The only reason such an inhumane black market can exist is because no one is allowed to produce it legally. I would argue regulators are responsible for the harm caused by the trade.
If I outlaw [drug], I'm not responsible because you kill someone trying to sell [drug].
There is a common trope that criminals sit down and decide what crime they will commit, and decide that drug dealing is the best one. In fact, that is backwards; if the TAM of crime is cut by 10x, then there are fewer jobs, and at the margin some will stop. And in the other direction, if there is no longer easy money to be made by selling drugs, then fewer would find their way into the drug business in the first place.
See prohibition in the USA for a natural experiment that supports my claims here.
That's exactly the thing though isn't it. Marijuana is (was) illegal, and has VERY LITTLE amount of violent crime related with its market. Making something illegal isn't enough to induce violence alone. So the [action] of (making drugs illegal) itself alone isn't enough to make [consequence] of (additional violence) to be a certainty.
Or, consider the simple case. I insult you, you punch me. You clearly wouldn't have punched me if I didn't insult you. Who's at fault here?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/14/legal-marijuan...
The main reason cartels didn't take over entirely was A) there are few effective barriers to production, B) the low density of the product favors domestic supply, and C) making high quality product is time consuming and logistically complicated.
There is plenty of reading material on this.
This is untrue. The vast majority of the US drug trade is done without violence.
There’s violence in the powder/pill drug game because the profit margins are so high, creating an immense amount of competition. Sometimes you can 5-10x your money off powder, that isn’t really possible with marijuana or lsd, unless you are the grower or chemist.
There’s very little violence in the marijuana and hallucinogen markets.
> There’s violence in the powder/pill drug game because the profit margins are so high, creating an immense amount of competition.
All 3 of those drugs are powders, so no, I didn’t forget those.
If you bought some Chinese fentanyl and made “heroin” I bet it’s closer to 95-99% net, imagine having a money machine that spit out 20 dollars for every dollar you put in. No wonder people kill each other over drugs.
I was going to argue with you. Something something... not everyone is that bad. But then I considered all the harm large corporations do... Shit man wtf is wrong with humans?
We end up with a world where normal human behavior is stigmatized, and once that happens there’s no meaningful way to actually discuss what should be stigmatized.
Let's say:
I have a choice to outlaw drug X or not. I can infer with near certainty that this policy will lead to a black market run by violence that gets people killed. Nevertheless, I outlaw drug X. People get killed.
What responsibility do I bear?
I honestly don't know, but neither "none" nor "100%" sounds right to me.
You bear no responsibility. Everyone must take responsibility for their own actions.
I have a kid, I raise him to the best of my ability, and commit no egregious mistakes. He grows up and murders someone. Am I at fault? Obviously not, just because I'm a part of the equation, doesn't mean I also should be assigned blame. If I didn't have a kid, [person] would still be alive. That doesn't mean I'm responsible.
edit: blame isn't exclusive; everybody can have 100% of it. Although IMO blaming children for what they've done (however you define the age of majority) is almost entirely scapegoating. You might as well convict a dog or a pig as an adult if you would convict a 13 year old.
The laws prevent relying of the police in protecting your business with violence. The law creates jobs where violent people excel but those same violent people would not necessarily be violent without it, they may also be really good pianists, it just doesn't pay as well.
If you pass that law knowing full well that it will create a violent black market, you certainly are responsible when it does.
100% agreed.
> If you pass that law knowing full well that it will create a violent black market, you certainly are responsible when it does.
I'm not sure you could say knowing full well. At least not when the laws were enacted. And knowing that it could create a black market, isn't the same.
Also, if your calculations also lead you to believe that you could control the market, keeping the violence to a small minimum. You're at worst responsible for a small mistake in calculation. Not the violence that you were unable to predict.
The argument of who's to blame currently is the people with access to all the information who still refuse to act.
This calculation seems negligent. Like, I could shoot you in the face, and it wouldnt be my responsibility if you died. I could only know that it's a possibility that you could die, not that you would definitely die
Drugs do destroy lives, and cause real societal harm. But it was never as destructive as what making it illegal has been able to achieve.
Ironically, the obverse task -- trying to create a molecule that acts on similar neurobiological targets as an illegal drug but doesnt get people "high" or look like a molecule from an illegal drug -- can be similarly fraught. The flagrant example is BIA 10-2474, an experimental drug meant to target the endocannabinoid system in a roundabout way: not by directly activating receptors, but by inhibiting an enzyme that degrades the endogenous chemicals that activate endocannabinoid receptors, which would, ideally, have similar effects as directly activating those receptors. A trial of it killed one person and irreversibly and severely neurologically damaged a few others. This isn't to claim that FAAH inhibition is doomed to failure, just that safely messing around with sublimely complex neurochemistry is difficult; adding constraints like "must not make people feel high" or "must not look like Prohibited Molecules" makes it needlessly harder.