Shedding light on the dark web
economist.com
economist.com
From the buyer's perspective you now have to go into business with some often unsavory people just to get high. From the seller's perspective you have to make sure that the buyer isn't law enforcement and also not someone who is going to rob you because you have zero legal recourse. It's really a shitty experience for everyone involved. Considering how shitty that experience is it says a lot about people and their desire to take drugs that the market continues to exist and basically never stops serving the customer.
It really seems like when confronted with something inevitable, like drug use and sales, the effort to prevent it may be more costly and damaging than just allowing it to happen in a more controlled environment.
However, it creates many thousands of very well paid jobs for police, lawyers, prison employees, etc. - you know, the people that create the laws.
Long ago I might have considered that there might be some justification for these laws (or anywhere there's rules really), but nowadays when you wonder why "the way something is" is, it's easier to just assume someone (or usually a group of people in collusion) is running a little rent seeking scam, and you'll probably be right most of the time.
Have you considered that these laws are still in place simply because it's the status quo?
Politicians voting on laws and drafting new ones must ultimately answer to their constituents. While the vast majority of things fly under the radar, "pro-drug" support is enough of a charged issue that supporting drug legalization is guaranteed to be used against you the next time you're running for office.
Like it or not, logic be damned, drugs will continue to be illegal because the majority of Americans do not support drug legalization. The tides are starting to turn in some states on weed, but the average American outside of the most liberal states doesn't even support that. Good luck convincing them to legalize cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, or any "harder" drug.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/...
Again, I'm not necessarily supporting this point of view, I'm only trying to be reasonable.
" “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.” "
- John Erlichman, on why he and his boss created The War On Drugs
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
"Around 1910, the Mexican Revolution was starting to boil over, and many Mexicans immigrated to the U.S. to escape the conflict. This Mexican population had its own uses for cannabis, and they referred to it as “marihuana.” Not only did they use it for medicinal purposes, but they smoked it recreationally, which was a new concept for white Americans. Even the term, marihuana, was unfamiliar to them, as they called it cannabis.
Southern states that were receiving the Mexican immigrants became concerned with this growing population. Newspapers ran headlines speaking of the “Mexican menace” or the “marijuana menace” and claimed Mexican men were going crazy from smoking marijuana and were killing people. El Paso, Texas became the first U.S. city to ban marijuana in 1915, and city officials started rounding up Mexicans who smoked marijuana and had them deported."
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/02/the_real_reason_marijuana_is...
However, what the moral panic (and its often racist / political dogma as mapt pointed out) created was drug policies that were overly punitive, and even from the user angle often treat rug addiction itself as a criminal problem, not a medical one. Unfortunately, too many "leaders" are too willing to exploit certain sentiments (ranging from outright racism to a mere desire to protect their kids from harm) and create reactive prohibitions that often do more harm then good.
Ironically, one of the biggest and most lethal drug addiction epidemics right now in America concerns prescription opioids (such as Oxycontin or fentanyl). Because it is a legally prescribed substance, I find media on this much more sober than the moral panic hysteria articles I remember from 1980s and 1990s media on most illegal drugs.
The "emotional bias" for illegal drugs definitely is still around though, and it unfortunately is not entirely rational. One fun example from the other angle: a few years ago, somebody created an overpriced brownie, added melatonin (the same melatonin you can buy at the herbal medicine isle for sleep, that has no LD50 that anyone has figured out yet), and marketed it with "head shop" type graphics for the "head shops" crowd. Cue moral panic here and elsewhere: http://www.nbc12.com/story/14168427/cg-3-linedangers-of-lazy...
That article you link claims the two biggest offenders have spent $35 million between 1989 and 2015. Google spent $10m in 6 months last year - http://www.wired.com/2015/07/google-facebook-amazon-lobbying....
You can't infer much other than it's not free to promote your ideas to your government.
It's a marble halls & suits non-conspiracy lobbying thing.
I am not making that claim about criminalization, and I would not make that claim about legalization. However: yes, if and when legalization happens I will likely be making cynical comments about marijuana lobbying.
