The bogeyman cometh!
Posted on 12/03/2008 10:30:35 PM PST by Eric Blair 2084
Legalizing alcohol didn’t increase its use so…oh wait. Yeah it did! Hmmmm? Well at least kids don’t have easy access to alcohol…oh. Hmmmm?
Black market dealers smuggle and sell CD’s, DVD’s, cigarettes, electronic goods, shoes, designer label merchandise, and guns. So legalizing drugs would accomplish what? Legalizing alcohol didn’t rid us of the Mafia, so why would we believe it would rid us of drug gangs? Legalizing some of the drugs, such as grass, might reduce the profit, but the criminal enterprise would simply adjust. Human smuggling is already starting to become more profitable than the drug trade. Additionally, tobacco products are not illegal, yet there is a huge tobacco smuggling underworld worldwide (why? I assume to bypass taxes and maximize profit?).
Drugs aren’t exactly expensive now. Ever hear of a “dime bag”? So how cheap do we have to make drugs before we remove the incentive to smuggle them? How many junkies do you know who hold down a job sufficient to finance their habit? They smash car windows for a couple of bucks in change rather than work for it. They can’t come up with $10 a day so how is legalization gonna change that human dreg into something else?
Did prohibition create alcoholics? Does drug prohibition create addiction?
Cocaine, meth, heroin, opium? Legalize them all? If not then what have we accomplished? If so then google meth addicts and take a look at the images. Do you really believe those people will ever stop? Ever get a job at a McDonalds? Do we really want pharmaceutical manufacturers getting into the business of selling these drugs to the public?
Show me one example of a place where legalization has been enacted that has actually had the positive effect envisioned by its supporters. Look at England after heroin users were given a regular supply. Not pretty.
Tell China how harmless opium is! The British used opium as a means to break the Chinese state and it came close to working. The United States had 400,000 opium addicts around the same time. It was outlawed for a reason in both China and the United States.
Khat (Qat), also known as Jaad in Somalia, Miraa in Kenya has worked wonders in Somalia. You know, that ‘Failed State’ where this narcotic is perfectly legal. The criminal gangs don’t seem to have gone away. Apart from the Meru tribe, few Kenyans consume Miraa. But so popular is it as an export that in some places it has overtaken coffee as a cash crop. This again is a totally legal product both in the source nation and most of the destination states.
“Healthwise, economically, politically and socially, Qat is destructive - it has destroyed Somalia,” says Mohamud Abshir, a spokesman for the Somali Salvation Democratic Front. “It is the worst enemy we have.”
“What’s happening in Mogadishu is people are under the influence of Qat and Valium or liquor,” Mr. Bryden says. “You become a mess. Either you crack completely or you lose reality.”
The Qat trade is the only commercial enterprise still functioning in Somalia. The size of the business and the loss of foreign reserves suffered by governments or entrepreneurs is largely unaudited, unlike other large agricultural crops. An official of the World Health Organization in Somalia says $350,000 worth of Qat grown in Meru alone is shipped to Somalia each day. “You’re talking about a lot of money changing hands.”
Cocaine in Britain sold for around £44 a gram, is one of the less profitable drugs, with a profit margin of around 95 per cent.
Virtually all of Prozac’s sales gains this year ‘’go to the pretax earnings line’’ because the gross profit margin ‘’will be close to 95 percent,’’ Mr. Kaye said.
What is the Average profit margin for alcohol sales? 72% For cigarettes it averages around 35% and they are commonly smuggled by criminal gangs.
So how do you lower the profit margin on these drugs sufficiently to remove the profitability to the criminal element? A 95 per cent profit margin is the same profit margin Prozac has. Reduce the profit margin to that of retail alcohol, or cigarettes? How low? Do you subsidize the sale of drugs?
Previous efforts to legalize drugs like marijuana saw an increase in abuse. The National Families in Action found that during the decade when 11 states decriminalized marijuana, regular use tripled among adolescents, doubled among young adults, and quadrupled among older adults.
Theodore Dalrymple;
“I have personal experience of this effect. I once worked as a doctor on a British government aid project to Africa. We were building a road through remote African bush. The contract stipulated that the construction company could import, free of all taxes, alcoholic drinks from the United Kingdom. These drinks the company then sold to its British workers at cost, in the local currency at the official exchange rate, which was approximately one-sixth the black-market rate. A liter bottle of gin thus cost less than a dollar and could be sold on the open market for almost ten dollars. So it was theoretically possible to remain dead drunk for several years for an initial outlay of less than a dollar.
