At 4/9/07 10:19 PM, bob-the-ripper wrote:
If you recall, I proposed two scenarios (I will assume you remember). In both, the police situation was virtually identical. I'm just saying that nothing will change when you legalize drugs, so I don't see what you hope to accomplish by doing so.
Well, for one, active investigations and raids would stop, which would save a ridiculous amount of money, you wouldn't need drug dogs any more, blah blah blah.
There's a whole barrel of monkeys of drug-related arrests that don't stem from public intoxication.
Well, I guess that can be viewed either way, becuase there wouldn't be any drug users without gangs to provide the drugs. It's kinda like "which came first, the chicken or the egg."
No, this isn't a chicken/egg scenario. People wanted drugs, so people realized they could make a lot of money selling them, and started up their business. Then gangs realized they could use strong-arm tactics to control large amounts of sales territory, so they told dealers to work for their gang or get the fucks out.
Gangs didn't come along and say "Hey guys, look what we found! Drugs!"
As I've said before, if prohibition meant no gangs to sell drugs to people, I'd be happy with it. The problem with prohibition is that it doesn't do what it's supposed to.
Fun fact: Alcohol prohibition was the time when big organised crime sprang up in the US, due to the need for a supply and distribution chain to be set up. Before that, the local city-sized crime syndicates had no reason to communicate with each other.
Let me elaborate:
Gangs will adapt to the situation by becoming much more methodical and surrepititious about how they approach their business. Also, they will become much more systematic, milking prostitution far more than was previously necessary.
Right, but what I'm saying is that supply doesn't determine demand, demand determines supply, or it determines price. Either way, demand is what determines the amount of money flowing into a system. Since there's no shortage of prostitutes, and the demand is already met, they can't make any more money off of it.
Unless of course they start manufacturing higher-quality prostitutes and charging a premium. But then everybody wins, sort of.
Basically, its like a family that was doing well that suddenly went under massive debt. They will resort to various means (ie making the children work) that they didn't need to before. You argue, asking why didn't that familiy do those things before. I would say that it wasn't necessary.
Right, but gangs aren't a family. They have no overhead costs to worry about for the gang. Their objective is to sock away as much money as they can. Once drugs are out of their hands, all of the people who were in the gang to deal drugs no longer have a reason to be in the gang, unless they're willing to become the violent types (As I mentioned before, many people who sell drugs are opportunists, they do it because they can get the money without having to hurt people themselves). It would also stem the flow of people who started selling drugs then got caught up in a gang because of it.
See, the difference between a gang and a family is that you can't quit a family, and you can't just disband a big part of a family either when they're not making money from the family. For many people, gangs are a way to make some money, it doesn't work the other way around where a gang makes money because it needs to support the people who are in it.
And as I said before, non-consensual crimes are a cinch to crack down on, if gangs do actually respond in this way (Again, your reasoning is purely speculative, and you don't really have other examples to back it up, which isn't really a good enough reason to justify the continued support of a failed policy like prohibition).
Well, people involved in the omnipotent Aryan Brotherhood have an warped sense of reality. They truly believe in a "perfect race of humans." They won't accept a normal job, especially since half of them have swatiskas tatooed all over them. The same can be said about other gang members. A lot will not accept a normal life, even though they should.
Well, I think the Aryan Brotherhood is going to do a lot of stupid shit whether we're supporting them with drug money or not. I doubt they're sitting around going "Whoops, no time to hate the blacks, I'm late for work at the drug mill!"
As I said in my last post, if it were really the case that these gangs are only stopped from a big burst of violent crimes because they've got enough money from drugs, we could end the war on drugs just by handing money to the gangs and saying "here, have fun"
The problem with that is that then a bunch of people would be joining up with the gangs, because the size of the gang is influenced by the amount of money in it, rather than the gang always being the same size and requiring a fixed income.
I'm just thinking that taking away an entire industry on which gangs rely will push them to do things they previous did not need to do, but of course could do.
I think if there were one thing that gangs actually would do to bring up the crime rate, it would probably be that they would splinter up and fight amongst each other for a smaller group to have control of the same territory, a large group no longer needed since there's no drug income.
Organised crime runs like a business, and it's hard to run a business based on something as unpredictable and unreliable as robbery. Also, since robberies are hit-and-run operations, it's impossible to be running the robbery racket in an area, because by the time someone's robbed someone, they're too far gone for you to do anything about it. That's why robbery is done by individuals or small groups rather than large organised gangs, in addition to the fact that if you're working for yourself, you keep all the profits.
And since robbery is often more lucrative than small-time drug dealing, people who are willing to rob people are usually already doing it.
Also, to reiterate, since robbery isn't consensual, people will report it every time, and people will be caught quickly if they're using it as their primary source of income. One of the reasons you can't crack down on drug dealing is because drug users don't go up to police officers and say "Excuse me officer, but that man just sold me drugs!" They don't want to lose their connection, so the dealing doesn't get reported.
Robbery, on the other hand, there's nobody saying "Wow, that robbery was some good shit man, we should go back to that guy."
Ending prohibition would also give a lot of these people the opportunity to get out of crime, because their past drug convictions that may have been keeping them from real employment would be gone.
It was only attampted once.
Nope. It's been attempted with other things, notably boxing and the numbers racket. The numbers racket was fixed with the introduction of a government lottery, and now that boxing is legalised and regulated, there's standardised and safe equipment, as well as a doctor at the ring side who will stop the fight if the health of a fighter is jeopardized.
Prohibition has never been a good solution to any consensual behaviour.
Who says the current prohibition is a failure? If it was, don't you think the government would have acknowledged that by now?
The facts say it's a failure. Drug use and abuse is still rampant, and no matter how many busts are made, the supply of drugs remains uninterrupted.
Plus, the alcohol prohibition was enacted under different circumstances than was this one. In the 1920s prohibition, alchol, a commodity that was accepted as legal, was made illegal. Drugs have always been illegal. See my point?
Now that's just plain silly. How could drugs have always been illegal? Marijuana wasn't even illegal until four years after alcohol prohibition ended.
And that's not to mention drugs that didn't even exist until later, such as LSD, invented in 1938 and not prohibited until about 30 years later (despite many uses in psychiatry and other fields).
