I don't know what the answer is for all drugs, but Marijuana should obviously be legal, so that's a good place to start. If we wait for the perfect answer to all questions, we'll never fix anything.
I worked in the MIL/INTEL world for a long time and a staggering number of really nasty things turned up amongst bags of powder all over the world. Drug networks are like VPN for physical objects. And drug producers would happily abandon that protocol for FEDEX if they could. The remaining market for moving things we truly cannot live with would be reduced by many orders of magnitude if we gave up on the drug war.
We can shut down the drug cartels in Mexico, like we did in Columbia, but the drug trade will be next be passed to another country like a baton. The next country to be promoted as a drug state will be Afghanistan with it's fields of poppies fulling the growing heroin demand.
I'm all for Proposition 19, but legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic.
Drug smuggling out is fairly widespread and finances bad stuff; very little else is smuggled in or out, except for a bit of quasi-legitimate reimport of stuff on the Pakistan border to get around absurd Pakistani tariffs on stuff like cars, and moving fighters across the Pakistan border.
Child (or general human trafficking) isn't a viable market: Afghanistan can't afford to smuggle children in, and Afghan children mainly are consumed in the domestic market. ("woman for breeding, boy for pleasure, melon for sheer delight"). Very few Afghan women become prostitutes outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan (unlike Iraqi women in the neighboring states/Gulf).
There aren't many migrant workers moving across the borders either, mainly due to a lack of an economy in any of the neighboring states. Iran and Pakistan have a fair number of refugees, but they are fairly static, and don't actually work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran.
Eliminating opium as a profit source would eliminate the weird choice between befriending farmers as local allies AQ/Taliban vs. destroying opium (and thus making those farmers into enemies or enemy sympathizers for purely economic reasons), and would definance most of the Taliban (if not AQ, still financed via Saudi recreational jihadis).
Sounds like an argument for legalizing drugs.
> legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic
Why not? Legalizing alchohol did seem to stop the flow of moonshine.
Touché in regards to the commend on moonshine. But it is well document that The Netherlands, who have a long standing liberal view on prostitution, are a leading destination of human traffic[2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_liberalization [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherlands...
So American, lets just go and make a mess where nobody called us. Anyway, if you were so successful shutting down the cartels in Colombia, how come it is still the world's leading producer of Cocaine[1]?
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
who said that it is the cartels who produce the cocaine nowdays? How about government for example?
Taken literally, this seems extremely unlikely.
The largest cocaine bust was on the order of 48,000 pounds. Drug smugglers, on the high end of things, have access to submarines and secret tunnels that cross nation boundaries.
Child trafficking happens, and it the overlap between the major drug movers and the child traffickers is significant -- because they are both serving black market commodity on the level of distributors.
There are, however, a whole lot less people out there interested in buying children compared to the number interested in buying pick-a-substance. The reduced amount of profit available to high-level black-market distributors when you take away the market for drugs would, in my opinion, make it harder to find people willing to smuggle children.
In a lot of places (US Southwest especially), the penalties for drug smuggling are far higher than for escorting groups of people -- if you get caught, you might go free if it's just a group of workers. The humans can transport themselves on foot. The humans can be held hostage afterward and you can try to extort more money from their family; if a $20k kilo of coke is held for ransom, no one is going to pay more than the discount to an alternative kilo for it.
Detection and logistics, mainly. Weapons are a special case, since if we're still talking mainly about the US/Mexico border, I would expect that weapons do not move in the same direction as drugs, and expertise in smuggling one way across a border may not translate to smuggling the other way.
Nuclear material will require at least some shielding to avoid detection, and it would seem to me that a well-implemented detection system would notice abnormally quiescent cargo as well. That would mean that you have to carefully tune shielding to present the right level of radioactivity, rather than just piling on more to make it as low as possible.
Smuggling people of any kind requires life support; there are a lot of tactics you wouldn't be able to use without losing them. For some types of human cargo, the smugglers might find some losses acceptable, but angering terrorists by losing a container of their buddies might not be healthy. In any case, it seems that there's already a lot of people walking across the border into the US, and I'd expect that if there were an obviously safer or more reliable way, they'd use that. Lots of assumptions, there, of course.
