Did you just jump from wanting to legalize cannibus to legalizing ALL illegal narcotics?
Marijuana is one thing, but what does possession and use of black tar herione look like.
Child endangerment is what it looks like to me, I guess, and while I understand and agree with the argument that we are creating a black market for these substances, are there new and exciting substances for which we just cannot draw the line that will just create newer black markets?
We can legalize and license prostitution too I guess, just as we have infanticide.
In fact, maybe that was the low bar anyway. We have not only legalized infanticide, our Supreme Court has held that it is a constitutional right. As such, to say that a soldier who can fight, but cannot legally have a beer is absurd, and along with that any law banning practically any substance a consenting adult might choose to use.
And since infanticide is the low bar, suicide should most assuredly be legal.
You’ve changed my mind, legalize all of the above, so long as infanticide is a civil right, drug use, suicide, and prostitution are positively pedestrian by comparison.
If, however, we make such things legal, we should also first repeal the 14th amendment as we currently understand it, and we should also reform the tort system as well.
We should do these things first, because a reasonably prudent person might argue that they see no problem whatsoever in discriminating against such people as would participate in drug use, prostitution, and infanticide, while we are at it. A reasonably prudent person may fear for the safety of their families in such a society, and I definitely think each state would have to make their own call on all of this legalization.
I would think more unintended consequences may include the arson of locations providing such services within 100 miles of their towns. I would think that the advocates and users of such services, while well within their legal right to do such things, may in some circles be seen as a clear and present danger.
I was watching the 5PM news tonight, this very evening, and a man was stabbed on a Seattle Transit bus while with his two sons, and some family from out of town. The perp had been causing trouble for some time on the bus, harrassing passengers and making a scene prior to the stabbing. This family was only trying to get off the bus and leave this threat to their rudder.
The perp apparently took offense and stabbed the father in the chest.
Seattle Transit, concerned that you might see such a thing as a deterrent to riding their busses, wanted us all to know that there were ONLY 67 violent assaults last year committed on Seattle Transit busses.
That’s, of course, more than one incident per week. My wife and I just laughed. So taking the Seattle Transit is like playing an assault lottery where on a weekly basis some random family may have their father stabbed in the chest, or some variant there of. Your odds, of course, are small, but we’ll have this drawing weekly, and more often during the holidays - that’s when people start feeling blue.
Imagine downtown in a country where black tar herione use, or any other drug for that matter, was LEGAL.
Now, if all of these things were legal, I think eventually that would embolden the advocates of such things to infer that legality was the same as general social acceptance.
I’d love to speculate on whether that 67 assaults number goes up or down, but from a law enforcement perspective, you’ve just changed the mandate. I think you’d find attorney’s that could twist Murder 2 into voluntary manslaughter due to the fact that the crime was committed while under the influence of a narcotic. We’ll seek help for these poor wretches, and remind people of the bad old days when gangs used to roam the streets killing indiscriminately.
I have news though. When you put these gangs out of business, they are going to find another line of work, and it won’t be at a McDonalds.
The gangs will steal from people to replace their income stream, and worse, and the junkies will still steal from people to buy another bag of rock, even if it’s Uncle Sam selling it, because he’s going to want his cut, no matter how low the price is, and he’s not going to pass it out with the Food Stamps and the five pound blocks of cheese.
Woe betide the guy selling the rock at one of Uncle Sam’s dispensaries after midnight - if he sells it to someone who’s already high, and the guy kills somebody, then a lawyer will sue him civilly after he’s locked up criminally for involuntary manslaughter. If he decides NOT to sell it, then he may end up getting shot, right? Poor guy selling the rock is going to take his chances and sell the rock, because he took this job part time for the extra dough to send his kid to school and he’s not going to get killed for holding a $5 rock from some skell.
There will be a group of people willing to wall their city and patrol it to ensure none of that gets in. I think there will be more than a few that will agree.
I don’t think libertarians have thought all of this through.
Needle Park in Zurich is one thing. Imagine such a thing in a society of 700 million people. I can’t.
I get and accept the short term academic argument, but like all academic arguments, its only as strong as its assumptions.
Economists assume gangs will just break up and go away. They’ll find legitimate pursuits. They assume that junkies can be managed with the savings we’ll realize from the recovered WOD money. This assumes, of course, you’re willing to admit that these junkies won’t get sicker more often than any other medicare dependent.
This assumes legalized prostitution will actually decrease the amount of STD cases in a given population (it doesn’t, of course, because since sex in all its forms is legal, and therefore socially acceptible in certain places, there is more unprotected sex going on.)
