Similarly, anti-prostitution activists cheer that Backpage removed adult classifieds.[0] If you really want to prevent abuse of sex workers, you need to legalize the trade and bring it into the open. By driving it further underground, you just cause more harm to the people you want to save. I can't understand how people make the same mistake over, and over, and over.
For drugs, anyway, it's because it has nothing to do with harm reduction.
The war on drugs was created solely out of white supremacy, and now continues because it is a tremendous flow of cash to those in and adjacent to government that directly profit from a huge (mostly minority) prison population.
It has nothing to do with drugs, just simple racism and money.
The underlying issue seems to be that we confuse the empathy we should have with victims and their families, for reverence. We spend so much time listening to their advice, which is pro tanto going to be the most emotionally charged advice you can get. When policy is formed through pathos, nothing good can come of it except purely by chance.
It's not just drugs. At all levels of our justice system and society, we confuse the need to listen to victims and respect them, with a need to let them control policy. Of course the mother of the girl who is raped and murdered wants nothing more or less than such behavior to end. Of course the person who takes drugs and spends years in hell because of them has a very particular view of them.
We should listen to those views, incorporate them into policy, but they should not be the oracles of policy.
> Of course the person who takes drugs and spends years in hell because of them has a very particular view of them.
Have you talked to many recovered drug addicts? Everyone I know who has been either addicted or seen friends go through addiction advocates for compassion and harm reduction, not stronger prohibition.
I have, and I know mostly those kinds of people too. Unfortunately I also know plenty of the other kind, the "Drugs are literally the devil" types. Having an addiction doesn't confer wisdom, and some people get out of active addiction however they can. For some people it's a journey back to who they always were, but some... are very different.
When I was younger, I thought I had a real problem with marijuana (truthfully I had a problem with being a putz), and I went to some Narcotics Anonymous meetings. I met some great people there, some I still stay in touch with, but I met some broken, broken people too. One guy in particular had a rough life before addiction, and an even rougher one with it. He made it out alive, but that's about it.
I used to call him, "The bag of Jesus man", because he always carried around a bag stuffed with religious pamphlets, papers, books, iconography, etc. This is how he stayed off drugs, and alive, and you have to respect what he did. You don't however, have to form policy based on his recommendations, which were frankly alarming.
It's not true in Europe at least. Amsterdam (where weed is legal) has the strongest strains available on the continent. They are supposed to knock the socks off even very experienced users.
Many studies like these only focus on US data and forgets about the rest of the world so they get flawed results. The strongest alcohol you can find is from Northern Europe and Russia, where it never has been illegal. In Islamic countries, where it is illegal, black market alcohol isn't stronger than anywhere else.
The article didn't seem to mean in terms of the quality within a drug type. It looks like is more about the value density of a drug. So if Amsterdam cracked down on Marijuana, then there would be more potent cocaine, crack, meth, etc. Even the strongest marijuana pales in comparison to the 'potency' of the hard drugs.
...And of course Amsterdam is also serving much of the world (pretty much exclusively, until really recently) in terms of breeding new strains. The demand for high strength was global, even though the nexus was small, and in a legal haven.
You don't offer any citations or evidence or proof for any of your claims. How do you know what kind of alcohol is available in Islamic countries? How do you know the pot in the Netherlands is as strong as you say (given you say "they are supposed to..." without any evidence)?
Anecdata: In the Perhentian islands off the coast of Kelantan, a strictly Muslim state in otherwise generally tolerant Malaysia, the only form of alcohol available at most bars/restaurants is bottom-barrel Ukrainian vodka sold under the counter. (Although I gather a few places have finally managed to obtain actual liquor licenses since my last visit.)
> The THC levels in Dutch weed are normally higher than what you are used to. Dutch Nederweed contains about 15-18% THC, while foreign weed only contains about 7.5% THC. The THC level in hash is about 19%. So, ask for advice from the coffee shop about the type, strength and effect of the drugs. If you don’t know how strong it is, take a small puff from the joint and wait for 1-2 minutes to see the effect. Inhaling deeply is not needed for the THC to enter your lungs. The effects will last 2-4 hours.
