> Legalization advocates, though, would like to have their cake and eat it too—to believe that everything bad about drugs is actually caused by prohibition.
Bingo. See also: “if you legalize weed, the black market will disappear and only legal distributors will remain, thereby starving the gangs that profit from the black market and allowing the state to regulate the producers”, a line people still repeat 15+ years into the legalization experiment, with the black market and the gangs continuing to control the majority of production and distribution. I live in Canada. I’ve seen the results. It’s a disaster. The only real changes have been: 1. Giving the state an interest in encouraging weed consumption, 2. Weed stores on every corner of every city and town, and 3. Communicating very clearly to young people that consuming weed is what is expected of them.
Lots of good stuff here but I quibble with your conclusion: “Let me suggest to you that anytime someone claims otherwise—claims that the solution to the problems of liberalization is more liberalization—you should not take that argument seriously.”
Surely liberalization can be done incompletely and poorly, creating problems that are solved by further liberalization. For example, Britain partially liberalized currency markets by cutting the Sterling Area down to just the UK, Crown Dependencies, and Gibraltar. This cured some but not all of the problems exchange control had caused. The further liberalization by ending them in 1979 fixed those.
Why focus your energy on preventing me from having fun? Just prioritize getting DAs to lock up criminals. Why tailor laws to the most low Iq and low impulse control? How much fun should we deprive ourselves on their behalf?
> Legalization advocates, though, would like to have their cake and eat it too—to believe that everything bad about drugs is actually caused by prohibition.
Bingo. See also: “if you legalize weed, the black market will disappear and only legal distributors will remain, thereby starving the gangs that profit from the black market and allowing the state to regulate the producers”, a line people still repeat 15+ years into the legalization experiment, with the black market and the gangs continuing to control the majority of production and distribution. I live in Canada. I’ve seen the results. It’s a disaster. The only real changes have been: 1. Giving the state an interest in encouraging weed consumption, 2. Weed stores on every corner of every city and town, and 3. Communicating very clearly to young people that consuming weed is what is expected of them.
Lots of good stuff here but I quibble with your conclusion: “Let me suggest to you that anytime someone claims otherwise—claims that the solution to the problems of liberalization is more liberalization—you should not take that argument seriously.”
Surely liberalization can be done incompletely and poorly, creating problems that are solved by further liberalization. For example, Britain partially liberalized currency markets by cutting the Sterling Area down to just the UK, Crown Dependencies, and Gibraltar. This cured some but not all of the problems exchange control had caused. The further liberalization by ending them in 1979 fixed those.
That's not a quibble. That conclusion just does not follow from the arguments at all.
Why focus your energy on preventing me from having fun? Just prioritize getting DAs to lock up criminals. Why tailor laws to the most low Iq and low impulse control? How much fun should we deprive ourselves on their behalf?
You might find this interesting. I make a similar argument.
https://medium.com/@PostLiberalBot/weeding-out-the-cannabis-myths-the-case-against-cannabis-commercialisation-2c223cec9da0
For the clean air example, it does not take much imagination to make a law that can ban any type of smoking/vaping in those intended public spaces.