Civil asset forfeiture laws could fall subject to the same "status quo" problem as drug laws. Even then there are states who are taking steps to change them (e.g. CA SB 443 revote in Aug 2016), which could also be said about marijuana decriminalization.
Remember there are CAF laws for much more than just drug dealers. Most states have CAF laws for drunk drivers, drag racing, animal fighting (cock fighting and dog fighting), gambling, and wildlife (fish and game) poachers.
To totally focus on drug dealers for CAF laws is pretty myopic. Most people support CAF for a myriad of things. Do you think it was right to seize Michael Vick's dogs and then rehabilitate them and find them homes instead of putting them down? Should a guy who's poaching deer lose his guns and license and face stiff fines?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/25/suppo...
The original banning of marijuana is ridiculous and riddled with racism and xenophobia:
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/02/the_real_reason_marijuana_is...
This is just marijuana. Drug legality and policy is mired in racism and money politics. It is just as conspiracy-theory as it sounds.
I would hasten to say this. I totally support a lot of the legalization for medicinal purposes but there's still way too much of this happening:
Driving while high on marijuana causing spike in fatal accidents - http://www.today.com/health/driving-while-high-marijuana-cau...
Police: Driver Was High Before Crash That Killed Massachusetts State Trooper - http://www.necn.com/news/new-england/DA-Massachusetts-State-...
Driver was high on marijuana when he killed NE Portland cyclist, police say - http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2015/12/driver_...
Driver accused of crashing into marijuana dispensary while high on marijuana - http://www.oregonlive.com/happy-valley/index.ssf/2016/06/dri...
Teen driver admits to smoking marijuana before crash killing 3 - http://www.kiro7.com/news/teen-driver-admits-smoking-marijua...
Sorry but that old adage that people who smoke weed just sit on the couch and eat potato chips and people who smoke don't hurt anybody is a load of BS. These are not simple accidents, these are people getting high, driving and killing people, and its happening a LOT more frequently.
I do believe in legalization for medical purposes and feel there are huge benefits for people who need it - but clearly there are still issues that need to be worked out. And save your "Drunk drivers kill more people very year" and "Alcohol is way worse. . " arguments. Just because we already have one dangerous legal drug, does not make it right to legalize another one. Heroin and Cocaine are also schedule I and II drugs. Are they any less dangerous than weed?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/06/tennessee-bus-drive...
http://www.thedailyjournal.com/story/news/2016/07/11/driver-...
http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/local/boone-county/2015...
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/dangers-texting-while-d...
This type of an argument, "Sure that's bad, but this is WAY worse!" is a horrible argument. The point is, they're both bad and need to be addressed. Saying its ok for something to be legal since there are worst alternatives is a poor argument IMHO.
Furthermore, take care to notice "newsworthiness bias", which is when disproportionate media interest in an issue makes it seem more prevalent. Also, "if it bleeds, it leads" has been a journalistic aphorism for a long time. Watch out for articles in the next few months about injuries caused by "Pokemon Go" specifically, rather than something more generic and mundane, like "mobile phone games".
As some organizations with political clout have vested interest in continued prohibition and some influence of mainstream media, my opinion is that there is a slight bias in favor of running news stories that tend to portray marijuana use in a negative light. Of course, there has always been significant bias in the counterculture in favor of portraying marijuana as harmless or benign.
For a benchmark, acetaminophen causes roughly 450 deaths/year (in the US) from acute liver failure, as a verifiable medical statistic. The CDC believes about 88000 deaths/year (in the US) can be attributed to ethanol, from all proximate causes. Perhaps 480000 deaths/year (in the US) may be attributed to smoked tobacco.
Clearly, society has some tolerance for fatalities from legal drug use.
If only driving under the influence of cannabis were illegal in those states... er.
Out of curiosity, do you have data to back this up or point to some source?
That doesn't mean they're off the hook though. They are biased, and unlike the general public, they have a professional responsibility to account for that before acting to influence public policy.
Yet Guatemala pays with blood. It enforces ridiculous money laws. It has to do all this and it's a total net negative for the country. They get no benefit, other than appeasing the US. Is this a conspiracy? Either way it massively benefits the US, which gets a way to keep these countries preoccupied with false issues, keep them rife with violence, an so on, preventing them from becoming a credible threat or competition.