Wrt alcohol, no I don't know that. I do have met a fair few immigrants from Islamic countries and none of them enjoyed binge drinking. Very few of them even tolerated the taste of alcohol or liked getting buzzed.
Agreed, the claimed direct correlation between strength of enforcement and strength of substance is reaching too far.
But the basic idea that there exist powerful market-forces which incentivize the production and supply of increasingly strong products when a good is prohibited seems quite logical and supported by the evidence cited in the post.
The effects of prohibition are not always easy to predict, or even know in hindsight. Many of the things people think they know about prohibition are incorrect.
The analysis in that article showed little to no thought about side effects. Sure, the mobs existed before hand, both Irish and Italian. However, they were initial police forces for the ghettos. What prohibition did is give them a cash infusion, which in turned allowed them to expand. The same is true in modern times with various cartels.
As to the benefits, look at cigarettes. We haven't banded them. Instead we've pushed the idea that they are terrible for you. We've put up graphic ads of organs. We've had olympians with mouth cancer talk through machine. As a result the consumption of that product is down.
Do we want to have the hamfisted power of the state come down by law on people or do we want people to self-select and improve? Prohibition gets you the former; indoctrination and propaganda get you the later.
Published in 1989, near the height of America's anti-drug fervor. The article also undermines itself by acknowledging organized crime became "more visible and lurid during Prohibition," and then hand-waving past it with the bland truism that "it existed before and after". Well of course it did. While I agree history lessons are often applied overly-simplistically, I'm inclined to disregard as extremely biased the intended conclusion of the article, which is that we should double down on drug enforcement.
In Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan notes that the potency of marijuana did in fact increase tremendously from the 1960s through the 1990s (when the book was written). As did the growth rate and yield, and as the time-to-harvest fell.
Selective pressures, biological or otherwise, are ... a hell of a drug.
I think hashish actually used to be more popular in the old days. Cultural references to it were certainly more common in mid-20th-century contexts. After the brief decriminalization movement of the 1970s, many states had reduced penalties for marijuana while lumping hashish in with harder drugs which may have shifted consumer demand towards the green stuff.
These days you see dabs, which serve the different purpose of being easy to conceal while being used, which was never true of hashish.
No comms. The internet is the backbone of changing that, but it's messaging apps and smartphones that have connected even the guys living on a mountaintop in India with everyone else. Now the guy who liked to make some oil for knife hits with is buddies out in Cali, posts a story about that. Viral amplification leads to interest, research, which is made possible by the internet.
Now however, you've seen it go from kids with butane cans blowing themselves up, to an industry involving CO2 extraction and lab-grade fractional distillation of individual terpenes. This would simply not have been possible without the ability to rapidly share information between people all over the world.
It selected for things like higher THC:CBD (which is a bad outcome for users), smaller plants, autoflowering plants, shorter growing times, feminized seeds (all easier to grow illegally).
Black market drug manufacturing creates adulterated, weakened, or counterfeit drugs that usually are transported as contraband surrounded by foreign substances like gasoline.
During Prohibition alcohol was manufactured to include methyl in the final product just to maim, blind or kill anyone desperate enough to drink it.
Prohibition does not make drugs hard. It makes them dirty.
You are halfway there. Before prohibition in America the go to drinks were beer, cider, and wine. When prohibition came into play people were charged NOT on how much alcohol they had on them but on the volume of the alcoholic beverage they had. Punishment for a pint of whiskey == punishment for a pint of beer.
So in other drug markets where it was a naive measurement (weight volume) that ignored the active ingredient drug importers and venders are incentivized to create stronger and stronger products as a hedge against getting busted.
Anecdotally a friend in Saudi told me that beer from the informal markets costs more than Johnny Black.
So while you are correct that quality does fall often in illegal markets arguing that they have no effect on the potency of drugs would be wrong
I'm going to guess that even if the punishment had been considered per qty volume of alcohol, all but the seller to consumer would have preferred the most efficient carrier of alcohol due to space for transport --of course, now that they have powdered alcohol[1], my guess is they'd have chosen that.
