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Comment by lossolo | Hacker News Reader

What about people that are involved in illegal drug industry after legalizing drugs? Most of them know only how to deal drugs, know only crime, they will need to find new way to make money and probably it will not be a legal one. So i don't know if it's better that someone stay on corner and sell cocaine to people that WANT cocaine, without (in most cases) hurt anyone else in the process OR make that person steal, extort etc.

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> Most of them know only how to deal drugs, know only crime, they will need to find new way to make money and probably it will not be a legal one.

This entire sentence is constructed of wild, unsubstantiated assumptions, strung together one after the other.

There's no part of this that resonates with my experience of the world, nor with the apparent fact pattern of the end of prohibition in places where prohibition has been materially ended.

On some level the premise of your statement is not totally incorrect. As a result of legalalized weed, It has been reported that Mexican cartels have moved to other sources of revenue such as kidnapping [1].

One of the main goals of legalization is to starve black market actors of revenue. Extortion and kidnapping don't scale nearly as well as dope; therefore they are orders of magnitude less profitable.

1.http://fusion.net/story/108575/how-mexican-drug-cartels-are-...

The beauty of drug dealing (from a criminal's perspective) is that it's easy and profitable - there's a high demand from customers willing to spend a lot of money on drugs, and enforcement is very poor (judging from the ease end-users can buy drugs). Prostitution is very similar. So, if you legalize all businesses with which criminals easily earn a lot of money, a lot of them will be economically incentivised to start participating in legal businesses.

And the alternative ways to make money for a self respecting criminal are getting harder every day. Cars are more difficult to steal, people use a lot less cash, you have CCTVs everywhere, now the police even collects DNA for a robbery. I can't think of an obvious substitute to drug trafficking for these criminals. I would be also ready to bet that Tinder must have made a dent in the prostitution trade!

But not all drug traffickers are Tony Montanas, there are legions of petty criminals, or even workers who make money on the side dealing drugs.

They could always open a bank or become a hedge fund manager...

That's, to the extent it's an issue at all, a short term problem that you need to accept at some point if you want to stop creating new criminals of that sort through drug prohibition.

And rehabilitating criminals in the criminal justice system becomes easier when drug-war-induced overcrowding of the prison system is reduced.

> without (in most cases) hurt anyone else

Surely you don't think the only victim in the drug trafficking industry are actually drug users?

I am pro legalization but I would never see a drug user as a victim. No more than an alcoholic driving a car is a victim. The flip side of freedom is responsibility. The state will not make decisions for you, and therefore you are responsible for your own decisions. It's not like if the long term effects of drugs aren't well and widely known.

One of the biggest problems with drugs is the addictiveness. You seem to have no problem with addictions, so let me inform you. It fucking sucks. Your entirely of being is focused on getting to that next respite of peace that only some substance seems to be able to provide. Goals? Fuck em. Job? Who cares. Commit crimes for cash? Absolutely.

The problem with hardcore drug use is that it literally strips you of your decision making capabilities. Many people describe it as a secondary being within their body, for damn good reason.

The only reason I ended up 'normal' and not an addict is that I had the support system in place to deal with the underlying issues that caused my reckless behaviour, before they led somewhere I had no coming back from.

My addiction started with Adderall, prescribed by a doctor.

I agree but once the drug user is addicted it is too late. Addiction as a result of a treatment is a different matter. But the responsibility is for a user to chose to consume recreational drugs in the knowledge of the large risk of addiction and long term effects on the brain. These risks are widely known, and there is almost not a single movie that doesn't depict drug users as junkies. People should be free to take their chance nevertheless but I don't see them as victims.

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