Thats because the price for a pack of cigarettes is still reasonable and its not worth the risk (generally) to people to buy stuff illegally on the black market. Make the price of cigarettes, say, $10/pack or $20/pack and you’ll eventually find a threshold where more folks are willing to take the risks to save money.
As to the OP, I don’t really know what the effect on the economy would be if you could ever rid the US of all illegal drugs (something that doesn’t sound very likely in any case). I doubt whether it would have too great an impact except perhaps on law enforcement and corrections facilities. Now…if you made some currently illegal drugs legal that could have a definite impact on the economy. I’m skeptical you could pay off the nations debt in 5 years though.
Yes but if someone is buying MJ for 10$ right now, the government legalized it only if purchased from a regulated store for the price of 13$.
Why would the person risk the extra punishment for the 3 extra dollars? That was the point I was trying to make as explained a few posts up.
Now how they would they be able to tell the difference between the regulated and blackmarket I have not a clue. It would be easy to say “You buy regulated its good, if you buy blackmarket its a penalty X times worse then current times”
But really for this discussion I am just throwing out the “Y” would still be valid.
Because the people who are willing to pay the $10 for the marijuana now don’t care about the legality of the marijuana that they buy, and because marijuana is a luxury item, not a staple.
But bootlegged MJ would be higher in cost then the legal MJ. Because it would still be illegal to grow and sale. So why would that change?
GuyA, GuyB, and GuyC right now
GuyA buys his MJ illegally for 10$
GuyB Doesn’t purchase due to it being illegal
GuyC Doesn’t buy due to moral reasons
Now the government legalizes the purchase of MJ from its store’s only! If your caught with MJ not purchased from a legal shop your penalty would be whatever the penalty is currently. The store will offer the amount that GuyA used to buy for 10$, for 15$
I think,
GuyA would buy his MJ from the store.
GuyB will buy his MJ from the store.
GuyC will still not buy MJ
Can you show me anyway where I could be missing something?
Exactly. A working model for all illegal drugs (not just marijuana) could be to control it to keep it (mostly) out of the hands of minors, *a la * liquor and tobacco, and to tax it to pay for the society costs due to those who can’t control their consumption. The cost of these drugs would have to be low enough so that addicts would not need to commit crimes to buy it, and also so that there would be no profit in selling in a black market.
There are lots of issues to work out in this approach; for example, the culture of personal responsibility, where being under the influence is no excuse for committing a crime, would have to be greatly strengthened. But IMO the economic and social benefits would be worth the effort.
That first statement is a false premise unless the price of legal drugs drops way below the current black market value.
First, legalizing marijuana only sold through certain vendors and keeping the same absurdly out-of-proportion penalties for contraband sale we have now is not particularly politically feasible. You just can’t justify throwing the local dealer in jail for years because of what amounts to minor tax evasion. But, even ignoring that argument, there are simple market forces that will make it impossible to keep prices as high.
And how, exactly, do you catch those people? Once you start to legalize drugs, posession of the drug is no longer sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.
Let’s say the cops are cruising for illegal drug users. They find a guy smoking pot, and ask where he got it. Right now, because posession is itself illegal, they can put serious pressure on the user to finger his dealer, work their way up the chain and nail the big producers. If posession is legalized, the user will calmly take out his official government-stamped baggie and say he got it at the local approved shop. They ask him to prove it, and he produces a receipt from a few months ago. So what? All this proves is that he bought some official weed once. They now have nothing to go on. Or consider how lucrative it would be to somehow counterfeit the “official” stamp and sell your pot at an approved outlet. It wouldn’t be easy, but there’s just so much money involved if you keep the 30000% profit margin that illegal drugs have.
This greatly reduced risk will allow the black market dealers to lower their prices, significantly undercutting the government shops. And, remember, the illegal drug trade is incredibly profitable at this point. If there were any price pressure, they could cut prices and continue on quite easily. There’s no way that the government could keep prices at current prohibition levels.
No need for wild guess work, someone at Harvard, Jeffrey Miron of Boston U. has done the work. In short,
As for prohibition-induced price inflation, Miron estimates that, compared to taxed and regulated environment, cocaine fetches 2.5-5 times the price, heroin 8-19 times and cannabis 15 times.
Sale the tobacco in taxed packs. Sale the MJ in stamped packs. Seems to work for tobacco, and still enough people purchase that artificially high priced product. Some people pay $79.56 (average price in NY (PDF) a carton for cigarettes, and they have alternatives ranging from 13-30 dollars on the blackmarket they still seem to buying them legally right? Of course they have a black market, but so do things as trivial and as cheap as DVD’s.