How to miss the point. Methyl was only added to alcohol that was legally manufactured and sold, not home brew or bootleg alcohol. Smuggled drugs are smuggled pure in order to maximise the amount got through, then adulterated before its sold. There's no point risking your life smuggling 30% soap suds across the border, when you can add it on the other side.
One scheme I like for the decriminalization of party drugs is to invert the ILoD: limit the concentration and dosage forms (I was thinking a beverage) and possibly add bitterants. People are able to dose alcohol quite well, despite a relatively low therapeutic index (~20).
The rise of Fentanyl, and it's more-terrifying relative Carfentanil, certainly speaks to the increase in potency that prohibition can bring. This, combined with the over-prescription of opioids, is a tragic injustice.
This principle is why we are seeing a massive spike in Fentanyl use. It's many times more potent than Heroin (and therefore many times more profitable). Unfortunately, it's killing a lot of people in the process...
Even scarier we're starting to see Carfentanil, which is many times stronger again than Fentanyl, and is only used for sedation of large animals like elephants.
A corollary to the law is that when black markets don't exist, substitution takes place, e.g. prohibited alcohol is replaced by gasoline, glue, paint etc.
> I wonder what the effect would be of a mixed strategy where only the relatively safer and lower-concentration forms of a drug are legal?
The interesting solution is very high taxes, with the tax based on the amount of the substance. Then higher concentrations have higher taxes.
The optimal tax amount is just below the amount that would cause the tax-evading black market to be larger than the legal market. And then prosecuting for tax evasion doesn't cost the other taxpayers anything because every prosecution pays for itself through the back taxes and penalties, without having to put anybody in prison.
We already put people into feedback loops of administrative fines, and jail. You really think this would play out differently? Without incarceration, how exactly do you propose to collect your money? Once you figure that out, be sure to tell all of the parents looking to collect from deadbeats your secret, they need it!
The government doesn't need your cooperation to collect a tax debt. If you owe them and you have any money or assets they just seize them, and if you don't have any money they have your employer garnish your wages until you've paid it off. The IRS does not screw around.
And the point is to deter people from evading taxes. If they're permanently bankrupt you can't collect anything from them, but they also end up on probation which means the government can search their place and finances without a warrant. If they're stupid enough to violate their probation by committing tax evasion again, even though it's now much easier for the government to catch them, now they can go to jail.
The government doesn't need your cooperation to collect a tax debt.
It does if they want to actually make a profit on collecting taxes. Those "bleed the beast" pricks, extreme LDS sects, etc... all seem to have little trouble withholding taxes. Could the government step up enforcement? Sure... but it costs money.
> Those "bleed the beast" pricks, extreme LDS sects, etc... all seem to have little trouble withholding taxes.
Those people live in isolation without corporate employment, use of financial institutions or the ability to hold title to a vehicle. Hardly "little trouble".
Alcohol and tobacco are heavily taxed many countries, with pretty low levels of incarceration for smuggling them. It doesn't seem to be much of a problem in practice. Also programs of decriminalisation of regulated drugs provision in several countries have been very successful. At this point, there's an awful lot of actual real world evidence that it really does play out differently.
> where only the relatively safer and lower-concentration forms of a drug are legal?
Partial legalisation of that type is likely to be counterproductive to achieving such a shift to safer forms of drugs. Trying to enforce (laudable and correct) principles such as "lower-concentrations are better and safer" with the coarse and brutal tool of the criminal law tends to be counterproductive -- there are far better tools of policy-making.
As far as the criminal law and the police goes, they should keep their nose out of drugs except for pathological cases where there's actual criminal intent -- such as intentional / grossly negligent fuckups by drug manufacturers or people non-consensually dosing others or, say, drugged driving. Besides those sorts of exceptions, it should be impossible to get arrested/searched for any drug offences.
Completely removing the selection pressures (those created by fear of law-enforcement actions such as search and arrest) towards easier-to-conceal drugs will, by itself, allow for exactly the shift back that you describe. Combining that with regulatory requirements for labelling, dose accuracy, and lack of impurities will allow people to safely use drugs in controlled accurate doses.