So, to make a very long story short, if we decide to legalize drugs, prostitution, suicide, and continue to believe that infanticide is a right, then we should declare the Constitution null and void and start over with something like a parliamentary system.
Jefferson or Franklin commented on the system proposed by them and pointed out that it can only work for a moral people. Clearly they were right in the criticism of their own system, because its not failing today, it has already failed. Our elected officials spend more time figuring out new ways around to violate your rights than they do to protect them, all in the pursuit of your safety and protection.
You could legalize all those things, but if you don’t give people who cannot live in such a society some sort of compensation, there will be violent reaction to such a thing.
Look at homosexuality, it is victimless but yet there are so many victims - from discrimination suits to AIDS patients to increases in sexual abuse of children by their fathers.
Now we are looking for a few good gay men, and we don’t even know where and how we can berth them in a 60 person berthing bay on a ship without massively violating the privacy of those poor homophobes who feel weird showering in front of men that may fancy having anal sex with them someday. They’ll get used to such a thing over 9 months deployed in the West Pacific away from their wives and kids defending freedom and their way of life. They should suck it up a little. After all, its not as if they are ACTUALLY having anal sex with you. They are only doing it during the 4 to 8’s in the forward crew lounge. Stay out of there and you won’t have to deal with it.
All of this liberalization comes with costs that equal or exceed what we pay to battle gangs.
These are the days of the end of the glory of the United States. They found Uncle Sam dead in his hotel room with a half eaten pizza, the top button of his pants had popped off long ago, and there was a needle stuck in his arm.
The two hookers that woke to find him dead between them commented on what a shame it was that such a well meaning guy like that should die so suddenly. “Sammy was so passionate about defending people’s freedoms, and he lived what he preached. He left behind a couple of wives and about seven kids though. Sammy was a freedom fighter, but responsibility was never his long suit. I hear he was only a month away from gender reassignment surgery too. He may have been much more at peace with himself as Aunt Samantha. All in all, he meant well, and it wasn’t like he was committing a crime or anything. He just overdid it . . . .”
This is a nicely written and passionate post, but you fell in the end to the same illogical trap that any statist argument invariably does. You take the example well past the limits of libertarianism, and into anarchy, then use the results to show that libertarianism is bad, when you're really discussing anarchy.
Child endangerment is still child endangerment. Your second amendment rights don't mean you can store a loaded revolver in your child's toy box and be free of any responsibility if the child uses it. Having legalized drugs doesn't mean it's defensible to store it next to the Play Dough and crayons. Sure, some irresponsible person might do that. They might also accidentally shoot their child, drive around with them without seat belts, or let them play unattended in the swimming pool.
Abuse is still abuse. The right to harm others is not a libertarian one, it's an anarchist one.
The question is, does legalization prove an overall net gain for society, not an absolute gain in all aspects. If you consider the pros of the drug prohibition (militarization of the police, eroded freedoms, encroaching police state, drug cartels, destabilized governments, corruption, thousands of dead a year) vice what we could achieve by spending that drug warrior money on education and treatment, it's really a no brainer. The Drug War failed. The idea that the occasional 3 year old might get killed by a careless junkie ... well, that probably already happens, because people already do as many drugs as they like. That's not a justification for a dozen other offenses against life, liberty and prosperity that the Drug War inflicts.
Drug cartels have no place in a world where drugs are legal. Drug gangs may not like it, but it's not economically feasible to move a legal substance. Not much call for bootleg bathtub gin, is there?
Drug legalization can and should come with the same stigma as smoking. Warning labels on the pack. Government programs to drive it into unpopularity. Education and stigmatization are the only weapon that works. It's taken decades, but tobacco use has fallen off dramatically in America. It'll take decades more to get the same drop out of narcotics. Until we bring drugs into the light, we can't discredit them socially like we have tobacco, and our society will becoming increasingly less free under the boots of SWAT enforcers.
All I have to say to you is one word: Portugal. Read their story with decriminalizing heroin. They have fewer addicts now.
Almost every reputable free market economist that has studied the drug problem has agreed with me that the war on drugs produces substantially more harm than benefit, not just economically, but in the loss of civil liberties. I am in good company with men like Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Walter Williams and Jeffrey Miron. Let’s just try it. The federal government has no right to tell us what drugs we can or cannot take while at the same time forcing us to accept abortion on demand. If a woman has a constitutional right to kill her baby, then I have the right to smoke heroin. I don’t want to, but I have that right. My rights come from God, not the federal government.