Featured Don't legalize Drugs...

One of my favourite columnists is Theodore Dalrymple:
Retired Prison and Hospital Psychiatrist, and overall expert on treating druggies and their victims. Great column he writes here:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_2_a1.html




For those who don't want to read a column this long...some snippets which, I think, sum up many of his arguments well:

Even the legalizers’ argument that permitting the purchase and use of drugs as freely as Milton Friedman suggests will necessarily result in less governmental and other official interference in our lives doesn’t stand up. To the contrary, if the use of narcotics and stimulants were to become virtually universal, as is by no means impossible, the number of situations in which compulsory checks upon people would have to be carried out, for reasons of public safety, would increase enormously. Pharmacies, banks, schools, hospitals—indeed, all organizations dealing with the public—might feel obliged to check regularly and randomly on the drug consumption of their employees. The general use of such drugs would increase the locus standi of innumerable agencies, public and private, to interfere in our lives; and freedom from interference, far from having increased, would have drastically shrunk.

...
many others—even policemen—have said that “the war on drugs is lost.” But to demand a yes or no answer to the question “Is the war against drugs being won?” is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.[/U]
Let us ask whether medicine is winning the war against death




This being the case, not all freedoms are equal, and neither are all limitations of freedom: some are serious and some trivial. The freedom we cherish—or should cherish—is not merely that of satisfying our appetites, whatever they happen to be. We are not Dickensian Harold Skimpoles, exclaiming in protest that “Even the butterflies are free!” We are not children who chafe at restrictions because they are restrictions. And we even recognize the apparent paradox that some limitations to our freedoms have the consequence of making us freer overall. The freest man is not the one who slavishly follows his appetites and desires throughout his life—as all too many of my patients have discovered to their cost.

It is of course true, but only trivially so, that the present illegality of drugs is the cause of the criminality surrounding their distribution. Likewise, it is the illegality of stealing cars that creates car thieves. In fact, the ultimate cause of all criminality is law. As far as I am aware, no one has ever suggested that law should therefore be abandoned. Moreover, the impossibility of winning the “war” against theft, burglary, robbery, and fraud has never been used as an argument that these categories of crime should be abandoned. And so long as the demand for material goods outstrips supply, people will be tempted to commit criminal acts against the owners of property. This is not an argument, in my view, against private property or in favor of the common ownership of all goods. It does suggest, however, that we shall need a police force for a long time to come.

 

:laugh::laugh:

1.) I do appreciate your faith in the honest reporting of Mexican drug cartels
2.) That is frankly stupid on it's face.

How much of the demand lives in places where marijuana is legal?

Let's see, we've got Colorado.....and Colorado......and...

That's just about it.

What percentage of the U.S. market for marijuana do you think resides in places where it is now LEGAL?? maybe 10%??

And how quickly, pray tell, do you think the market has reacted on the supply side for the extremely new legalization laws and in such small segments of the overall market?

You are taking that as gospel without even bothering to think it through...There's enough market in the 40 something contiguous States which have no legal use of the drug for states like Colorado, Oregon and Washington to do as they will, and there will remain a perfectly large market for it to be profitable.

There may be stiff competition on the supply side...and enough local pot-growing in the U.S. to render it un-profitable recently, but you sound absolutely DESPERATE to believe a report like this....

Straight from the mouths of a Mexican drug Cartel. :laugh:

I have Ocean-front property in Arizona on sale Poncho....you should take a look at it.

 

I could go along with that too.

New York, Kalifornia, Taxacheusettes....and a few others.

Oh, wait...you were trying to be sarcastic weren't you. N.V.M.