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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Legalising drugs != Making them cheap as chips on every high street. We can legalize drugs while applying significant barriers to entry such as high taxes, regulated distribution, user registration, medical oversight, etc and still suck the profits out of the illegal market. This has been done already and it works.

Criminalising everything to do with drugs has utterly failed. That's just a flat out fact, the huge damage done to your friends demonstrates this. The damage to society has been staggering, not just the effects of the drugs themselves but the criminalisation of huge swathes of the population.

It's time to try something different.

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"and still suck the profits out of the illegal market. "

Not really.

If you create a big series of regulations and taxes around drugs - then there will still be a huge secondary, black market.

The 'war on drugs' will therefore continue - even as you 'legalize' drugs. Double whammy.

Take cigarettes - a much milder health concern:

"the total U.S. tobacco market represented by illicit sales has grown in recent years and is now between 8.5 percent and 21 percent." [1]

So now you have to 'fight a war on drugs' - and deal with the massive health-care crisis from the considerably more people who well get hooked on opioids, barbiturates etc..

[1] http://sites.nationalacademies.org/dbasse/claj/us_illicit_to...

I am also wary of the mass legalization of illicit drugs, mainly because of the already huge problem my states has with opiates. I think it's a good goal, but should I really believe that the "regulated" decriminalized drug market is going to be that much better than the already heavily regulated prescription drug market? Maybe once the US can get it together with it's painkiller problem I'd be more inclined to believe in total decriminalization. I would like to see how a system like Portugal's works with opiates in US before I'd hop on board for the whole shebang. However, it seems unlikely to happen since it's already hard enough to get tax payers to sport for Narcan let alone the drugs themselves.

Neither legalisation with regulation, or the current system of blanket criminalization is going to solve the problem of dangerous narcotics. These drugs bare here to stay. The failure of the war on drugs, which was supposed to solve the drugs problem, proves that.

So given that eliminating drugs completely has utterly and comprehensively failed, at huge financial and social cost, and given that legalization and regulation has proven to be effective time and time again, the question is which approach is best at managing the damage these drugs do and protecting individuals and society?

>If you create a big series of regulations and taxes around drugs - then there will still be a huge secondary, black market.

The experience in places where this has been tried is that the supply in the black market reduces and prices significantly increase. So yes, the evidence is that legalization does a better job of restricting black market access than blanket criminalization.

Note that having a legal market doesn't suddenly mean the police stop busting drugs gangs. What it means is that drugs gangs not only have to face exactly the same law enforcement crackdown they already have, but also have to compete with legal, medically regulated access to drugs. It's a double-whammy for them.

> If you create a big series of regulations and taxes around drugs - then there will still be a huge secondary, black market.

this point is under appreciated. i see new taxes and regulations spring up on legalized cannabis in California. and, just like with the high taxes on a pack of tobacco cigarettes, some of the market goes underground. (except, with cannabis, it hasn't had time to fully emerge from the underground in the first place!)

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