>Drugs are still illegal in the US and we don't really see >the same kind of crime in our country because the police >actually (for the most part) do their job.

I strongly disagree with your statement. Police? Mexico is not using your usual police officers to fight drug violence neither Colombia. They are using highly trained military forces. Why? Cartels have very advance military equipment that is, sometimes, even purchased directly from the U.S. government as stated by one of the captured Zetas cartel heads (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jul/7/inquiry-of-we...). One of the main reasons the U.S. doesn't have the amount drug related crimes that countries like Mexico do is because it's their primary market (in the case of Mexican cartels) so they, obviously, don't want to create that much problems there and mess up their business.

This is not about pointing fingers or saying that the police is useless but as someone who was unlucky enough to witness hitman executed individuals (in front of my house) but lucky enough to _not see anything_ useful for the police I have to tell you that is not about an effective police force. The production, distribution, violence, money laundering, and all the other problems that revolve around drugs are shared between: consumers, criminals, and corrupt individuals (private, government, and public service sectors). My point is that this very complicated problem has only gotten worse since the "War on Drugs" started so legalizing drugs to have some regulation could be an alternative.

"Police? Mexico is not using your usual police officers to fight drug violence neither Colombia. They are using highly trained military forces. Why? Cartels have very advance military equipment"

If you read the article, you'd see the reason Colombia and Mexico use the military is mainly because the cartels own the police. Virtually ever person has been bribed. That's the core problem here.

...and if US users can grow their own, legally, in their backyards, then that bribery money goes away.

America has more drug driven crime than anywhere else on earth, by far. The source of the destruction (crime + violence) of our inner cities is purely drug based. Before the drug revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, our inner cities were livable.

A quick examination of the FBI's data on African-American crime proves that out. We put four million black men in prison every decade due to drug related criminal activity, and have nearly two million black men in prison at any given time. The lifestyle of said criminals is always tied to illegal drugs (there's no other profit source powerful enough to drive that kind of crime wave).

Corruption is a tradeoff. Is the risk to lose your safe job and possibly land in jail worth the money? So you need money to corrupt officials on a large scale, a lot of money.

Obviously that kind of money is no problem if your profit margin is 80%. Legalizing drugs (hence introducing highly industrialized competition) and helping those who are truly addicted tends to quickly kill that margin.

I'm not saying legalization is the golden bullet; obviously you will have to do a lot more to reverse the damage done by millions in prison, impoverished, killed, or corrupted in the government apparatus. But its the starting point to stopping the cancer from expanding.

People who have lived in big cities in the U.S. would strongly disagree with you. There are entire areas that are dangerous to walk in thanks to drug gangs. Legalize the stuff and dealers can't continue forcing out the competition with guns, since that competition will be the local supermarket.

Alcohol is already legal, so why gangs are not gone?

It looks like you're being downvoted, so I'll provide a reason.

Alcohol is legal. The gangs that formed around producing, smuggling, and selling alcohol (e.g. Capone) are gone.

The hope is that once other drugs are legal, the same thing happens to their producers.

Of note, since I was curious as to the answer myself and just found out, there are still 'gangs' (though less the urban variety we're used to seeing) based around moonshining.

That prompted me to ask "why is moonshining illegal", and the best (wrong) answer I could come up with was for production and delivery to dry counties.

Turns out, it's just a matter of taxation. Moonshiners are welcome to go legit, but they then have to pay $2.14 for each 750ml bottle they make, which cuts into profitability.

As they likely don't have reputations and/or massive marketing budgets, they still and distribute illegally, which turns it into a pure profit + overhead scenario.

There's still a small safety element. Sometime moonshiners produce toxic alcohol, or they contaminate their product with things that are toxic.

I agree that the main element is taxation.

Very many cigarettes sold in England are smuggled in from EU because of tax. But now people are counterfeiting so some cigs are both smuggled and fake - the quality of some of the smuggled product is alarmingly poor. (But it's tricky to get any sensible information about this because the only people releasing information are the customs / police who want to make it seem as scary as they can.)

And the cigarettes sold in EU are smuggled from Ukraine :-D - at least they're the real deal, even though they're like 5 times cheaper there...

That's an interesting point that I've never considered (or heard mentioned in the legalize argument). I'm for legalization + taxation of all drugs but will we still see significant folks producing and selling illegally as a tax dodge? May legalization merely get drugs into more hands but still maintain significant illegal production? If so, a lot of the supposed benefits of legalization dry up.

The market for moonshine is niche at best :

"The number of jurisdictions which ban the sale of alcoholic beverages is steadily decreasing which means that many of the former consumers of moonshine are much nearer to a legal alcohol sales outlet than was formerly the case. Moonshine-like distilled beverages with names like Collier and McKeel White Dog,[27] Everclear, Virginia Lightning, Georgia Moon Corn Whiskey, Ole Smoky Tennessee Moonshine,[28] Platte Valley Corn Whiskey Cat Daddy and Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon are produced commercially and sold in liquor stores, typically packaged in a clay jug or glass Mason jar. As a result of these changes and aggressive law enforcement, moonshine production is far less widespread than it was formerly." [1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshine_by_country

Yes, here in the UK cigarettes are legal but smuggled cigarettes are a massive (£multi-billion) business because taxes are so high.

Obviously there is a point at which taxation is virtually equivalent to prohibition (1,000,000%?) so the aim of a good tax in this arena is to (1) discourage consumption (2) provide some revenue to offset against social costs of the activity (healthcare costs of smokers, for example) while (3) not being so outrageous as to push the activity underground altogether.

The ratio of moonshine to legit alcohol sold is tiny though.

It depends on what the markup is. You can't have taxes that equal current costs. If that was the case the market would largely stay the same.