If you are hankering for some whiskey, diluting it to the strength of beer or wine simply won't do. That said, there is good reason to avoid things twice that strong because folks die that way.
And I think similar care should be taken with stuff that is illegal. I'd not be too happy with half-strength pot, for example, but others might be. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want a strong cocaine (if that were my fancy, that is) nor do I necessarily want a hit of lsd that is doubled in strength (one can take two, after all).
The thing is this: If you go too low, folks will just buy the black market stuff anyway as that will seem like legalisation in name only. If you go too high, folks get in trouble.
> Unfortunately, there are many millions who do, and they tend to be loud, and politically organized.
There are millions of religious people. The ones who view the world that crazy way are a tiny minority and are not particularly politically organized, but are very loud. They're the right's equivalent of the people who advocate the murder of all men as oppressors, or who claim that racism is justified as long as you're not white.
The only reason anybody notices them at all is that they're so conspicuously wrong that their opponents find it convenient to elevate their platform because it's so much easier to knock down than the actual positions held by the majority of the other side.
We're still fighting over abortion and contraception because the other side's position is "people who don't want children should either abstain from sex or give them up for adoption". Reasonable people can disagree with that but that is nowhere near the level of crazy as "9/11 was caused by the gays".
Their position ranges from what you said, to wanting doctors who perform abortions killed, and the mothers who have them prosecuted. Our current sitting president once had that position for god's sake. You can pretend that it's just the WBC and 99.99999999% of decent, "love thy neighbor" types, but it just isn't. About a quarter of the US population is evangelical, and a lot of them are not tolerant of much.
It's not one or two people burning Harry Potter books. It's not one or two people who sent their kids to (and send them) to gay "rehab".
More than 200 million people in the US identify as Christians. Even three million people would be less than two percent. Three orders of magnitude less than that is background noise.
I am saying that identifying as Christian does not actually mean much. It's basically an ethnic affiliation that includes Mormon missionary's, Atheists, monks and mass murders. You can sub divide that into various groups where it actually means something. From some of those groups you can find the people where it means a lot. And from those sub groups you can find 100,000 people making a lot of noise that can very much punch up and have a significant impact.
Now, I am not saying only those 100,000 people have faith, or that all 100,000 share the same beliefs. Just, that they get a lot more attention than normal.
That was my original point. They are a tiny minority of Christians or Republicans or Americans or whatever outer group you like, not "many millions", and the only reason anybody gives them a platform at all is that it's so easy to knock down. Their only relevance is as a patsy to paint a much larger group with the color of their crazy.
To be clear, I don't mean to offend anyone religious, and am not saying this is the usual run of how religious people view the world. Unfortunately, there are many millions who do, and they tend to be loud, and politically organized.
That's what I actually said... maybe you'd have less trouble if you didn't invent things to respond to?
If it wasn't intended to be many millions then what relevance would it have in support of the original claim that "there are many millions who do" have a crazy view of the world?
There are about as many guns in the USA as there are people. Most people would agree that in general, guns are not difficult to find and/or purchase.
If it was truly a widespread view that abortionists should be killed, there would be a great many dead, rather than the 2 high profile cases I can think of, during the past 20 years.
It's not about abortion. The states where a majority of people support abortion already have it. It's not enough, however, for the states that the American left controls to have abortion - they must have it in states controlled by Republicans as well. The fight is about to what extent are states allowed to self-govern, to what extent can people who live in them create the kind of society and culture that they want to live in. One side thinks states should be allowed to do what they think is right in their own jurisdiction, so that different groups with diverse values can peacefully coexist in the same country. The other thinks they should decide what is right for everyone, so that all groups conform to their values, which they perceive to be universal.
Yes, well spotted, it's also the same argument you can use for literally anything else, until all you're left with is a state's right to decide on whether to enact a plastic bag tax or not.
From my perspective, there's little fundamental difference between "abstinence should be the only available form of contraception" and "9/11 was God's way of punishing us for homosexuality."
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/backpage-ads-sex-traff...