Well, the supply chain for illegal drugs hurts a LOT of people, but that’s because of the illegally.

In a world with legal drugs, you’d still want to prosecute someone for giving money to cartels, but there would be much less incentive for people to do so in the first place.

The supply chain for all of society hurts a lot of people. Drugs are only a higher proportion because that industry's order presently can only be supplied by smaller competitors with similar fixed costs to the incumbents.

> The supply chain for all society ...

And? That’s whataboutism, not a response.

> Drugs are....

That sounds like a vast oversimplification, to say the least. Also, again, I’m not defending drug laws.

The supply chain is not on trial in this instance, this one person (who did not harm or victimize anyone) is.

Look, I’m the last person who would defend drug laws, but I think your position is transparently silly.

This same illogic is used for people who want to defend looking at child porn:

"The person abusing the child is not on trial in this instance, this one person (who did not harm or victimize anyone) is."

More people have died in Mexico and Central America due to the drug war than have died in the war in Afghanistan.

If you buy drugs from a supply chain that involves the cartels, you are indirectly funding organized murder and crime.

If he was funding cartel activity by purchasing meth from Mexico, you can be sure that harm resulted (even before you get to the destruction that meth addiction causes).

If drugs were legal there wouldnt any cartel activity associated with it, maybe no powerful cartels at all, so this is stupid logic

Perhaps, but right now--as it stands--there is cartel activity associated with it. And funding violent cartels for any reason should be illegal, for the same reasons that funding any violent organization should be illegal.

The alternative of having a square job and funding the US military via compulsory tax payments kills and tortures an order of magnitude more people than the cartels, if you want to follow the money in this line of reasoning.

Furthermore, the destruction caused by the individual use of meth cannot reasonably be attributed to anyone other than the person who willingly purchased, acquired, and ingested the substance with full consent.

The difference being that if you don't buy drugs online voluntarily you won't get jailed. If you don't pay your taxes you, eventually, will.

It's not moral to ask citizens to pay taxes, but it's not immoral to pay taxes: you do it because it's the least harmful option available to you.

> There's no victim. Literally nobody was harmed here.

The IRS doesn't agree.

The more money the IRS get the more money they waste or use to increase inequality.

The US is already spending 13bln per day

The point I was trying to make is that you may see no harm as an individual, but the state has another viewpoint.

Money taken by the IRS and money spent by Congress have almost no relationship. “Starve the beast” doesn’t work.

It has had the effect of adding trillions to the debt we are passing on to our children and grandchildren though. Good job boomers!

And I say that as a boomer myself.