I'm willing to bet many other countries are in a similar position. Mexico would probably get cleaned up overnight if they gave Monsanto an exclusive license for pot and opium cultivation. (I'd bet on Monsanto corpsec over cartels any day.) Hell, these countries could even nationalize production if they weren't to bad at everything they do.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/19/otto-molina-wa...
All of which is false, but is perpetuated by those in powers - both by outright propaganda, and by (selective) enforcement of these laws.
It's more than that. The biggest opponents to the legal pot movement in CA this year are the police and prison guard unions.
And the ads those orgs are running are just FUD. In some cases, they are outright lies. Actually, in most cases, they are outright lies.
Those lies are seen by a lot of people are are the basis of Americans not supporting drug legalization.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...
If we look at this prohibition as an initiative not for reducing drug use but an initiative for policing people, I would say that it does work as intended.
The individual cells of an organism don't conspire to keep the organism alive and functioning - they simply do their individual job and the system maintains itself organically.
There is no conspiracy, there is just a system that has an interest in staying alive, a system which is composed of millions of people, with trillions of dollars moving through it.
Change and innovation are so hard with these huge issues.
Not to mention customs officials. In Australia recently 300 customs officials were under investigation for corruption, getting paid to allow drugs into the country.
There are also literally zero neighbourhoods where people are not using illegal drugs, because the truth that you don't hear about from the police and jail workers unions is that there are many high functioning productive members of society who are also illegal drug users.
This might blow your mind, but not everyone who takes illegal drugs is a junky sucking dick for crack.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...
This was never about health issues. It is a verified conspiracy against a large part of society.
So let's assume that we legalize 'drugs' for everyone: can I now buy pot and meth and acid and heroine and what not complete with shooting accessories from 7-Eleven? Are we seriously proposing that people in masses would be able to responsibly consume these newly available substances. If there is doubt, maybe we add, similar to obtaining a drivers license, a class of responsible substance use for kids to their high school curriculum. A 12-step program from mild to mind blowing experience that runs from elementary to the high school graduation. Which begs the question, do we make them free for all ages, subject to parents discretion, or maybe no drugs for minors? Or high schoolers? But then again, that would make it all less-free.
These blanket statements about legalizing drugs made by arm chair i-dont-know-what equate to trolling, victim of which I feel I just fell ;-)
Colorado has seen pot smoking go down for kids which is counterintuitive, right? Not really. I've got kids in high school and they tell me that pot is easy to get (I don't live in Colorado). In Colorado, the illegal trade has dried up, thus making it harder, not easier for kids to get it. There's no reason to believe it would be that different for other drugs.
The huge increase in commercial cultivation operations make it much easier for illicit operations to grow more than they could before without getting caught.
To be clear, I am for legalization. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though. A lot of the economic changes will smooth out over time, but it's up to us to find solutions for the new wave of social issues.
If I visit nearly any 7-Eleven after 10pm, I could buy any of these substances, it would just be in the parking lot instead of inside the store. And I wouldn't be able to tell if it was fake or cut with something.
Alcohol is far worse yet advertised liberally and treated near-mandatory in some social situations.
There's no issue restricting things based on age. That's already done for many things. So I think you're straw-manning here.
1: http://www.goodrx.com/methamphetamine?drug-name=methamphetam...
Which raises the question of how to go about doing this. Treating substances which short-circuit the brain's own reward and pleasure centers as illegal to use doesn't seem like it's quite working. I'm willing to explore other options.
The alternative need not be abosolutely unfettered access and sale. There are substantial parts of the world in which alcohol, for example, is available and for sale. From government-owned-and-operated establishments only. With great power comes great responsibility, etc., etc.
Taking active measures to discourage abuse, and to provide full, free, and effective treatments to that end would help a lot. As would requiring strict liability to producers and retailers of harmful goods, substances, and services for the damage cause. Say, automobiles, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and guns, among others.
And yet the world did not end when alcohol became legal where it was before illegal. Minors aren't allowed to use it. People of certain ages are allowed to use it with parents discretion. Many schools have classes about alcoholism and responsible drinking.
