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My main issue is that I want pot to be lower status. I don't necessarily think pot should be regulated differently than alcohol, but I think pot heads should be viewed much like alcoholics.
Furthermore, we need to stop blaming the War on Drugs for crime. Crime happens because low IQ young men think they can get away with crime. That's it. Drugs lower IQ and inhibition, leading to crime. Most people in on drug charges are in because they pled down to it or it's what the DA could nail them on, but…
You really don't see a connection between the war on drugs and crime?
That's hard to believe. Are you familiar with the deeds of drug cartels and gangs?
The idea that drug laws cause crime doesn't fit the evidence very well.
You have many polities with harsh drug laws and enforcement with little crime, and many polities with loose drug laws and enforcement with lots of crime.
When a drug is legalized, like say marijuana, you don't see any drop-off in crime or arrests. Many people who were getting busted on marijuana charges end up getting busted on something else (often the whole reason they were busted on a drug charge is because its easier to p…
You sound like you're talking through your hat.
I've recently been reading literature on gangs and crime going back to the 19th century, through the early 20th century, the Alcohol Prohibition era, the mid-20th century, late 20th century, and up to today. The role of gangs in American crime- and their power, their financial influence- surged during Alcohol Prohibition, and then in the 1980s, with the street retail trade in crack cocaine.
In particular, there' no comparison between the numbers of …
Many drugs have been made either outright legal or de facto legal (you can do business un-harassed in many open air drug markets today, and people wander the streets obviously high and nobody does anything). Yet gangs persist, in fact they are more common in those districts with lax laws and enforcement.
By contrast Singapore puts people to death for carrying too much pot and its got no crime at all.
An interesting thing with prohibition is it didn't spring into existence in 1920. Most of New Eng…
You want to make the US into Singapore? How about you move there, instead of implying that you find its system superior to the US?
Setting aside the totalitarian implications of that endorsement, consider the practical differences. Singapore has 280 square miles of land area. The US has 2,959,064 square miles of land area, just in the lower 48 states.
Singapore imposes its panopticon surveillance state on a population of roughly 6 million people. The US has 335 million. Around 100 million US citi…
"How about you move there, instead of implying that you find its system superior to the US?"
1) Because there is more to Singapore then crime.
2) Because it's on the other side of the planet and I'm not a citizen, nor are any in my family. Because it's not clear we could get jobs there.
"Setting aside the totalitarian implications of that endorsement"
Yes, people who visit Singapore routinely refer to it as a totalitarian hellhole. It's like they are in North Korea.
Myself, I enjoyed my visit. You should get out more.
"Singapore has 280 square miles of land area."
Singapore is a city. The appropriate comparison for Singapore would be large American cities. However, we could basically substitute any Asian country including big ones like Japan. Tough drug laws and criminal justice systems, lack of crime.
"you know, the dereliction of enforcement that allowed the legal opioid problem to get out of hand so badly in the 1990s,"
You are all over the place here dude. Opioids were legal and regulated like you want and they became a total mess. Is the problem legality or illegality? You can't seem to make up your mind here. Except that somehow an exactly perfect system should have done exactly the right thing, and you call me utopian.
What we learned is that doctors will push drugs that are bad for people if they have an incentive and that they can create their own demand (just like drug dealers). In fact it was worse because lots of people with better sense then to deal with drug dealers would trust their doctors.
If you think legal opioids were a mess I don't see how legal meth is going to go down any easier for you. The same dynamic will go down.
I expect basically every attempt to legalize drugs to go down the way opioids did, but worse the worse the drug is.
"Shotgun dry law enforcement killed more than 1200 people in raids across the country over the course of the mid-1920s."
Like police killings today, this is dramatically less then the # of people being murdered during the same time.
Total spending on prohibition enforcement in 1923 amounted under $9,000,000 in 2023 adjusted dollars. This amounted to $0.08 per person in 2023 dollars using the 1923 population. 0.0006% of GDP. This was not a serious attempt.
But more importantly I'm asking a simple question. Given that the period from the late 1800s until 1920 saw some parts of the country go dry and some stay wet, shouldn't we see a difference in crime rates between them? Shouldn't the dry areas have seen a huge increase in crime during this era? Shouldn't the crime in wet areas outperform them? This is as closed to a randomized trial as we can get.
I don't like prohibition because I think it was the wrong law and it failed most in the places that never wanted it in the first place. But I don't think drug prohibition is the reason for crime, and if you legalized every drug I would still expect to see crime (perhaps worse since addicts are more prone to criminality).