Apologies for continuing to post non-fukked posts in the Fukked Thread - in my defence I've been bladdered for all the other posts I've made on this topic so technically not an issue to be posting them in the Fukked Thread. You can be fukked and say actual things dontcha know
I accept I am not fukked at the moment but haven't looked in for a couple days and am not always so good at letting it lie (he wouldn't let it lie? no he wouldn't let it lie! etc) but it does rather seem there's precious little in the way of points being made the other way at this point so it's probably fizzling out and we can go back to the "I llkj tuik mush beennsazzoosas amd ar fikd" posts we all know and
If H is legal you still have to pay for it. Due to ease of availability, it's possible more people could become addicted. Which means more petty crimes (Theft, shoplifting, beating up grannies for their purses, etc) surely?
Again you are confusing the financial cost of drugs in an illegal market with the cost in a legal market. Heroin is a very cheap drug - it's also very easy to make even cheaper as poppies are easy to grow and there's legit medical use for them too so could even help bring the cost to the NHS down for certain pharmaceutical opioids if there were less legal restrictions on growing poppy. The latter is a bit speculative admittedly, the fact heroin is dirt cheap is not speculative. How d'ya think Afghani addicts can afford to keep up a massive habit? They ain't paying a tenner a bag I can assure you. Same goes for cocaine and for basically every other drug - the illegality puts a
massive premium on the costs. Anybody could afford a heroin habit in a legal set-up. Which is not to say everybody would wish to have a heroin habit in a legal world - another point you seem to be convinced of based on nothing and in the face of evidence to the contrary.
I guess it's an inevitable repercussion from an opposition of drugs. You can't fight a war without making sacrifices, can't make an omelette without breaking an egg... etc etc but at the same time, if dealers and gangs want to murder each other... it's kinda their own fault for getting involved.
I simply do not believe you actually believe that yourself. Gangs, dealers, growers/manufacturers and everybody else up and down the more... physical side of the supply chain only kill each other?!? If that is really what you are saying I can only presume you've never read a newspaper, watched the news, read a book, watched a documentary or had a cogent thought. You know that is not the case so why say it?
I see the principle in what you're saying, remove the illegitimacy, then we remove all the crime that comes with it. It's a peaceful approach to the problem
Precisely. You appear to have bought into the bizarre concept of a war on molecules. As mentioned above, surely however anti-legalisation you are you are well aware it is simply a war on the citizenry? It's a way of creating artificial "enemies" to keep police, military and other security services massively overfunded and on constant alert. It's a war on what is arguably a mental illness in the case of drugs of addiction. It's a fantasy not a war. Why would any sane person (or even a government which are not generally known for having the very soundest of mental health
en masse) choose to put
billions directly into the pockets of some of the most vicious, murderous and callous people in the world allowing them to fund what amount to private armies in the case of some of the Central and South American countries - so well-funded and well-armed they can hold entire nations to ransom? Why would you choose to lock up huge numbers of non-violent drug offenders which must clearly have a pretty big effect on any number of social and economic issues - and not much of that effect could be described as positive even by the most staunch prohibitionist - with entire "lost generations" in certain cases (thinking of Black and Latino young men in America especially)? Why would anybody choose to do all that simply to stop people getting high? Or even to stop them getting addicted? Or even to stop them potentially ODing at the end of a miserable life? Those things are horrible and they are possible consequences from using drugs. They are the choices of the individual though and there are ways to help mitigate - and indeed overcome - those horrible possibilities. Weigh the two against each other and tell me prohibition makes sense.