree. I mean - how likely is it that legalization would reduce the presence and availability of the drugs? Not very. Which leaves us with the options that it stays the same, or increases, with the latter being more likely. Prohibition does not eliminate supply, obviously, but it very likely reduces it.
I’m not saying it’s a good policy or a good use of enforcement dollars or anything like that - just that indeed prohibition does reduce supply to some degree for obvious reasons.
Prohibition would work if it was aimed solely at reducing demand, i.e. if it were possible or desirable to enact draconian penalties against usage. When the People’s Revolutionary Party took over mainland China in 1949, they successfully eliminated the use of opium by eliminating opium smokers. By contrast, national Prohibition of alcohol in the US during the 1920s targeted the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcohol, but penalties for actual possession were minimal.
The laws on the books against drug possession are harsh, but enforced about as spottily as speeding laws- one person gets caught for every hundred that use. So the main focus of drug enforcement is targeting supply, which works about as well as Prohibition worked.
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I can only speak for myself here, but I can tell you that one of the primary reasons I do not smoke marijuana at this point in my life is because it is illegal. If it were not illegal I’d gladly smoke up now and again. I just don’t feel like dealing with the legal ramifications if I were to get caught.
But I not only support the legalization of marijuana, I also support the insane crackdown on DUI penalties (which would necessary include marijuana) because if you’re going to do it, you should have the responsibility to do it safely.
Anyway, this is from <5 minutes Googling. I make no claims to the accuracy of the statistics, but it doesn’t matter anyway because I don’t see how it is germane to the topic. Can you show me why these statistics matter?
79% of US adults drink coffee (54% drink it daily).
Illegal:
12.3% regularly use marijuana
4% of the US population has tried methamphetamines, compared to 8% of teens.
Around 8% of the US population over 12 years old has tried cocaine and almost 1% has used it in the last month.
There are over 38 million prescriptions for oxycodone (including oxycontin) in the US and about 5% of 12th graders take it for non-medical reasons.
That I can tell, 19.8, 64, and 79 are larger numbers than 12.3, 4, 8, and 5–and by a fairly impressive margin. Given the sheer mass of advertising against cigarettes, that it still is significantly more widespread than marijuana seems like decent evidence that legality/illegality possibly is a relevant metric.
We have drug problems in the US with legal and illegal drugs. You can buy them on any street corner.We waste tons of money jailing people but little to create recovery institutions. We kind of like punishing.
I think a city like Detroit should immediately cease enforcing drug laws. They are wasting time and money, that they do not have. Want Detroit to grow again. Legalize drugs. It will help clean up the police department and the politicians. There is just too damn much money in the drug business.
Well as has been pointed out upthread about ‘inelastic demand’ the ridiculous profits lead people to simply increase their supply knowing that they only need to get a certain percentage through the prohibition in order to garner the ridiculous profits. If your profit margin is 300% and you are losing 30% of product to the police, you simply increase supply by 30% to compensate. This has been pointed out by leaders in narco-trafficking states where they simply increased the volume of supply to compensate for losses.
This is a valid point regarding marijuana but somehow I think not being a junkie, tweeker or a crackhead is a deterrant in its own right. Even if it were legal, living one of those lives would still be undesirable for its own reasons. Also, a rational drug policy could include a heavy awareness campaign. Not the stupid sentimental bullshit they’ve been pulling, but showing real nasty side-effects, like the anti-smoking ads that show the lady missing her fingers.
Given the prevalence of cocaine use in Hollywood in the 80s (reportedly), I suspect that it and other fairly medium-hard drugs could plausibly make it into decent usage numbers.
Really, a lot of it comes down to fashion and business. Comparing between nations is a fool’s errand in lots of things like this. For instance, the prevalence of teenagers acting as terrorists is significantly more commonplace in the UK than the US from what I can tell. Why? Cultural artifact. Japanese people are twice as likely to commit suicide. Why? Cultural artifact. If you’re bored, you can probably track these back to a few possible initial causes–though they’ll always be nothing more than speculation.
Minus an alternate Earth, like someone pointed out, what the US would be like without the Drug War is going to be almost impossible to guess. True, personally, I suspect that it wouldn’t be significantly different from our world, but I suspect that the rate of traffic accidents, principally, would be decently higher.
The Oxycodone prescriptions are nominally legal, but what the heck, I give it to you. I just don’t think you can compare the rates of coffee drinking with the rates of cocaine usage meaningfully. They are two completely different drugs. Or do you really think that 75% of the population would start doing heroin if it was legal?
I think a more valid comparison is between the Netherlands (where many of the these drugs are legal) or Canada (where they are decriminalized) and the US where they are still illegal. But I notice that you convienently cut that little bit out of the data I presented. Here, let me help you:
According to this site, in 2000 the Netherlands had a higher rate of tobacco consumption than the US. 35% for the Netherlands compared to 20% for the US. It was legal in both countries…