Quote from hapaboy:
RS7, welcome back.....
Thanks, always a pleasure!
However, you're assuming because the drug cost is now $5, John Addict is going to only spend that $5. My argument is our beloved groupie will spend the entire $50 and gorge himself on ten times the amount of drugs. If you're an addict, when prices go down, you just buy more. You're like a kid in a candy store whose $1 can now buy ten times as many gummybears.
OK, if you can respectfully disagree, I guess I can too. In the case of "soft" drugs, like pot and i guess whatever else is fashionable these days, smoking 10 times as much is unlikely. Now I have no idea about Ecstasy or only of these other designer drugs, but my guess is that like too much LSD (back in the old days) was too much. heroine and crack...take too much, and you overdose. So again, the "kid in the candy store" argument doesn't really seem to hold much water.
Respectfully disagree. You're in greater personal danger from an addict needing to finance their next fix than from your local kingpin, whose living' large in a mansion in a nice neighborhood, as far away from the "riffraff" he depends on for a living as possible.
Peace. 
Here we disagree again. While I may be in danger if I am in the wrong part of town at the wrong time of day or night, yes, maybe I will be mugged today for drug money. But it is highly unlikely I will be murdered. All the junky wants from me is enough to get a "fix"..
The real violence, as dgabriel said, is over the control of the distribution, the money. The power. Who gets to live in the big mansion.
Drive by shootings happen between rival gangs. What is their motivation? The control of territory. What is on their territory? The "right" to sell drugs. So it is criminals killing criminals. What is so sad is that these criminals hook up with their neighborhood gangs at very young ages. To gain acceptance. To get drugs. Whatever their culture drives them to do. But then the 10 year olds are given guns and given chores of violence because the 20 year old gang leaders know that if the 10 year old is caught, even as a shooter, he will be treated as a juvenile. And so the circle of violence continues.
What would decriminalizing do to help this situation? Well, if drugs were cheap (or at least not profitable on the streets), there would be less to fight about. 10 year olds making a thousand dollars a week would cease to exist. So maybe they would go to school instead. 20 year old leaders....well a little late for them, but the same kid given a different set of circumstances from an earlier age, still rises to the top, and is a leader in a legitimate business. Or at least the possibility exists.
The girls that sell their bodies for a $50 fix can work at Mcdonalds and afford a $5 fix.
Hey, I don't really know. I am making this all up as I go along. Because I was asked to participate.
The only thing I know for sure is that some drugs are very dangerous and the people that supply them are hard core criminals. They conduct billion dollar businesses and pay off (sometimes even control) governments.
Some drugs are not particularly dangerous. They are grown by farmers right here in Florida and all over America. The drugs (pot) cause no deaths from overdoses, the growers are not particularly desperate criminals, the users are not mugging people on the streets for a "fix", and yeah, I think it should be legal. No more debilitating than alchohol, and certainly easily taxable, just like cigarettes and alchohol.
Maybe even use that tax money to treat abusers of harder drugs. In the 13th century, all this stuff was legal right here in the USA. You could get Morphine, cannabis, Cocaine right at the local pharmacist. We did not become a nation of drug addicts. Certainly there were abusers, just like there are now with alchohol.
prohibition did not work. These drug laws do not work. Laws against bookmaking don't work (over 80% of tv viewers of NFL games have an "illegal" wager on any particular game). Laws against prostitution don't work.
Try and truly legislate morality.....you know what you get?
TALIBAN!
Peace,
rs7