Consider the cargo container. A large metal box. It'll hold several tons of drugs, or just as easily 50lbs of radioactive material and 1 ton of shielding. Or 5 people and several jugs of water.
It's not clear to me what the challenges are with smuggling radioactive material, or how good detection protocols are. That doesn't mean I can't think of any, or solutions to same, but it means that I expect there are at least some consequences I'm not thinking of, and it's certainly not as easy as some sealed, inert cargo.
However, my question was a bit more pointed and I think you haven't addressed it.
The justifications used in your post are equally applicable to cocaine and to other drugs. If different drugs have different answers, why didn't you (or why don't you) explain why your argument is limited to marijuana.
OTH if you strongly believe in the philosophy outlined in your post, what is stopping you from endorsing similar initiatives for cocaine and why would cocaine potentially need a different answer ?
[edit] I see a lot of good responses, but all of them special-case marijuana (e.g. marijuana is less addictive than heroin). This is fine, but Paul's post has flowery language about freedom and all of that language is applicable to heroin as well. Paul's post doesn't make the case for special-casing marijuana. On the contrary, if he denied the principles of "freedom" for cocaine, it would undermine his post which is all about "freedom" and nothing about marijuana being less dangerous than cocaine etc.
Cocaine was legal before it became illegal. What results il-legalization of cocaine have produced? More crime and more funding for crime organizations - check. What else? Look at the history of opium as well. And don't even start about LSD - the drug my reading about have discovered it having only positive benefits so far.
You mean the fact that it was legal in China about 500 years ago and it nearly created an entire country of addicts?
Vicodin (another form of heroin) is legal, yet there is still a black market for it.
I would also be interested to see "your reading" where LSD only had "positive benefits".
If you're using Vicodins legal status (requires prescription) as a comparison then pot and cocaine are already legal.
Right..so why fight for other forms of it then?
Also, it didn't stop people from selling it on the black market (like so many proponents would like you to believe)
Not that I'm arguing for or against just enjoying seeing the opinion of other HN readers.
I believe in legalization, but this this is false (in the US at least). Pot is a Schedule I prohibited substance, Cocaine is a Schedule II prescription drug, and Vicodin is Schedule III. Each schedule carries with it a large difference in how available and legal a drug is.
"legal" is a spectrum, and vicodin is much more legal than pot or cocaine are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Substances_Act#Sched...
You are right that cocaine is more strictly controlled than either of the other substances, but the original point I was making is that you can't use vicodin as an example of a legal substance when it's not freely available.
An entire country of addicts was nearly created by a Big, i'd say Huge, Business + Government Corporation - Britain's East India Company. These and other addictive substances have existed through the history of human species. They become a huge problem only when big money and/or big power gets involved.
>Vicodin (another form of heroin) is legal, yet there is still a black market for it.
that your statement doesn't make sense - Vicodin is legal for prescribed purposes. People having Vicodin prescription don't buy it at black market. Vicodin is illegal for all other situations, and in these situations people go to black market.
For me, the cost of marijuana prohibition is too high and the benefits too low. Based on what I've seen in my life in those around me, I do think smoking marijuana a lot is a bad idea. I can't scientifically determine if it makes you spacey or if spacey people are drawn to it, but it doesn't seem to be a good sign overall. But, there are a lot of other equally dangerous or even more dangerous things that we don't legally prohibit, and while I think it's probably bad for you, it's not that bad for you. Consistent alcohol abuse certainly seems worse.
The other deciding factor for me personally is the addictiveness of a drug. Marijuana may be addictive, but I've seen people successfully quit, even without seeming to exert that much will power. I am much less inclined to legalize the drugs that snare you on the first hit, for two basic reasons: First, the very fact that they do ensnare you, and second, because if we legalize them today, the drugs that could be designed under a legalization regime are even more dangerous. I don't think I want to release the full power of a free-market economy on the task of producing a chemical that makes you feel good (and better yet requires repeated purchases); that's just asking for trouble.
Careful observers may note that tobacco as it stands now pretty much fails my test for legalization. As a practical matter it would have to be grandfathered in, but yes, I actually do think nicotine's demonstrated ability to snare you physiologically on the first hit is actually pretty dangerous and may really be on the wrong side of my personal legalization line.
It also has little to do with the debate over prohibition, since prohibition has done little to curb consumption but certainly incentivized stronger strains.