[PeterPrinciple]

Your assumptions involve a free market. If the penalty for drug use and sales was death, what would happen?

In fact if the penalty for speeding was death, how many speeding tickets would be issued?

Because of the nature of man, there is no easy solution. But history does teach us some things. We might look to prohibition and say it was a failure if looked at in isolation . But if we understood the times, the whole system of the time, it changed society. There was tremendous per capita consumption, and moral degradation at the times began a generational movement that raised the moral stature of our culture. Yes it went to far but look at the big picture.

We are more than just economics.

I

[NobleFree]

If the penalty for drug use and sales was death, what would happen?

Drug dealers kill each other all the time, yet the drug trade continues; our system of trials, presumption of innocence, and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments could never make more than a marginal increase in the existing threat to life.

We might look to prohibition and say it was a failure if looked at in isolation . But if we understood the times, the whole system of the time, it changed society. There was tremendous per capita consumption, and moral degradation at the times began a generational movement that raised the moral stature of our culture.

Actually, the nongovernmental noncoercive Temperance movement that preceded Prohibition accomplished most of the change.

[babble-on]

Surprised to read a post in favor of oppressive totalitarianism here, but there you go.

[pepsionice]

If you go and ask the cops the relative price for cocaine, and rate it over forty years (since the Reagan era)....nothing has changed the pricing level. With all of the billions spent on police and foreign assistance to disrupt the traffic...the pricing remains virtually the same.

If you can’t disrupt the flow or pricing, then the only objectives left are to take customers out of the mix...mandating they spend 90 days in rehab each time they are caught with any cocaine in their system...or you make the stuff yourself and sell it at 10-percent of what the dealers make (driving them out of business real quick).

[nathanbedford]

if the penalty for speeding was death, how many speeding tickets would be issued?

Only one.

[grumpygresh]

“If the penalty for drug use and sales was death, what would happen?”

Every drug user and dealer would fight to the death. And we know that a cornered enemy fights the hardest.

Then we would have a real war. The Feds wouldn’t like that and the protection racket money, money laundering business, political payoffs would drop off fast. You also wouldn’t be able to fed the prison slave labor system.