Drugs are bad.
I’m very much an anti-drug person; but anyone can get them. In a recent 5-year period, heroin overdoses went up by 40% despite the War on Drugs having been going on for 40 years. It’s not working. The unintended consequence has been that the street price mark-up is robust, and dealing drugs has been taken up by urban males. The difficult job of controlling this has fallen to the police, and there has been strife on both sides.
Market forces are stronger than legal ones – a lesson we should remember and use to our advantage.
Urban males who have been shuffled through the failing urban schools, now have arrests on their records and cannot get good jobs. Our prisons are full of people with drug convictions and drug related gang activity. This all leads to a bigger problem of poverty and all the problems that come with it.
Unintended consequences always outnumber intended ones. By ending the war on drugs, (taking the market off the street) we can remove the alternative of dealing drugs to make a living, and leave no other option for urban males but finding a good job.
Omg Larry! Very well said! And I believe you are 150% right:)
But Larry, how would the us fedgov justify their huge surveillance police state and all the trappings of Orwellian government control that go with it? The war on drugs is really a war on freedom. You’re right, it has failed to stop drug trafficking but it’s been a resounding success in violating your constitutional rights.
Larry, a very well thought out and written article… but, where will the market go if we take it off the street?… it’s too profitable and too much in demand to go away… we obviously can’t stop the supply and we can’t legalize Heroin and other addictive drugs… the only option I see is to focus the war on manufacturing but how do we do that? …
I am also an anti-drug person. It’s great that you and I and many others recognize there is a terrible problem going on in the world and how it is affecting our lives. The real problem is how to fix it! It certainly doesn’t appear that the efforts of our law enforcement people seem to be making much of a difference. I would agree with the comment made by Jim, in that the war needs to be waged on the manufacturing end. Stop the root source and you stop the problem. Here in our community there has been a war placed on the manufacturing of meth and it has made a big difference. Our Fed’s should follow there lead on heroin and cocaine manufacturing and see how that works. Another perspective might be, if the end user finds the need to chemically modify there personality to survive in the world, then they probably will find another way to do that with other types of experimental drugs. So is the solution to stop the drugs or help the people who use them deal with life?