Of course, the necessity to go to work somewhat limited the workers’ consumption of alcohol. Nevertheless, drunkenness among them far outstripped anything I have ever seen, before or since. I discovered that, when alcohol is effectively free of charge, a fifth of British construction workers will regularly go to bed so drunk that they are incontinent both of urine and feces.”
In the 17th Century only the rich could afford the prohibitively priced strong drink of whiskeys and brandies, gin became the Everymans’ drink. Gin was strong, cheap, easy to make, and everywhere. It was cheap because it was produced with the lowest quality grain, grain unfit even for brewing. Secondly gin was neither taxed nor controlled at all making it a truly anarchistic drink. This punk of a drink, Gin, was in essence the cheapest and strongest drunk around often advertised with the slogan “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two pence and a straw for nothing.”
Egypt allowed unrestricted trade of cocaine and heroin in the 1920s. An epidemic of addiction resulted. This started in 1916, cocaine first being sold non-medically and shortly afterwards heroin. The price of the new narcotic was kept low to start with, until the vice had spread and caught large numbers of victims in its grip. There were even instances when contractors were paying their labourers with heroin.[37] The vice spread to every class of Egyptian society and a new kind of slum was formed as the result of heroin addiction. The hygienic conditions among the addicts were often beyond description and all sorts of sicknesses followed in the wake of heroin. Thus a great epidemic of malignant malaria started among the addicts in 1928, spread by the hypodermic syringe, which was injected into one person to the other without being disinfected after the use.[38] The total number of addicts in Egypt at the end of the 1920’s has been estimated to half a million. Taking into consideration that the total population of Egypt at that time was about 14 million, the extent of the problem may be realized.
By 1840 China’s opium addicts totalled 10 million. Lin Zexu, the Chinese High Commissioner of Canton, wrote to Queen Victoria complaining that Chinese customers spent 100 million Taels annually (1 Tael equaled 38 grams of silver) on opium, while the entire budget of the government was only 40 million Taels. Insisting on a complete cessation of the drug traffic, he remarked, “There is a class of evil foreigner that makes opium and brings it for sale, tempting fools to destroy themselves, merely in order to reap profit.” TEMPTING FOOLS TO DESTROY THEMSELVES, MERELY IN ORDER TO REAP PROFIT! Who wouda thunk it?
While the Chinese were learning from painful experience about the high price of addiction, the English were learning about the benefits of being drug dealers. By 1870 almost 15 percent of the English national budget came from taxes on opium. By the time Japan invaded China during World War II, between 20 and 40 million Chinese, 10 percent of the entire population, were estimated to be addicted to opium. For British-controlled Hong Kong, the estimate is closer to 30 percent. Not until the Communist takeover in 1949 did things change significantly—and then only because of Mao’s ruthless policies. Dealers were executed. And although users were often treated humanely, many of them also were executed after relapsing. The argument that widespread availability and government sanction would not lead to an increase in use is not borne out by experience. Not in China regarding opium, not in Russia regarding vodka, not in England regarding gin during the industrial revolution, and not in the US during the more permissive era of the 60’s and 70’s, regarding drug use in general.
The British system didn’t work. Addiction levels rose, especially among teenagers, and many addicts chose to boycott the program and continued to get their heroin from pushers. In 1983, England began switching over to methadone and stopped dispensing heroin from the clinics, and that caused even more addicts to depart in favor of the real thing. According to the late John Kaplan of Stanford University, the number of addicts increased fivefold. James Q. Wilson states that the British Government’s experiment with controlled heroin distribution resulted in, at a minimum, a 30fold increase in the number of addicts in ten years. Great Britain experimented with controlled distribution of heroin between 1959 and 1968. According to the British Medical Journal, the number of heroin addicts doubled every sixteen months and the increase in addicts was accompanied by an increase in criminal activity as well.[66] And British authorities found that heroin addicts have a very good chance of dying prematurely. On the crime front, Scotland Yard had to increase its narcotics squad 100 percent to combat the crime caused by the “legal” addicts.
If illicit drugs were legalized, who would be allowed to buy them? What age limits would be set? Would sales be restricted to dependent people? Would cocaine or heroin be restricted to cocaine-dependent or heroin-dependent persons respectively? Could a heroin addict purchase PCP or cocaine? Would the combined use of cocaine and heroin (speedballing) be legal? Who and what body would determine if a user was dependent on amphetamines? If only dependent persons were allowed to purchase their drugs, where would the recreational and experimental users obtain their supplies?
