US smashes grim drug records death for the 6th month in a row: Newly-released figures show that 106,

Did they punish the users during Prohibition?
You know like all the swells drinking in the 21 Club in NYC?
Did they try that?

 

And how could governments function without the police/illegal drug/prison industrial complex and all the loot it generates?

 

trying to figure out why you're making it about lobster?

 

Was trying to figure out why you made it about coke.

 

IF you didn't insist on arresting, incarcerating and stigmatising anyone who smokes crack for their entire lives that would be alright; but you spend literally trillions to do just that. Your police ignore burglaries but raid people smoking a joint in their living room and then wonder why everyone hates police. Moralistic "libertarianism" is just old school repression where you thump a copy of Atlas Shrugged rather than the Bible.

 

cause coke used to be cheaper when it was legal

drug dealers making their money, prohibition funds gangs

 

It was cheaper when no one knew what cocaine was. It became more expensive when people learned how good the high was. Supply and demand, just like lobster became more expensive when more people started eating it.

 

Interesting. How would you end loneliness?

 

Remove the free trade between us and Mexico until they fix their problems with the cartels. I'm ok with lax penalties for drug users and very stiff penalties for selling drugs. As jcarlilesiu was saying, we don't need to punish people for their own stupid decisions. They punish themselves by their own decisions. Conversely to how Kranes56 sees the problem, once you sell, you are involving other people and it no longer becomes an issue where you are only hurting yourself. Kamala's lack of leadership has killed thousands of people. If she were the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, she would be in jail for her lack of action on a known deadly issue.

 

alcohol got cheaper when legal

 

I'm not sure that's true. Look at how high beer prices have gotten since micro-breweries have become more legal/popular. Do you have data that would show what you are saying?

 

not counting inflation over the years, alcohol is pretty cheap

and no one has to risk going to jail for people to have it

 

I dont advocate incarceration for drug use. I also don't advocate programs, services, or other costs to address their decisions to use dangerous drugs.

Agreed. We should stop doing that.

Those are just unsubstantiated platitudes.

And no, "everyone" doesn't hate the police. A very small number of people hate police, but like usual they are the loudest.

Collectivist usually don't like the concept of individualism nor personal accountability for success or failure.

So....

 

Free Taverns. Spend just a quarter of the money we spend on making drugs illegal on giving people free food and drink but only in daily limited quantities and only if they'll come and get it in places we set up with convivial and secure atmospheres. Another would be town meetings, where people would have a chance to talk to their government representatives and/or have their voices heard and free credited college classes but with no part online or in homework. All could be paid for easily with just a small part of what we spend now to make criminals out of people who just want to feel slightly better.

 

Well it’s complicated but basically we need to restructure infrastructure to encourage people to meet up in different places. Ie we need to get people to go join clubs and organizations. The biggest problem to this though is poverty. I’m the US we eliminated a lot of common spaces. So to go anywhere we need money. To stop this problem we need to reinvest in those common areas, and promote quick and easy transportation to them.

 

If Society was to agree to this, could we also castrate or sterilize drug addicts, illegal aliens and criminals so they don't breed and create more drug addicts, anchor babies and future criminals to become a burden for hard working and responsible tax paying legal American citizens to have to pay for.

 

Good ideas. Too bad our gov spent the past 2 years working to isolate people.

 

The Republicans are the party of special interests rather than public service. They have no way to survive but by putting us at each other's throats. Trump was literally the poster child of this ideology.

 

A general principle of American Jurisprudence is that you are not responsible for the torts and crimes of others. You find me a manufacturer knowingly directly selling to a cartel, and you have found the only legal target for suit. < You won't find even one of these though, so you're stuck trying to sue manufacturers for selling products that work as advertised which is not how products liability works.
Additionally: The constitution bars ex post facto laws ergo, since FOPA has been in place the whole time you'd have to remove it and only then could you even begin to try to sue for instances moving forward from that date.

 

That's not actually how that works.
If the legal alternative is abundant in supply and similarly priced the legal alternative basically puts the cartel out of business.
No one risks prison time over a bag that's at most $10 cheaper, the price margin isn't there.
Same with transporting it illegally, who is going to risk that when they could just get a CDL and do it legally?

 

Yeah sink a bunch of trash in the gulf of mexico. Great ****ing plan.
Waste billions of dollars in perfectly functional equipment rather than seizing and selling it.

FFS do you people even pause to examine your own ideas for a full minute before you just **** them out?

 

How can the price possibly be similarly priced when the cartel is able to hire cheap labor? Very cheap labor and no one dares cry about increasing the minimum wage.

 

Lighten up, Francis.

 

Odd to see you take a jab at Republicans while admitting that you are helping them by taking cheap shots. I agree, but if you are a Democrat, you are not pointing with clean hands. Your party is as bad if not worse.

On the subject of isolation, Dems have a huge lead.

 

Because of the externalities I've already mentioned.
You can hire field slaves in mexico to make shitty dirt weed. < That shitty dirt weed is LITERALLY cheaper than dirt. They sell it by the pressed brick to distributors who sell it to dealers who break dime bags off of it.
To move the product to the distributors involves normal transport with increased risk IE the **** smells and you have to move so much of it at once its hard to hide it. Especially across international borders.
So another strategy is they will steal or divert from state legal markets some dope and move it across state lines and sell it where it isn't legal for the boutique price plus a markup.
That's the status quo, those 2 types: Large amounts of field weed from central and south america, and items diverted from the state legal markets.

Now let's move into the hypo: Texas suddenly legalizes weed. Now, anyone can go buy extremely high quality weed from dispensaries that pop up in the same way tobacco shops pop up now IE ****ing everywhere. Understand: Any company that grows pot is going to do so in a way that produces higher quality pot from the field grown nasty brick weed.
So your shitty dirt weed must now compete with top flight boutique weed, and your top flight boutique weed you're moving from say California and marking up now has a domestic legal source to compete with.
This is ok, boutique weed will cost more than brick weed and first timers might still catch a buzz off of brick weed.... maybe. However: You don't need 3 joints of boutique weed to feel a buzz, it breaks up easy and leaves a harvestable pollen dust on a grinder you can put on top of joints or bowls that's very concentrated. Additionally, this boutique offers things like resins and concentrates, fresh edibles etc all of a known distribution of chemicals and quantity that can be taken to court if its a lie and which haven't degraded from the long hot transit (they require temperature humidity etc control that's just not present in black market lines). You don't take your plug to court etc.

So it won't be profitable to move your boutique weed from high cost of living, high tax California in to low cost of living low tax Texas once Texas legalizes. They'll just buy domestic. And why would I buy the out of state black market moved boutique **** from the plug at a markup when I can look through my phone, place an order on an app, and have "Mr Nice Guy" come deliver me the same **** made in my own state, with the same markup for transport but perfectly legally? Or better yet: Why not wander on down to the store personally and pick it up WITHOUT the markup?
And why would I divert from legal domestic supplies to sell in my own state on the black market at a mark up? Who is my customer going to be? How am I going to compete?

In summation: You can drink all the nasty rotgut moonshine you'd like, for cheap, too IF you can find it and IF you can stomach it. Odd that there are so few dealers of rotgut moonshine eh? Odd that you can just BUY your rotgut moonshine at the store, in a nice labeled bottle with a warning on it, for cheap without worrying about the whole crime thing eh? Its called everclear.