“In 1870 there were no drug laws in America and there were no overwhelming drug problems. Nobody should need to be Albert Einstein to figure that one out.”
Not true - cocaine and morphine dependency were HUGE problems in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Which is why drug laws were passed.
Iran had few drug laws until quite recently. It’s estimated that, in the 1950s, 20 percent of the population were addicted to opium.
What will the drug gangs do if their source of income is cut off? I’ll tell you: find even more noxious ways to earn a living.
Unless you want to return to an 18th century level of society, without mechanization, like the Amish, the war on drugs must continue.
It’s like weeding a garden. Yeah, the weeds grow back - but if you don’t weed, you don’t have a garden.
That said, we need to be mindful of civil liberties. We also need to get the best bang for our buck - decriminalizing - or even legalizing - pot might make sense. But crack, coke, meth, heroin? Our society won’t survive if their use is widespread.
Drug laws were passed at the same time as alcohol prohibition. The only difference is that there was not the heavy public lobby for relegalization of drugs that existed for alcohol.
When people are sent to prison for more time than murder for the crime of selling drugs, this is not justice.
Not true - cocaine and morphine dependency were HUGE problems in the late 19th and early 20th century.
There was no prison/industrial complex in 1870. There were no drug raids or no-knock raids. There were no entire countries being destabilized by drug cartels as Mexico is today. Crime was generally disorganized, nobody had to steal to buy drugs, and whatever percentage of the population may have been being rendered non-functional by drugs was certainly less than is rendered non-functional today by drugs or the demoKKKrat party or whatever.
Best of course would be to keep the really hard stuff illegal but you could legalize it all and be better off than we are now.