Most people are fine with that.
On the other hand, many high schoolers and below are prescribed controlled doses of amphetamines.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Given that it's chemically addicting and steeped in cultural history, I'm all for the Pandora's box approach of scratching it off as a loss and leaving it.
We don't need more dangerous, chemically-addictive substances mass introduced to the public. At some point the priority of an individual's freedom to abuse substances and harm their selves is outweighed the lives they take from those around them in society at large.
And no, Marijuana and MDMA are not chemically addictive.
If you toss alcohol, you will need to substitute some other mode of social interaction with fewer or less dangerous chemicals that will get folks out of the house and meeting new people. There are many, many people out there today who never would have existed if at least one of their ancestors had never become drunk on ethanol.
You can't just chuck it without first supplanting it from all the niches it may currently fill.
Bars used to be a primary social scene, but that's changed drastically in the last decade and doesn't mean they need to preserved.
As to your points, alcohol is already legal. Which one of your points applies to other drugs but not alcohol?
The Drug War approach is built on a few axioms:
- people who take drugs would not do so if drugs are unavailable
- making something illegal prevents it from happening
- people who take drugs are somehow less moral or weaker or "bad" and deserve to be persecuted
All of these have been disproven.
Addiction is going through the roof, drugs are available (at a high cost and unpredictable quality), the jails are full and we are building more jails.
Numerous well-regarded medical professionals & researchers have been shown this to be false.
Here is an short article discussing David Nutt's (former chief drug adviser to the UK government) work in this area: http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...
The intent is certainly to make it more difficult, specially in the open.
The premise is, if you want to do drugs, you're on your own. There's so much risk. You'll be dealing with bad people. You have do it in secret. etc.
Does making it more difficult to get drugs prevent people suffering addiction from getting them?
This is precisely one of the presumptions I was addressing.
Also, one of the reasons people fall into addiction is that they feel "on their own".
> people who take drugs would not do so if drugs are unavailable
They can still do them, just, away from me (and my children, family, neighbours, community, etc) to a big risk to themselves. They alone should bear that risk. They should be looked down upon to deter other people from trying.
Making something super risky does, believe it or not, deter people. Not all the people, but deters quite a lot of them.
Alcohol prohibition never worked. Drug prohibition didn't either -- at least beyond its goal of mass-criminalizing and incarcerating people of color and low income.
Trying to prevent drug use via prohibition is very much like preventing pregnancy via abstinence and prohibition of contraceptives.
Sure, it deters one chunk of people, but at the same time encourages a large amount of, arguably more risk prone (think teenagers rebelling) , people due to the allure of forbidden fruit.
The people you manage to discourage are likely the people that wouldn't have had issues with drugs in the first place, even if they were partaking.
Teenagers in say, Japan, wouldn't so much rebel by using drugs.
There are tons of less dangerous ways for teenagers to rebel. If kids in your community are rebelling by using dangerous drugs, you have a much more deeper problem.
Because teenagers in Japan most certainly do do drugs, both legal and illegal, dangerous or not.
It's interesting that you use the phrase "dangerous drugs", I assume you meant to write "illegal drugs". I would argue that making any drug illegal immediately makes it 1000x more dangerous than it is inherently. You seem to be ignoring the fact that many legal drugs are very very dangerous, and the statistics certainly agree with that. Alcohol? Cigarettes? Society definitely tolerates a certain level of danger in their legal drugs. It seems almost totally arbitrary which drugs are legal and which are not, certainly not correlated with a level of "danger".
> Because teenagers in Japan most certainly do do drugs, both legal and illegal, dangerous or not.
I'd bet you a lot of money that the problem there is much much smaller than in the US. They have their own problems though. No society is without problems.
> I'd bet you a lot of money that the problem there is much much smaller than in the US. They have their own problems though. No society is without problems.
So what is your point? You're saying community in the US is breaking down, and that's causing drug problems?
How do you suggest the US deals with its larger drug problems than Japan that are caused by communities breaking down and social relations deteriorating, if not by dealing with its drug laws?
