Iron law of prohibition

This assumes anti-prostitution is about sex workers and not moral outrage at sex being easily available outside marriage.

For drugs, anyway, it's because it has nothing to do with harm reduction.

The war on drugs was created solely out of white supremacy, and now continues because it is a tremendous flow of cash to those in and adjacent to government that directly profit from a huge (mostly minority) prison population.

It has nothing to do with drugs, just simple racism and money.

> Of course the person who takes drugs and spends years in hell because of them has a very particular view of them.

Have you talked to many recovered drug addicts? Everyone I know who has been either addicted or seen friends go through addiction advocates for compassion and harm reduction, not stronger prohibition.

The article didn't seem to mean in terms of the quality within a drug type. It looks like is more about the value density of a drug. So if Amsterdam cracked down on Marijuana, then there would be more potent cocaine, crack, meth, etc. Even the strongest marijuana pales in comparison to the 'potency' of the hard drugs.

You don't offer any citations or evidence or proof for any of your claims. How do you know what kind of alcohol is available in Islamic countries? How do you know the pot in the Netherlands is as strong as you say (given you say "they are supposed to..." without any evidence)?

The point is that prohibition increases the mean or median strength, not the maximum available.

One argument I've heard in favour of legalizing cannabis that it would increase the supply of weaker strains, reducing the potential harm to users.

The analysis in that article showed little to no thought about side effects. Sure, the mobs existed before hand, both Irish and Italian. However, they were initial police forces for the ghettos. What prohibition did is give them a cash infusion, which in turned allowed them to expand. The same is true in modern times with various cartels.

As to the benefits, look at cigarettes. We haven't banded them. Instead we've pushed the idea that they are terrible for you. We've put up graphic ads of organs. We've had olympians with mouth cancer talk through machine. As a result the consumption of that product is down.

Do we want to have the hamfisted power of the state come down by law on people or do we want people to self-select and improve? Prohibition gets you the former; indoctrination and propaganda get you the later.

Published in 1989, near the height of America's anti-drug fervor. The article also undermines itself by acknowledging organized crime became "more visible and lurid during Prohibition," and then hand-waving past it with the bland truism that "it existed before and after". Well of course it did. While I agree history lessons are often applied overly-simplistically, I'm inclined to disregard as extremely biased the intended conclusion of the article, which is that we should double down on drug enforcement.

In Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan notes that the potency of marijuana did in fact increase tremendously from the 1960s through the 1990s (when the book was written). As did the growth rate and yield, and as the time-to-harvest fell.

Selective pressures, biological or otherwise, are ... a hell of a drug.

I think hashish actually used to be more popular in the old days. Cultural references to it were certainly more common in mid-20th-century contexts. After the brief decriminalization movement of the 1970s, many states had reduced penalties for marijuana while lumping hashish in with harder drugs which may have shifted consumer demand towards the green stuff.

These days you see dabs, which serve the different purpose of being easy to conceal while being used, which was never true of hashish.

No comms. The internet is the backbone of changing that, but it's messaging apps and smartphones that have connected even the guys living on a mountaintop in India with everyone else. Now the guy who liked to make some oil for knife hits with is buddies out in Cali, posts a story about that. Viral amplification leads to interest, research, which is made possible by the internet.

Now however, you've seen it go from kids with butane cans blowing themselves up, to an industry involving CO2 extraction and lab-grade fractional distillation of individual terpenes. This would simply not have been possible without the ability to rapidly share information between people all over the world.

It selected for things like higher THC:CBD (which is a bad outcome for users), smaller plants, autoflowering plants, shorter growing times, feminized seeds (all easier to grow illegally).

You are halfway there. Before prohibition in America the go to drinks were beer, cider, and wine. When prohibition came into play people were charged NOT on how much alcohol they had on them but on the volume of the alcoholic beverage they had. Punishment for a pint of whiskey == punishment for a pint of beer.

So in other drug markets where it was a naive measurement (weight volume) that ignored the active ingredient drug importers and venders are incentivized to create stronger and stronger products as a hedge against getting busted.

Anecdotally a friend in Saudi told me that beer from the informal markets costs more than Johnny Black.

So while you are correct that quality does fall often in illegal markets arguing that they have no effect on the potency of drugs would be wrong

How to miss the point. Methyl was only added to alcohol that was legally manufactured and sold, not home brew or bootleg alcohol. Smuggled drugs are smuggled pure in order to maximise the amount got through, then adulterated before its sold. There's no point risking your life smuggling 30% soap suds across the border, when you can add it on the other side.

> possibly add bitterants

No need, most party drugs already taste disgusting.

Even scarier we're starting to see Carfentanil, which is many times stronger again than Fentanyl, and is only used for sedation of large animals like elephants.

> I wonder what the effect would be of a mixed strategy where only the relatively safer and lower-concentration forms of a drug are legal?

The interesting solution is very high taxes, with the tax based on the amount of the substance. Then higher concentrations have higher taxes.

The optimal tax amount is just below the amount that would cause the tax-evading black market to be larger than the legal market. And then prosecuting for tax evasion doesn't cost the other taxpayers anything because every prosecution pays for itself through the back taxes and penalties, without having to put anybody in prison.

> where only the relatively safer and lower-concentration forms of a drug are legal?

Partial legalisation of that type is likely to be counterproductive to achieving such a shift to safer forms of drugs. Trying to enforce (laudable and correct) principles such as "lower-concentrations are better and safer" with the coarse and brutal tool of the criminal law tends to be counterproductive -- there are far better tools of policy-making.

As far as the criminal law and the police goes, they should keep their nose out of drugs except for pathological cases where there's actual criminal intent -- such as intentional / grossly negligent fuckups by drug manufacturers or people non-consensually dosing others or, say, drugged driving. Besides those sorts of exceptions, it should be impossible to get arrested/searched for any drug offences.

Completely removing the selection pressures (those created by fear of law-enforcement actions such as search and arrest) towards easier-to-conceal drugs will, by itself, allow for exactly the shift back that you describe. Combining that with regulatory requirements for labelling, dose accuracy, and lack of impurities will allow people to safely use drugs in controlled accurate doses.

That would actually work just as well as full legalization.

Except some people would still take too much of that substance and die, and then the banheads will be at it again.

That really depends on how low you go.

If you are hankering for some whiskey, diluting it to the strength of beer or wine simply won't do. That said, there is good reason to avoid things twice that strong because folks die that way.

And I think similar care should be taken with stuff that is illegal. I'd not be too happy with half-strength pot, for example, but others might be. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want a strong cocaine (if that were my fancy, that is) nor do I necessarily want a hit of lsd that is doubled in strength (one can take two, after all).

The thing is this: If you go too low, folks will just buy the black market stuff anyway as that will seem like legalisation in name only. If you go too high, folks get in trouble.