The Continued Failure on the War on Drugs

Reference Article

"A study done by Gary Jenkins, a professor at Vanderbilt University, entitled “Prohibition, Alcohol and Murder: Untangling Countervailing Mechanisms" states on page 31, “Generalizing from the findings on Prohibition, we can hypothesize that decriminalization would increase the use of the previously criminalized drug, but would decrease violence associated with attempts to control illicit markets and as resolutions to disputes between buyers and sellers. Moreover, because the perception of violence associated with the drug market can lead people who are not directly involved to be prepared for violent self-defense, there could be additional reductions in peripheral settings when disputes arise”

Basically, what these guys are saying is that by making drugs illegal, you are actually creating more crime. Imagine if cigarettes were illegal, and the lengths some would go to in order to get a nicotine fix. I know people that would cut off their own mother's head. Under our current nicotine laws, these people can go to the store and get their nicotine fix, and mom gets to keep her head.

Think about it, a heroin or crack addict will rob you and kill you to get a fix, and they do this because they never know where that next fix is coming from or how they are going to get the high amounts of money required. When you take away that problem by making the drugs they seek readily available and cheap, that takes away their motivation to rob and kill you. That, my friends, is a good thing.

Sure, we would have crackheads running the streets without shame, but we already have that now. I, for one, would feel better if I knew the money they spent on the crack they smoked earlier went to bettering education instead of buying their drug dealers latest piece of bling."

When you think of it, the war on drugs, especially in the US, is a failure. Perhaps I buy too easily into this thinking since I'd like to see pot legalized in Canada; however, it does make sense.

A lot of the people who commit petty crimes because they don't have money , for say, weed (because it is illegal). If it were a free-market item, that anyone could purchase over the counter, and it was actually the price it should be (ie very cheap), those crimes wouldn't happen. The jails wouldn't fill up with such petty crimes, etc.

However, fixing this problem won't work. That's because there are government agencies that would like to make a lot of money if a drug was legalized. If weed were legalized in Canada or the US, it would cost more than it did illegally, perhaps, which is silly. Weed is naturally growing substance that grows very easily, in fact. It should cost less than alcohol, tabacco, or even sythetic over-the-counter drugs. However, I suppose it would still get rid of the aforementioned problems stated in the article.