1) By making something illegal, it makes it more attractive to people looking to rebel because it makes it an "edgy" forbidden fruit. For example, teenagers are stereotypically rebellious and making a drug illegal may encourage drug use instead of discouraging it.
2) The people that wouldn't use drugs due to them being illegal likely wouldn't have issues with drug abuse even if they were legal, though they may occasionally use them.
Not easy problems to fix.
Addiction is a whole different story, my point was related more to kids partaking in "sex drugs and rock and roll" to piss off their parents, fit in, and be "cool/edgy".
A surprisingly large amount of arguments against drugs are circular:
Addiction is bad -> make it illegal -> look at all the legal trouble addiction causes -> Addiction is bad.
And most of them get even sillier if you replace the drug being demonized with the word alcohol.
pretty different! Both the addiction, how easy it is to get addicted.
I've got a challenge for you, start using heroin, then decide to stop, like a casual drinker. Report back your experience!
But yes, don't mess with your GABA system unless you like seizures; and don't mess with your opiod system unless you like being miserable.
First time you do heroin, dose once everyday for 3-7 days and you've got yourself a very painful withdrawal ahead of you. Once you're no longer heroin naive, it could take only 2 doses in a week's time to send you back into withdrawals.
Just because it's easy for you to refrain from drinking alcohol does not mean it is easy for everybody. Some people have a serious problem to the point where the only way to guarantee they don't abuse it is to not even be in the same room or house as the stuff.
His point remains: Heroin is intrinsically different from alcohol, given the ease with which a new user can become addicted after a just a few uses. We should be careful of false equivalencies when discussing how the law should treat these two substances.
Bringing up those people who've already reached the level of 'serious problem' that you describe doesn't address his point.
While it feels like the easy way out, do not confuse drug legalization as supporting the abuse of hard drugs.
There's two or three of us left, yeah.
that just see the destructive effects of an incredibly addictive dangerous drug as a problem you could solve using the free market.
That's not really an accurate view of what (most) libertarians believe. I don't feel like writing a huge monologue here, but I'll say this:
1. Libertarians are, in general, opposed to the initiation of force to achieve social/political/whatever ends, because we consider initiation of force/violence to be immoral.
2. Within that framework, most libertarians also support a free market approach to economic issues for a variety of reasons, both moral and consequentialist.
3. The goal of libertarian approaches isn't to "solve problems" like drug addiction using free market techniques, or anything else. The goal is to eliminate the use of initiation of violence. Whatever else happens as a result of removing initiation of violence from the equation is seen as being either a. acceptable, and/or b. a problem that needs solving through whatever means can solve it without initiating force/violence.
Now, libertarians will argue, quite rightly, that the free market does provide the best solutions to many issues. But we don't actually claim that the free market is the be-all end-all that magically solves all problems. We just think a world based strictly on voluntary cooperation, despite whatever other problems might endure, is a better world than world predicated on use of force/violence.
I'd like to nitpick the word "requires" (vs "is best served by")
> everyone would agree drug addiction is a problem that requries some government intervention.
Personally, I believe that it is absolutely theoretically possible to address our societies drug addiction problems without any government intervention, if only we as a culture were willing to do so.
Look at obesity rates.
People get addicted because their life sucks. How can the government make their life not suck?
I think drug use is more like payday lending. Payday lending a shady industry, people who take advantage of it are often not too well off, and sometimes people make terrible decisions and screw up their lives, to the profit of the lenders. (or drug dealers.) But people are always going to want to borrow money for short periods of time just like people are always going to want to use drugs. No government policy is going to make everyone in the world happy, but we can try to minimize the number of miserable outcomes with some careful intervention.
Case in point: school lunch in Japan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vwC51FxP10
I have an eery feeling that something like this will never fly in the US. People will complain about 'muh freedom'.
Nobody has said that here. So until one of those libertarians comes in and comments, let's keep the discussion to what has actually been said?
Remember, opiates are legal now, with a prescription.
I wonder, hypothetically if there was a drug where the effects were as pleasurable as I assume heroin must be, but with no physical addiction or nasty side effects, would people still be against it?
