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Comment by D9u | Hacker News Reader

This is a good start.

By removing the profit motive from cannabis production it helps to reduce cartel receipts, helps to reduce smuggling, and separates cannabis from other, truly harmful, drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamines, and heroin.

That so many US states have already made provisions to either decriminalize medical use, and or recreational use, by individuals, serves to illustrate that cannabis is nowhere near as dangerous as governments have attempted to portray cannabis as being.

There is absolutely no reason for the DEA to classify cannabis as a Schedule One drug when legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco are responsible for an exponentially greater amount of negative social impacts when compared with cannabis.

Case in point?

Amsterdam.

Just look at the statistics regarding "hard" drug use in the Netherlands, as well as incarceration rates, and homicide rates.

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/netherlands_v_us#sthash.ta7j...

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I remember the Netherlands had so few criminals that it had to shut down several prisons and lay off hundreds of staff members and started importing criminals from other countries like Belgium on a contract basis because of the lack of people to incarcerate. [1]

This is the country where you could just drive into its capital and buy every strain of cannabis you can possibly imagine and different strains of psilocybin magic mushrooms without so much as a howdy and an ID if you looked younger than 18.

[1] http://vorige.nrc.nl/international/article2246821.ece/Nether...

I am not clear how there is a causal link between the two. Are you saying that legal weed/shrooms causes crime to go down? Or are you merely pointing a correlation?

It seems obvious that if drugs such as cannabis are held to the same standard as decidedly more deadly, legal, drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, then the accompanying crime statistics are bound to be less.

Pot heads aren't known for their violent tendencies, as compared to alcoholics.

Anytime you make something that people like to do legal, crime will go down as those people aren't criminals anymore. And a lot of people do weed. It's directly causal. More importantly, you destroy a huge profit center for organized crime, weed is one of the big cash crops.

Making the use of marijuana legal means that there is no longer the crime of 'using marijuana'. You can't get a more direct causal link than that.

It's quite obvious that when you decriminalize something, the crime rate will go down, since the people doing that thing are not criminals any more. (n / m) < (n - 1) / m.

But even apart from that (because it's a cooking-the-books level trick, really), decriminalization of drug use has other effects that lower crime rates. For example: keeping up a heroin habit is hard when you need to pay black market rates (€100 / $150 per day). So often, these people need to resort to burglary, robberies or prostitution. Regulating the market drives the prices way down (you could have retail prices for a brick of coke that are the same as that of a package of coffee if you'd let the market work unrestrained), which causes people to not have to resort to crime to fund their habits.

(note: not advocating unregulated heroin or cocaine markets, just stating the obvious socio-economic implications of prices within the bounds of affordability for regular people with a regular job, leaving aside their ability to do said job)

> (n / m) < (n - 1) / m.

Looks like you got that reversed

Whoops you're right - I meant (n - 1) / m < (n / m).

Amsterdam has its own problems namely hordes of drunk and high people from UK and US being loud and obnoxious. As a person who drives through the Netherlands sometimes, if you just want to chill out and smoke a nice joint in the park I recommend Eindhoven.

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