Hacker News Reader

Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

> it's a victimless crime

Not always, not for the worst drugs out there. Heroin and meth addicts regularly commit violent crimes as a direct result of their addiction. You can say that the actual violence is the crime, but if there is a common root cause for a lot of crimes, doesn't it make sense to criminalize the root cause?

View on HN

Heroin and meth addicts regularly commit violent crimes in order to procure more heroin/meth. The only reason they need to is because prohibition makes those drugs orders of magnitude more expensive than they would otherwise be. The only reason the drug cartels engage in ruthless violence is because they operate outside of the law and thus outside of the government's monopoly on force. Criminalization is the root cause of the crime.

It's not a direct result. Also no it does not, if it makes matters worse. So if you ban heroin, price will go up, addicts need more money, plausibly the criminality will go up, not down. Which is exactly what happened. The quality will go down and dealers/smugglers will optimize transport costs by using more effective and deadly drugs like fentanyl. So now the ban is directly harming the population of addicts, their relatives, and even first time/ recreational users.

And alcohol, no stranger to huge amount of crime, is still legal. As it should be, but this perfectly shows the hypocrisy around drugs.

no, because poverty is largely what causes those (and most) crimes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com