Do you think that the criminals and thugs smuggling these drugs would magically turn around and find honest work if drugs were made legal?
If drugs are legal, there’s little incentive to form drug smuggling gangs.
“Do you think that the criminals and thugs smuggling these drugs would magically turn around and find honest work if drugs were made legal?”
When you take all the profits out of it, few people will continue on this career path.
Besides that, what is the WOD REALLY accomplishing?
Heroin is cheaper and purer than it has ever been.
Ever heard of supply and demand and how it affects price?
No, But they wouldn’t have access to thousands or maybe millions of dollars that they do now from supplying drugs that are currently illegal.
Most of them would be unemployed by their current bosses. The meth labs would disappear because coke and heroin would be available. The first year we would have overdoses as common as sunsets. It would do a lot to clean up the gene pool!
A lot of them would. When alcohol prohibition was over most people involved found honest work. The major gangsters, the Al Capone types didn't, but the average Joes with stills in the woods, and the people people transporting car or truck loads of booze and the ones smuggling it in from Canada and so on for most part found legal work. Most of these people weren't even in the business full time. They were just making an extra buck here and there as part time or odd job workers in the black market for booze.
I handled thousands of pounds worth of drug mule cases as a public defender. When I first started doing it, I was expecting all these guys to be hardcore tattooed gang banger types. Some were those types, but most of them actually had clean records, no tattoos, and they were actually fairly law abiding family men with wives and lots of kids. What they all had in common was that they didn't have any money. Somebody would offer them five grand or so to drive a vehicle packed with weed a few states over, and that would be really tempting to these people. They could make several thousand dollars in a four or five day trip, tax free. Most of them had jobs, they just didn't pay very well. These were not for the most part ambitious gangsters who wanted to be the next “Scarface,” they were just involved in this because the opportunity presented itself and they needed the money. They would know little about the people setting up their trips, and nothing about the organizations their handlers were working for. They're just pawns, peons in the businesses. They're people who would do this work if the opportunity presented itself, but not necessarily the types who are out looking to be involved in as much criminal activity as possible. They are not unlike the booze runners and the lookouts or whatever from the old Prohibition days. If drugs were legal most of these people wouldn't be involved in criminal activity. The big players would still be in the game somehow or another for the most part, but most of the little guys wouldn't, just as we saw with alcohol Prohibition.
That being said I'd be dead set against legalizing all drugs. Drugs like heroin, cocaine and meth should never be legalized. They are too addictive and prone to causing horrible problems in our communities. Many of the currently illegal drugs are not widely available and they are so expensive to use that many who might try them won't get the chance, and many who do try them won't be able to afford to do it enough to become addicted. Heroin for instance is really not available at all in my town. Police hardly ever make a heroin bust. Most prosecutors and defense attorneys in my area have never handled a heroin case. The only one I ever had was one where a couple of guys were caught with a couple of pounds as they were passing through on the Interstate headed to a state out east. The last thing we'd need to do is legalize heroin.
Marijuana is a different story though. It's not good, but it's not nearly as bad as the other drugs I mentioned. That and it is cheap and easy to get everywhere in this country. If people aren't using it it is not because they can't find it or can't afford it. Fear of arrest probably isn't stopping many from doing it either because it's so easy to do it without getting caught and even if people do get caught not much will happen to them. There are probably very few people out there waiting for marijuana to be legal so they can finally start smoking it. The vast majority of those who want to smoke it despite all the good reasons not to smoke it are already smoking it.
The kicker is that Americans consume more marijuana than all other illegal drugs combined. It's the drug Mexican drug trafficking organizations are really getting rich on. It's their bread and butter. Mexican drug trafficking organizations produce thousands of tons of it every year in Mexico and increasingly here on our own soil. They sell most of what they produce to Americans. The second most popular illegal drug in the U.S. is cocaine, but Americans consume several times as much pot every year. And Mexicans are only the middlemen for cocaine. They don't produce it. Marijuana is their cash cow. If we take that from them we really hurt them. Not only would it deprive them of billions of dollars in revenue every year, but those vast existing marijuana distribution networks that reach every corner of America that they move the biggest part of their hard stuff through would be gone. They'd be killing each other over what's left of the illegal drug trade and it would be harder for them to move their cocaine and meth and heroin and so on. They'd end up being a shell of what they are today and we could do that without legalizing the hard stuff.