Six Easy Reasons to Legalize Drugs

Dave Barnesky’s blog at AntiState.ca is “dedicated to exploring the questions of morality, liberty, the state, and its role in Canadian society.”  Noble goals indeed in the Great White North (that’s Canada, right?)  and they aren’t much different here in America either.

Here are the reason Dave lists:

1. Save the police time and money policing non-violent crimes.

Using the police to make sure adults aren’t peacefully consuming certain substances doesn’t appear to be the actions of a country which supposedly cares about individual liberty.  Freeing up these resources means that police could be focusing on actual crimes, and even better, letting the taxpayer keep more of their earnings.

2. Allow the government to spend less on the prison system, by not locking up non-violent offenders.

Now private prison builders and contractors aren’t going to like this but those state-sponsored cash cow needs to go, both here and in Canada!  Free people do not belong in cages.

3. Help the drug addicted, by allowing drug use to be in the light… of day, we can start looking at drug “abuse” as a medical problem, and not a criminal problem.

Last I heard roughly half of all people in prison are there for non-violent drug “crime.”  If they need help to quit, we’d like to see them get it.  If they are just using peacefully, leave them the hell alone!  At the very least don’t send armed men after them to cage them.

4. It would severely reduce the revenues of gangsters and other people who would use violence as a daily way of doing business.

For something with a virtually endless demand, the economics of drug illegality ensure the trade’s endurance.  Every drug operation which is ended by the state means that the supply of narcotics diminishes and thus the price for available drugs increases proportionally.  As entrpreneurs see that the goods are fetching higher prices they will enter the market, underbidding each other until some sort of equilibrium is approximated and the market is saturated with supply.

Unfortunately, rather than business people making these exchanges it is unaccountable thugs who often behave as coercive monopolies, attempting to keep their competition out of the marketplace with violence.

As famed mustache aficionado John Stossel is fond of saying, “you don’t see the Coors guy and the Budweiser guy fighting in the street.”  Rather than giving people who do business in the most destructive and unaccountable way possible an enormously lucrative source of income I would rather support legal businessmen and women who use courts to solve disputes over guns, and hopefully also accept silver!

5. It would lead to fewer people dying from drug overdoses. Most `overdoses` in hard drugs are due to bad batches, and legalizaton and regularization of production would lead to far fewer bad batches.

Not necessarily “regulation” but regularization would see firms who distributed quality product which did not hurt its users would be strongly favored in the marketplace, and those which didn’t would be subject to potentially bankrupting lawsuits.  On the black market it might be dangerous to even suggest you received a dangerous dose from your dealer, let alone receive retribution for you resultant medical problems.

6. Stop funding `terrorists`overseas. By pushing drug industry into the black market you are taking money out of the pockets of legitimate business men, and putting it into the hands of `terrorists`and other fanatics.
The opium fields in Afghanistan have always been a great example of this, and the illegality of those plants just gives big statists one more reason to keep an imperial military presence all over the world.

For the individual liberty of drug users and for the stabilizing and positive economic benefits of drug legalization, we should follow the advice of Dave Barnesky and support the end of drug prohibition here in America, in Canada and all over the world.