People who want to see tighter enforcement of our drug laws are unwittingly in league with the gangsters who profit from drug prohibition, the ultimate de-regulation policy.
Drug dealers do not see our drug policies as deterrents to their underground enterprises, but rather as incentives. Those who manufacture and sell outlawed drugs are among the staunchest of prohibitionists. The notion of “legalization” is as much an anathema to them as it is to the families and friends of people whose lives have been lost or ruined by drug abuse and/or addiction.
Without drug prohibition, there would be no unregulated, unlimited, and untaxed underground drug market and potentially destructive psychoactive substances would be far less accessible to children.
Drug policy reform advocates do not actually wish to see illegal drugs “legalized,” we want to see unregulated drugs regulated because our nation’s drug problem is far too complex to be dealt with via an oversimplified policy of prohibition. If we are to ever have any hope of re-gaining control of the market in certain psychoactive drugs, that market must be brought out of the shadows and into the light.
Drug policy reform is not a matter of some “right” to recreational drug use; it is a matter of wresting the control of a multi-billion dollar enterprise away from gangsters and placing it into the hands of responsible businesspeople.
My question is: Will society continue to be duped, by the false promises of drug war rhetoric, into sacrificing the lives and futures of its children in order to protect and defend the special privileges that drug prohibition affords to gangsters?
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Original Articles Copyright 2004-2008 by Margaret Romao Toigo
Your good with words, but you wouldn’t be saying all that if you had children of your own. Legalizing drugs will make them socially acceptible and turn even more of our children into burnout druggies.
I have four children, Devlin.
It pains me to no end to see them have to grow up under the same prohibitionist policies that I did in the 1970s.
The war on drugs has not reduced drug abuse/addiction, but it has enabled the expansion of the criminal enterprises that profit from the underground drug trade.
Legal doesn’t mean socially acceptable as there are many examples of socially unacceptable conventions, behaviors, and habits that are perfectly legal as long as the rights of others are not violated, such as; cigarette smoking, overeating, pornography, promiscuity, abortion, and “White Power” demonstrations.
I too think that the “war on drugs” is misguided.
Actually, drug policy is a great thing with which to squick overly-doctrinaire libertarians
— I honestly do agree with them that drugs should not be illegal. But then I look them straight in the eye and say that legal drugs would make *such* a great source of tax revenue…