Soldier or Policeman?
Mexico has had 3,500 lives snuffed out each of the last two years due to drug cartels fighting over the lucrative drug business with rich Americans and Europeans:
Gonzalez’s violent death was just one of 7,000 in the past two years in a brutal war between Mexico’s drug gangs, fighting for control of trafficking routes to the United States and Europe, and the Mexican army and police trying to stop them.
Here in America, over 500,000 people (including a very high percentage of black Americans) are in jail on drug counts. Hundreds of American’s die each year in our own slice of the war on drugs.
And even in Alaska, grandmothers-to-be are jailed on drug counts.
Meanwhile our police militarize to (understandably) keep up with the armament the drug cartels use. They hunt drugs to seize assets to fund their operations.
Put another way… the war on drugs is quite costly. I think it not worth the cost of consigning whole classes of people to prison and the incremental loss of our civil rights.
What do I recommend? First off get real about the cost/benefits. Recognize that some drugs are less costly than others. Act on that knowledge.
First, legalize marijuana. Treat it like like the safer version of alcohol it probably is. Then… on the hard stuff… quit going after supply. We have to switch strategies and go after demand. That’s right – make using drugs a serious crime. Make it risky and difficult to shoot up.
The model to use is the same one we’ve done for drunk driving. Stiff, sure, penalties. Make it socially unacceptable. Make it a darned bad idea.
With reduced demand, cartels will crumble, corruption will remain but with lower stakes. Prison costs will lower. Social costs of drug use will lower.
The odds of this being tried…. I don’t know. Maybe only a former cocaine user can “go to China”?
December 19th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Halfway up the tree. If tobacco and alcohol and MJ are acceptable, why not everything else that people want to take to amuse themselves? Let’s have cocaine Life Savers.
Demand suppression requires hassling a lot of contributing citizens who vote. Get law enforcement against individuals out of it and just let tax collectors hassle businesses that don’t pay what they owe from lawful business. Tax the product sales at a low enough rate to discourage a black market. We already know how to do it for tobacco and alcohol.
Educate, don’t incarcerate.
December 19th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
My libertarian purist deep inside me agrees with total legalization. But…. we live in a very connected society that has made me responsible for people who harm themselves. So I’ve also an interest in preventing that.
So I try to balance it. Legalize safer drugs, punish the use of unsafe ones severely.
I’m not surprised you see “taxing†as an answer… I, however, don’t think the cocaine store is such a hot idea.
Educate don’t incarcerate misses the point that incarceration, or risk there of, is very effective education. Note also that I’m not talking about long prison terms, just sure ones. Anything that disrupts the users life and makes the drug very costly.