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A comment on A Heroin Dealer Tells the Silk Road Jury What It Was Like to Sell Drugs Online. Parent comment

Re:A Heroin Dealer Tells the Silk Road Jury What It Was Like... by stickfigure on Thursday January 29, 2015 @06:21AM (#8965480)
...at $3,500 a week the price reduction would have to be huge before any legal drug wouldn't continue to create acquisitive crime to fund it

I infer from this statement that you believe that, in the case of legalization, the price would still be high enough to require crime. Do you have any reason to believe that heroin is inherently more expensive to manufacture than, say, aspirin?

Also, unless heroin addiction skews towards the top five-percenters, $3500 per week is a distant outlier.

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Re:A Heroin Dealer Tells the Silk Road Jury What It Was Like... by cmdkeen on Thursday January 29, 2015 @06:36AM (#8965526)
The UK estimates that between a third and a half of all acquisitive crime in the UK is committed by class A drug users.

You're assuming that in the case of legalisation there wouldn't be sin taxes, which given alcohol and cigarettes (and indeed weed) would be incredibly unlikely.

The problem with heroin is that once you are abusing it you need more and more but it starts to destroy your ability to earn the funds to pay for it.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/financial-cost-of...

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Re:A Heroin Dealer Tells the Silk Road Jury What It Was Like... by xyzzy123 on Thursday January 29, 2015 @07:06AM (#8965619)
By the point where it screws up someone's ability to earn and they don't have family money, they're no longer a functional human in society. Their other relationships are screwed, no matter which way you look at it, they're a welfare case.

My experience is that "those" crimes are caused by trauma and mental illness, but I guess the drug use is the easy thing to blame. It correlates super high at that point.

My experience with most of this is second-hand.

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Re:A Heroin Dealer Tells the Silk Road Jury What It Was Like... by army on Thursday January 29, 2015 @11:45AM (#8967212)
Heroin still requires growing poppies. Aspirin can be be synthesized.
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Re:A Heroin Dealer Tells the Silk Road Jury What It Was Like... by stickfigure on Thursday January 29, 2015 @03:05PM (#8968516)
Replace 'aspirin' with 'vitamin d' in my question.
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