Just check google news occasionally for news on the drug war in various countries. You'll find that, despite barbarically draconian policies and practices, the drug trade lives on. My point is a reductio absurdum; that, even if Americans, Canadians and other 2nd world, industrialized countries were willing to go to those extremes, it still wouldn't work.
Prohibition of any comodity for which there is a steady demand always fails and, in the course of failing, always creates a black market. That's a hard, imutible rule of ecconomics. The more vigorous the enforcement efforts, the broader, more violent and more lucrative the black market.
When I look around at the drug scene today, I'm also concerned. Since our state established an area drug taskforce a couple of years ago, things have predictably gone downhill. Violent crime is up. The local prison is overcrowded w/ former breadwinners sleeping on the floor. They were over budget by a million dollars last year and the media has been silent on that problem since.
And the result here in town, the focus of the effort? The poor users now have to lug their butts all the way to the next town 2 miles away and pay a little more for lower quality product, violence is up, homelessness is up (especially among women and children), police corruption is up and property values continue to stagnate. We're actually missing the housing boom that most of the rest of the country is enjoying. That sucks! I was rather counting on that!
In other words, we have (predictably) all of the problems associated w/ prohibition and none of the promised benefits. That should not be too surprising. That's what always happens.
So, where do you look for a good example? The only good example I know of is our own history. Prior to the New Deal in general and the Harrison Narcotics Act specifically, we had drugs aplenty, freely sold at retail outlets and even through the Sears catalog to anybody w/ a nickle w/o a Rx. At that time, Bayer sold aspirin and heroin for the same price. And we had addicts, to be sure. But we had no drug crime. There were no drug gangs. There were no gnangland shootings or kids used as corriers and snitches.
And, most notably, we had no more nor fewer addicts than we have today. None. No difference at all.
So, why are we doing this again? Why are we funding the drug war in Thailand? Why are we airial spraying reformulated Agent Orange all over Colombia, Peru and Bolivia again? Why are we threatening sanctions against Mexico? Why are we sending DEA thugs to arrest bedridden terminal patients at gunpoint? What are we supposed to accomplish by it all?
If experience is any teacher and our leaders are not total idiots, they must like havning a black market, a booming prison industry, our courts and prisons overwhelmed to the point of collapse and absolutely no benefit to anyone else. Cause that's what we've always gotten from prohibition. I know for a fact that many people have made sure that our governments know this. And yet we persist.
Then again, we're still working that old Manifest Destiny saw all over the planet, too. Maybe they are just hopeless religious zealots and are, therefore, incapable of seeing what they're doing.
I am married, not Buried !
-- Steve Webb