What if, in the future, your cellphone could emit a frequency that generates pleasure in your brain, but as soon as you turn it off, you are back to normal. Would that be made illegal?
Could it be simply a moral objection to unearned pleasure that people are really against?
It seems kind of hypocritical to me to say it's acceptable (or at least not illegal) for people to consume drugs, but not protect them by giving them any ability to know what it is they're actually taking, because they would still have to buy drugs of unknown strength from shady characters, manufactured in dodgy underground labs from ingredients of unknown origin.
Maybe decriminalization of consumption, as well as government testing labs that can identify unknown substances for people? That opens up it's own can of worms, of course.
It's a difficult conundrum, but our current system is the worst possible option. Almost anything would be an improvement.
Indeed, even the hygiene part could use some open innovation. Right now IV users mostly have to repurpose insulin needles (interchangeable thin needles (like 30G)) are rare. Long-term IV use is geared towards hospital use.
Removing the medical industry gatekeeping of who gets to use opiates would blow open the marketplace.
Needles aren't illegal, are they? Can't people just buy them?
In some places it's illegal, as it's "drug paraphernalia". In the UK there was even a story about a kid being denied buying teaspoons since he was underage (patients often cook drugs in a spoon before injecting).
So IV patients right now have a very hard time. If they are lucky, they can convince a pharmacy they are diabetic and need insulin needles, in some cases.
Legalizing would mean stores can sell and make money, and would start to reduce the stigma.
If there's any better evidence that the drug wars have nothing to do with public health or safety, I haven't heard it. That's bananas.
Treating opiate addiction as a public health, not criminal justice, issue requires some of the tens of billions spent on the war on drugs to be diverted to health and social care.
Really?
All other things being equal, you'd have to agree that it does, wouldn't you?
Going to jail is definitely a disincentive. Otherwise the people who choose to do illegal drugs would just do it out in the open, with no regard for the threat of incarceration.
I don't think that many people would do something with the only reason being because it is illegal. Would you? There has to be some other incentive, for example the drug makes you feel good, or is an interesting or novel experience? Otherwise, why do it?
Do you count skyrocketing murder rate and gov't-poisoned hooch in your metric for success?
Obviously alcoholics can't just "not drink", but prohibition was never going to be a pleasant experience for them.
Soa decrease in deaths of cirrhosis is beneficial, presumably as it extends lives. Is the extension of life an inherent benefit? If you lived for 10,000 years in abject misery would that be better than dying in 6 months? Clearly, it's conditional.
Life is complex, every life is unique, so you can safely assume you aren't going to make things better when you try to violently protect people from themselves. If you were arguing about the drop in domestic abuse that'd be one thing, but cirrhosis from alcohol consumption is self-inflicted. Universally falls squarely in the "mind your own business, jack" space.
See also the very entertaining book by Daniel Okrent.
This stuff is documented, so you don't actually have to deduce it from first principles.
Didn't all those things happen in other countries which didn't implement prohibition? Are you sure it wasn't a natural evolution of society rather than a direct cause-effect from making alcohol harder to get?
I don't know about that, didn't lead poisoning go way up?
1: http://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/5975605/alcohol-prohibition-pois...
Prohibition ruins people's lives, when they are sent to jail, marked as felons and excluded from the job market. We spend billions and billions of dollars enforcing these laws. And believe it or not, many people just enjoy drinking, and do it without any negative consequences to themselves or others. You can't ignore all of that and say prohibition is justified just because it (arguably) improves things on a single dimension.
I think that the kind of people who would agree with prohibition at any cost are followers who won't think for themselves, have no knowledge or interest in history or hopes for a better future, and would have happily extolled the virtues of drug legalization if that had happened to be the policy at the time.
These people seem to attribute no value to civil liberties at all.
The answer none of the people who are for the criminalization is why should a victimless action be considered a crime.
Why should otherwise law abiding citizens be criminalized for something as innocent as smoking weed. Even harder drugs would be much easier and economically better, dealt with if it was legalized.
Weed is illegal on a federal level in the US. Companies selling weed in states have a hard time operating. Companies selling methamphetamine are treated no differently than any other pharma company.
