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Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

Why do gangs even exist, though?

There's a school of thought that we inadvertently create terrorists by interfering in the middle east and thus motivating people to want to do us harm. And by 'we' I mean 'The United States'.

I suspect that a similar argument can be made that the illegal drug trade and gangs are fairly well correlated and that gangs arise because individuals don't derive any security from the police for a variety of reasons. So gangs are the result of police policy, not that police policy is the result of gangs.

I'm not suggesting that this is a 100% solid theory. But there's probably some nugget of truth in it.

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Gangs tend to organize around any kind of illegal, lucrative market. Smuggling (which is really what drugs and alcohol are about), gambling, prostitution, vote buying/selling, theft. Because those activities are outside the law, the law can't really regulate the market.

Then there is racketeering/blackmail, which is probably more of a problem of ineffective policing, at least as far as the "Hey, you've got a nice business here, how about you give me a cut to make sure nobody comes by [sic buy] and smashes your cabbages" variety goes.

why would they smash cabbages they already bought?

from the perspective of drug trade, gangs exist to protect the distribution- that part could be much more decentralized if it were legal

I detected a hint of "the cop is the perp and the perp is the victim" in your other post but wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. This kind of attitude is quickly disabused of when living in a poor neighborhood. Why are gang members practically suicidal? Drugs play a part, but they are not protecting their neighborhood they are trying to get a larger territory to deal drugs. As for the US going into the Middle East, it was probably a bad idea but then people turn around and complain we are not doing anything in Syria.

No, I don't think that the cops are to blame. It's a far bigger problem than that. They don't make policy, they just enforce it. Why blame policy problems on the police?

By your reasoning, though, one might surmise that ending the drug prohibition would then also end gangs, wouldn't one? The gang exists to defend illegal drug territory. Illegal drug territory only exists because drugs are illegal. Ending prohibition would make drugs legal, not illegal, and thus the outsized profits would go away. This would then make operating the gang unprofitable and it would disband or "go out of business".

I'm sure you'll bring something else up like "but drugs are bad!" or some such. But that line of reasoning works, doesn't it? Changing the subject because you don't like the moral implications of legal drugs isn't an argument.

Legalizing drugs would reduce gang violence to almost zero, but whether or not drugs are bad is orthogonal to the argument. I lost a good friend to alcohol and have relatives struggling with heroin. Just for the record I cannot believe the huge comeback heroin is making, I just don't understand. Some kind of affluenza and believing the stupid media telling them that the world is shit. I am in favor of virtually anything that reduces suffering in the aggregate.

I think the real question is "would there be a net drop in suffering as a result of legalization?" and I personally suspect that the answer is "yes".

Forgive me for accusing you pre-emptively of moving the goalposts. It happens a lot and I get tired of it. That's usually what happens once it becomes clear that legalization would end gang violence, another objection to stopping legalization for another, never before mentioned reason.

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