So wouldn't this utterly destroy the claim that ceasing the War on Drugs would collapse the price of illegal drugs and thereby drive the drug dealers out of business?Um, no? It's not even clear how you arrived at that conclusion. How many criminals deal legal drugs like Nicotine or Alcohol? If the prices are high, they're high because of taxes. The people who make money off them are your neighborhood grocery store and gas station. If drugs are legal the "drug dealer" would be no different then a liquor store today, or a wall-mart. It would drive the current drug dealers out of business, the same way the Mafia no longer makes a ton of money on moonshine.
I hope we're not ignoring the fact that maybe crack became more prominent because it's way more fucking addicting than most substances on the planet.It's the same thing as cocaine, which had been around for a long time. I doubt people suddenly 'discovered' crack in the 1980s. People must have known how to make it before -- it's just "freebase" cocaine.
Except that that is the claim that, if true, destroys the argument against the War on Drugs which claims that the high prices resulting from reduced supply are precisely what draws the dealers into the market.Well, first of all one random claim from one random person does not 'destroy' an argument, and second of all, like I said you don't seem to understand what the argument is saying. The argument is that, if drugs were legal, the current drug dealer networks would be completely superfluous. People would just buy drugs at the supermarket, liquor stores, whatever the same way they buy other products. And beyond that, if somehow current drug dealers are able to compete by going legit, they would no longer have any reason to resort to violence. They could have legally binding contracts and sue each other. They would have every incentive to cooperate with the police if some one threatens them, and so on. They would be no different then any other small business person today.
I do, however, know several people who have switched to (or temporarily substituted) synthetic marijuana, which is still legal and available at any head shop in my state, when the real deal wasn't available. (Either that, or they drank more alcohol.) As a friend said, "I swipe my Visa and done -- no meeting up with sketchy dealer guy." And synthetic appears to have much greater health risks than nature's own:I know a guy who's really into pot. He'll go for a long time not smoking it, then go back to smoking it, whatever. Lately he told me he'd started smoking the synthetic stuff. And he said it was actually way more addictive then normal weed, and also he thought it was really messing up his body. But the fact that it was so risk free kept him at it, for a while anyway, then he went back off of them.
That can be said about just about anything that is enjoyed to excess. The problem is that when we start saying that, say, cocaine is "addictive," then we open the door to such notions as "sex addiction" and "internet addiction," which are qualitatively different medically from dependencies like alcoholism or opioid addiction.Well, I think that's actually the difference between "addiction" and "dependence". People can get into situations where they want to stop something, but can't, all the time.
I think most people who end up using hard drugs habitually are starting, even before they get high the first time, at a disadvantage: a difference in brain chemistry or some other reason that they don't experience life even in a moderately pleasurable way. That "some other reason" might be situational (frustration or boredom or anger at current life circumstances) or it may be something else.Yeah but that's totally unfair. Some people just have less self control then others, it doesn't necessarily mean you're unhappy, or whatever. I'm sure motivation plays a roll -- the stronger your desire or your need to stop doing something, the easier it might be. Take Junk food for example. Lots of people know they need to cut back, but because it's so easy to just take an opportunity to just grab some at those low ebbs of self control, it's hard to stop. Cigarretes are another example. People who smoke and eat junk food aren't depressed or unhappy all the time except when they're stuffing their face or smoking a cigarette. I would imagine people addicted to harder drugs are similar.
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The economics just don't make sense in this piece. It's not as if the "War on Drugs" was entirely a war on marijuana, or as if there has ever been a time in the US when marijuana was actually all that difficult to come by.
posted by yoink at 11:07 AM on January 13, 2012