1: http://www.goodrx.com/methamphetamine?drug-name=methamphetam...
If government legalizes drug usage it would solve hell lot of problems in society and it will create far more legitimate arguments to force government to get rid of their control on other aspects such as surveillance, soda-tobacco taxes, prescription drugs etc.
At this moment there are far too many commercial and vested interests involved in all this shit and radical reform wont come easy.
There's the sellers with suspiciously low prices and good ratings; which are always fake just like Amazon.
Buyers/Users of drugs will ALWAYS buy/use drugs, illegal or legal.
It is an interaction between humans of Earth, no government or entity, no system or blocks will ever stop it. Shut down the internet, it will continue. Short of a massive purge of life, drugs will never go away.
If you somehow...were able to shut down the "darkweb", it would move into something else that authorities are unaware of.
On a whim, if I desired, I can purchase any drug I want, probably get it today, without using the internet.
The war on drugs has no end. Stop trying to pretend you (the lawmakers) have never tried an illegal substance. Even the most powerful public figure in the world (Obama) has admitted to using illegal substances at one point in his life.
Government: It's time to sit down, shut up, stop wasting the taxpayers money and leave it alone.
Economist and social scientists would see this as a failure of markets, and do some analysis to figure out a balanced approach to create some sort of Laffer curve.
I think going the other direction and allowing a free for all situation with substances would be a problem too.
There is a reason why its in my interest to not have my neighbor stockpile chlorine in his basement.
The best example I can think of is the Israeli govt or the Chinese govt. Where the Israeli govt since they actually have a serious terrorism problem, do not have things like the TSA.
The other problem in the UK is old people who have been brainwashed to believe that drugs/homosexuality are terrible. Its going to take a generational purge for the political needle ( no puns intended ) to move.
What does this have to do with drugs? Maybe some extremely fringe libertarians like the idea of no substances being regulated, but a purist attitude would have to extend even to things like weapons-grade plutonium. Nobody is proposing letting people have chemicals that have to be handled very carefully without following strict procedures.
Drugs can't explode and kill everyone within half a mile, but even with drugs I don't think anyone is advocating for complete anarchy. The most radical serious approach is one where any adult is free to buy whatever drug they want, but not in some kind of "free for all". Particularly addictive drugs, like opiates and meth, might need to be sold by the state. Other drugs could be sold privately but only by professional vendors abiding by a set of regulations.
Any solution that doesn't allow people to get the drugs they want doesn't address the argument that prohibition limits people's right to manipulate their consciousness, which is epistemologically one of the most important things someone can do. The problem of drug availability attracting more users can be solved in ways that don't keep them out of reach of people who have made a well reasoned decision to use them: cigarettes are highly available, but few Americans take up smoking today.
It is not as inevitable as you make it out to be, but in a country like the US it is basically impossible to get rid of drugs. So much of the population already has contact with it. There is so much space to produce them and the borders are so large it is near impossible to secure them.
The government could still fight it, but it would be a health and human services problem at that point. Which means a lot less high stakes do anything to not get caught crime going on. It could be paid for by taxes on the drugs. There would be fewer deaths from drug overdoses because quality and purity could be regulated. Drugs with little to no long term side effects would probably become popular. Drugs that have harsher side effects and highly addictive properties would probably still be stigmatized because of their effects.
The line would get drawn the same place it does for gambling and alcohol. Occasional use by grownups is OK, if it becomes life impacting then rehab and abstinence is probably best for you.
I think the hypothetical here is that illegal activities could rise in search of money to feed drug addiction. This would come in the form of theft, robbery, etc. It's not as if no one ever stole money to buy food.
No. We have decades of experience on this from places like Portugal, The Netherlands, California, Washington State, etc. In fact, the opposite happens. The problem is that no one bothers to ever check facts before making assumptions about what will happen that fly in the face of the evidence, especially when writing laws.
> Sellers of drugs, will ALWAYS sell drugs, both illegal and legal.
Are you saying that 3,000 years from now, neohumans will be using addictive chemicals that damage their body in order to modify their brain chemistry and induce related experiences?
