I don’t really get the point of your argument, no, you’re right. I’d love it if you could explain it to me, because right now it seems like you’re just advocating the same ‘Just say no’ campaign that’s been failing to work for thirty years or more.
There is historical precedent for legalisation having this much impact. What do you think led to the decline of piracy in the 1700s? It was lowered taxation, the removal of sumptuary laws, and (in the case of the British Empire) the loss of the East India Company’s monopoly on exports from India. Prohibition in the States led directly to the rise of the mafia, and ending Prohibition significantly weakened it again. Drug cartels as we know them did not exist until drugs were made illegal in the 1920s. Their existence is directly related to the illegality of their product. If you ban something people want, all you do is create a black market. It’s historical fact.
And, I mean, yeah, of course there would still be mass exploitation. There’s also mass exploitation of the people who make your clothes, farm your food, build your iPod, etc. That’s capitalism in action. But that exploitation is regulated by labour laws, at least in most countries, and does not (as far as I am aware) include things like human trafficking and child abuse rings.
But it really is an easy answer, and I a honestly not being optimistc about this in the slightest. Like. Let’s say the government makes drugs legal tomorrow.
- It is now possible to buy drugs over the counter, if you’re over 16 (the drinking age in my country). Drugs are sold next to cigarettes andd alcohol and with similar restrictions.
- That means that newsagents and supermarket chains want to start stocking drugs.
- Newsagents and especially supermarket chains do not, however, want anything to do with drug cartels. They’re bad for the corporate reputation.
- There is a gap in the market.
- New, legally licensed companies step in to fill that gap.
- These new, legally licensed companies are under very close scrutiny from the government and cannot buy their product from drug cartels. Not that they would want to anyway, because that would ruin their reputation and they’d lose all those juice supermarket contracts.
- So they set up or buy farms, or else make contracts with existing farmers.
- These farmers no longer have to work with criminal organisations. (Did you know a huge propertion of Afghanistan’s agriculture industry is opium poppies? Guess who buys them!) They are probably still being exploited, but no more than cocoa or coffee farmers. (Which is to say, a lot, but that is a problem with capitalism in general and not the drugs market in particular.)
- Meanwhile, our legally licensed companies are required to sell their product according to food and medical safety standards. That means clinically sterile packaging and labels which provide a list of ingredients, calorie information and also say things like ‘Caution: LSD can cause hallucinations’. Also, sell-by dates and dosage information.
- Drug addicts can walk into the supermarket and buy safe, reasonably-priced, reasonably-ethical drugs.
- Supermarkets compete with one another, so these drugs are also reasonably cheap. And drug cartels like to price gouge, so these drugs are definitely cheaper than the ones they’re selling.
- Nobody with any sense would go to a drug dealer who’ll sell them cocaine cut with baking powder for £70 when they can go to Sainsbury’s and buy cocaine with all the ingredients listed for, oh, maybe £10? Possibly even less. What’s the price of a pack of cigarettes these days?
- So nobody goes to the drug cartels any more.
- Drugs cease to be a profitable black market industry and the black market consequently collapses, just like the black market tea industry did in the late 1700s. Cartels are left significantly weakened, if not outright destroyed.
Please, tell me where I made a great leap of logic? This is exactly how capitalism works. It sucks things in. It always has. Abolishing the black market really is that simple. It worked with Prohibition, it worked with the British tea market, and it will work with drugs too.
And I mean, no, this won’t automatically stop the human trafficking or sex abuses or the other things. But neither will not buying drugs. All we can do is to deprive the cartels of their primary source of income, which in itself may be enough to cause people to abandon them. And it would certainly be enough to weaken them, to put them on the back foot for a while, and to slow their operations. The police might have a chance to move in and really break them then.
(Drugs fucking up your body is, as I understand it, at least partly due to the fact that cartels cut them with things like baking powder and rat poison. Not entirely, but partly. And again - so does smoking. So does alcohol. Both of these things have a government-regulated industry, so why not drugs?)