So if everything illegal will be legal, like in America before USA, then all gangs will gone?

:-)

Cartels wouldn't have a business selling something like marijuana post-legalization. Just about anybody can grow it almost anywhere so its natural market value is extremely low. I doubt there are a lot of gangs financing their criminal activity off of potato sales or whatever.

Extortion and kidnapping must be way less pleasant and much more difficult than dealing drugs. It's very hard to believe that they could scale up to be the same sort of revenue source.

As for the US and its supposed success, sure, it's better off than Honduras, but it still spends a fortune on law enforcement and has a massive prison population. I don't want to think of how many lives have been ruined over needless drug-related convictions. US demand and money are also what's fuelling a lot of the violence in Latin America.

I disagree. I think the cartels or some large agro businesses would set up huge farms just like tobacco farms. I'm fairly certain it's perfectly legal to grow tobacco in your backyard, but no on does because it's so much cheaper and easier to buy it from a farm.

So those people with expertise in growing it would continue to do so but out in the open in huge farms and profits would plummet to near at-cost production levels as they compete with similar large farms.

Legalizing drugs means that the street price will drop by 90% and that will eventually make drug trafficking obsolete.

This of course doesn't solve the real problem which is consumption.

> This of course doesn't solve the real problem which is consumption.

I object to your use of the definite article here. We can argue about the degree to which consumption is a problem vs. it leading to problems, moderate use, what particular drugs, etc... but making the police into the enemy of a large swath of our population is itself a real problem, gang violence to control distribution territory is itself a real problem, etc.

If people are doing things that hurt themselves that's bad, but it's important we don't cause worse problems (for those people or the rest of us) in trying to stop it, and legalization frees up huge resources that we could put toward educating people about the dangers of various drugs and cleaning up the mess when they don't listen.

Street price doesn't even need to drop: it is safer for customers to buy it at the local drug store (legal, pure drug) than on the street (unknown quality).

It might be safer but I'm not sure it's preferable. You see the local drug store owner knows you and there's still a stigma for drug consumption. Your local dealer on the other hand doesn't know you and you don't risk been exposed or stigmatized buying from him.

If on the contrary you take the huge profits part out of the equation then the whole network collapses; there just aren't enough money to support all the individuals involved in trafficking.

Re. your first paragraph, here is a counter-example: go to another town where they don't know you, purely to obtain your coke; problem solved.

Besides, haven't you heard the saying: "Always know your dealer"?

When the US legalized alcohol its use doubled, but alcohol abuse only went up around 15%. That is, people who will only use a substance if its legal will tend to use it responsibly. I expect that if we legalized other intoxicants they'd mostly displace alcohol, which would actually be a public health win for many currently illegal drugs. For the others, I expect that having the FDA ensuring a pure supply would be enough to make it a net good idea, even if its one with disadvantages.

Why is consumption the real problem?

Even if so, moving to a harm reduction / medical model is more likely to fix the addiction problem than criminalizing (or worse, militarizing) the consumption side of the equation.

Meth is very cheap already. Any changes?

From what I understand meth is produced really poorly by regional producers.

I think it would end up more expensive at your local pharmacy if legalized. The benefit would be you know you won't lose your teeth from the odd chemicals the producer is using.

(I could be horribly off on the details)

You are horribly off.

Methamphetamine is currently available at your local pharmacy. It's a generic drugs and costs less than a $1 per dose.

You don't lose your teeth from meth because of chemicals used in it's production, you lose them due to a combination of poor oral hygiene and reduced saliva production. The same thing happens if you abuse the stuff you can get at the pharmacy.

No because Meth can't create huge profits for drug cartels. Street price is too low when compared to heavy drugs. And it's the money that makes cartels invincible.

"When you legalize drugs, they aren't going to suddenly stop selling it. They will now have a legal business which will continue to fund their criminal empires. We most likely will see an increase in other crimes, like extortion and kidnapping."

No. Once a drug is legalized, supply can go up and price plummets. What was once a "criminal empire" now has the cash flow of a 7-11. And because price plummets, addicts no longer need to crawl in your bedroom window to steal money/goods to buy drugs. Crime drops. Drug-related extortion and kidnapping would virtually disappear.

Why would the largest consumer (US) purchase drugs from the drug cartels if it were legal in the US and could be sold at every 7-11?

The drug cartels would lose a lot of the revenue which makes them powerful.

Why you are worrying about revenues of cartels? If you think that selling drugs is legal, then their business is equally legal to business of Apple or Microsoft. Why you are not worrying about revenues of Microsoft or Apple?

Because Apple and Microsoft aren't using their revenues to kill thousands of people. If cutting off their revenues diminishes their ability to do that, it'd be irresponsible of us not to worry about it, or at least consider it

Because Microsoft and Apple's retail employees don't do drive-by shootings of each other's storefronts.

No one here is claiming that selling drugs is legal. Some of us think that selling drugs should become legal, in the hopes that businesses that are like Microsoft and Apple, i.e., don't assassinate judges, etc, will outcompete the cartels and decrease the cartel's revenues, hence decreasing their ability and participation in such undesirable activities.

"I know the recreational drug users of HN don't really want to hear this"

They are of course part of the problem.

If you read the article, it points out that the price premium is for all the risk various actors bear in the cocaine supply chain. If you derisk it, you kill most of the profits and suddenly the cartels will have to compete with industrialized agriculture. This will not do wonders for the cartels' profits, and once the profits disappear, the ability to pay enormous bribes follows.

Also, without making any judgement about whether people should or should not do certain things, banning private, consensual transactions rarely works well or inexpensively. My politics do not trend libertarian, but this is a well established fact at this point, whether it's prostitution, drug use, etc.