Can't we illustrate the uselessness of the war on drugs without resorting to statements so sweeping and absolute as to be absurd when taken literally?
s/chemicals/electric currents/g or s/chemicals/embedded microprocessors/g or whatever and then you're just debating what semantically constitutes a ‘drug’.
So… yeah, I can get behind drugs being a thing 3000 years from now. They were a thing 3000 years ago and seem to have only gotten more prevalent.
No, I wasn't at all. I simply introduced a bit of specificity into the language used, but the point I sought to clarify was related to your lack of allowance for the importance of culture and for the ability of culture to change. There is an extensive list of human behaviors whose prevalence has changed dramatically over the last 1,000 years as cultural values have changed. There is no reason to assume that its impossible to have similarly changing cultural views (species wide) of drug use.
Its simply absurd to say that drug use will always be with us. It may, it may not. What do you know of our future culture? Especially if we start to more aggressively genetically engineer ourselves?
The semantic argument you've raised trivializes important issues. There are substances and behaviors which alter mood which no serious person has suggested be made illegal (such as aromatherapy, or going for a jog). Surely you aren't assuming that future experience altering technology would necessarily be illegal, physically addictive, or damaging to the body?
See the somewhat recent media hysteria and stupidity around craigslist/similar sites and prostitution. The only thing accomplished was driving the distribution channels to other, less visible, less-easily-tracked places. Everything that was happening before is still happening now.
I don't use drugs or alcohol anymore because I couldn't control my use of opioids. I have had a very difficult time in the past 10 years because of this, and every rehab/behavioral health treatment I found myself in recommended 12 step support groups as a one size fits all solution to my substance abuse issues. It wasn't until I got into a methadone program that I was able to find some relief from my addiction and frequent relapses. Unfortunately, methadone is frowned upon as much NA/AA is favored by addiction counselors.
Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. The point is that I think addiction is the real problem we face when it comes to drugs. And two potentially addictive drugs are currently legal. I think that if enough money was allocated for medical addiction treatment, legalization could work. A lot of money could be made by regulating and taxing recreational drugs. Addicts could be kept out of jail and receive the help they need instead of falling into the trap of the criminal justice system.
http://ryancompton.net/2015/03/24/darknet-market-basket-anal...
All the parsed data is available as a csv as well. I was surprised how well substance relationships could be recovered from vendor co listings
There have been arrest of sellers and buyers, primarily due to noobish mistakes. All told, the risk for the seller is much lower than dealing with a variety of forces in the street in their local jurisdiction.
Therefore your idea becomes a war of attrition for law enforcement. Where the yield is too low to justify the cost. This is why more effort goes into shutting down the marketplaces, but even this has become a war of attrition ever since the Silk Road 1.0 bust.
The federal government operating through just one agency got 80 million in bitcoin from that bust.
The next year, the FBI required cooperation with 16 agencies across Europe in a dragnet bust that only got 1.2 million in bitcoin, with most sites being back online in a week.
The trend continues, and every enforcement action simply prompts consumers, merchants, and site providers to implement UX and security practices that they already knew they should have been using (multisig addresses instead of human escrow, use of tails/whonix, not logging in as admin from a public library, etc)
Gwern lists at least 20 active Darknet markets: https://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20survival - I don't think law enforcement will ever get rid of Darknet markets.
The important point is that every time law enforcement removes one marketplace, customers are forced to visit the next one that's still online, thus increasing their revenue, effectively strengthening the strongest competitors every time they make a bust. The weakest marketplace is wiped out by law enforcement - leaving behind increasingly resilient markets - and new ones appear all the time, adding to the number of markets at the same time they're growing more resilient.
It's a fight against evolution that I can't possible see anyone winning.
Also those nodes would be an obvious place to use extra resources monitoring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...
I flatly do not believe the claims that the images are not retained long term.
It's a slippery slope argument that could be applied to all kinds of things. People need to remember the Constitution and its foundation of natural rights, that it was created to protect those natural rights, not to establish any rights.
Whether the stuff they're talking about actually has higher THC or lower CBD is another matter.
Ross Ulbricht gets life in federal prison, no possibility of parole, and yet people are tripping all over themselves to take his place.
[1]: http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...