Legalization of "Hard" Drugs

[Stargazer]

On 11/9/2020 at 1:08 AM, The Nehor said:

Yeah, the drinking per capita is still not that different but the distribution is different. There are a few alcoholics, a few who drink a lot, and then a lot of people who drink occasionally or not at all. Those who drink a lot skew the numbers. I should have said the median drinks per person has gone down, not per capita.

 

Another outcome of Prohibition was an increased scope in criminal enterprises. Of course they existed before then, but just as the War on Drugs has turned Mexico into a hotbed of criminal cartels, having a commodity like alcohol (much more socially acceptable than drugs, incidentally) as a product made the Mob into a very profitable enterprise. Previously they had to restrict themselves to services, like prostitution and protection rackets, which have inherent limitations.

As you may know, I live in southern England, and there is a long tradition of violent smuggling gangs down here. The smuggling was extremely profitable because of the heavy import taxes imposed by the British government. A gang local to where I live was the Hawkhurst Gang. Back in March, the wife and I spent a couple of nights at one of their headquarters, the Mermaid Inn in Rye. We stayed in the room alleged to have been the room stayed in by Queen Elizabeth I when she visited the town around 1560! 

[The Nehor]

20 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Another outcome of Prohibition was an increased scope in criminal enterprises. Of course they existed before then, but just as the War on Drugs has turned Mexico into a hotbed of criminal cartels, having a commodity like alcohol (much more socially acceptable than drugs, incidentally) as a product made the Mob into a very profitable enterprise. Previously they had to restrict themselves to services, like prostitution and protection rackets, which have inherent limitations.

As you may know, I live in southern England, and there is a long tradition of violent smuggling gangs down here. The smuggling was extremely profitable because of the heavy import taxes imposed by the British government. A gang local to where I live was the Hawkhurst Gang. Back in March, the wife and I spent a couple of nights at one of their headquarters, the Mermaid Inn in Rye. We stayed in the room alleged to have been the room stayed in by Queen Elizabeth I when she visited the town around 1560! 

Very true. Organized crime took off due to the new opportunity. I suspect though that with the ties to trade unionists and government figures during the era would have accelerated the growth of organized crime even without Prohibition but Prohibition undoubtedly increased the amount of growth.

[Meadowchik]

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this:

Quote

 

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

 

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

It's quite possible America has gone down many wrong roads altogether and has a lot of turning around to do.

[The Nehor]

8 hours ago, Meadowchik said:

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this:

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

It's quite possible America has gone down many wrong roads altogether and has a lot of turning around to do.

Another horrible step was the missteps in the 1980s that led to the opioid epidemic. They could have all but wiped it out but it would have hurt private enterprise too much.