What will be done with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? As its name suggests, the FDA is responsible for testing the safety of food and drugs in the United States. For example, the FDA banned the use of Red Dye #2 a number of years ago because it caused cancer (this is why there were no red M+M’s in most of the 1980’s - it was not until the candy producer came up with a noncarcenogenic dye that they started making them again in the late 1980’s). Similarly, the FDA banned the use of the substance known as Laetrile when it determined that this supposed drug had absolutely no pharmacological effects. But if we allow the legal sale of drugs such as cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and PCP - that unquestionably are dangerous - how can we justify allowing the FDA to exercise quality control over any other type of drugs? To allow the sale and use of cocaine while still granting the FDA power to regulate, say, food additives such as saccharine is like banning slingshots but allowing people to carry automatic assault rifles. So if we legalize the sale and use of clearly dangerous drugs, it seems that to be logically consistent we would have to close down the FDA and let everyone have access to every type of drug. And given legalized drugs it also seems hypocritical to have any type of quality control on food additives or food products more generally. If we allow exemptions for “bad drugs” and keep legislation in place for “good drugs” do we not establish an environment in which any sane corporation would strive to have their pharmaceutical products placed in the “bad drug” category to evade legal liability? If there were dangerous side effects to a “good drug” couldn’t the drug company simply argue that its a “bad drug” and therefore not liable by virtue of some combination with another substance?
How does legalizing drugs stop the violent crime associated with users acquiring money for drugs? If you’re broke and can’t hold a job, you still need to steal. A reduction in the price doesn’t change that. Free drugs or legalizing bad drugs would not make criminal addicts into productive citizens. Making them legal no more takes the profit out than having legal booze, cigarettes, cars, fast food, toilet paper etc, takes the profit out of those businesses. What making them legal does is simply lower the price, makes them potentially available to a wider consumer base, but does not eliminate the profit. Drugs, regardless of whether they are legal, would still cost money. Since many addicts cannot maintain jobs because of the effects of their use, they would continue to engage in stealing and prostitution to pay for drugs and would continue to subject their families and friends to abuse. An increase in use would mean users would be going through what little income they already had at an increasingly rapid rate meaning predatory crimes would eventually become a quick and logical alternative to addicts. During the late 1960s, Dr. Marie Nyswander experimented with opiate addicts at the Rockefeller University, giving them free morphine, and saw the addicts’ daily tolerance for morphine rise swiftly. Her partner, Dr. Vincent Dole, commented, “The doses on which you could keep them comfortable kept going up and up; the addicts were never really satisfied or happy. It was not an encouraging experience.”
If an age limit of 16, 18 or even 21 is set (as all legalizers stipulate) then one can assume firstly that a black market would continue, albeit diminished, and secondly that, as occurs with alcohol and tobacco, minors would have more access to legal drugs than they currently do to illegal drugs, partly through parental and older peer access, and partly because the price would be more affordable than at present. In the USA it was reported that 62% of high school seniors had smoked cigarettes, thirty percent of them in the last month. Some 87% of high school seniors admitted drinking alcohol, of whom half had done so in the previous month. There are an estimated 12 million under-age drinkers. Adult precedent sets a strong example for the young; teenagers are alert to hypocrisy in adult behaviour and might resist the warning “it’s all right for us but not for you”.
Legalizing drugs means more users. How does legalizing drugs lower the number of people driving under influence, operating heavy machinery, getting into “bar” fights, flying airplanes, operating on patients, etc. When most commodities become cheaper, more people use them and those who used them before use more of them. This has been proven true with narcotics and other pleasure drugs. For instance, when crack was introduced in the mid-1980s, the price of cocaine dropped significantly, and the number of users nearly tripled as a result. New York authorities supported DuPont’s research, stating the reduced prices also accompanied increases in the numbers of both new users and abusers of cocaine (DuPont 127). Several studies show that the price of cigarettes-our most addictive drug-has a measurable impact upon consumption. It is not a difficult concept to grasp: the higher the price, the less tobacco smoked. (DuPont 126-132) DuPont states that since the main goal of legalization would be elimination of the black market, drug prices under the system of legalization must be kept much lower than they are now.
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