Do you want to reduce gun homicides? Sure, we all do! There are some really easy steps we can make to accomplish this.
First and foremost among these steps would be to repeal drug laws.
Oh, you mean THOSE gun homicides! Those mostly affect people who are not nearly as white as me. Can we get back to talking about preventing white people from getting killed by guns?
Dripping sarcasm aside, repealing drug laws and regulating and taxing their sale would solve a whole lot of our social ills. Not only will it likely drastically lower the homicide rate, it will also raise governmental income while reducing incredibly costly governmental spending on drug interdiction.
I don’t mean to make this sound like a panacea for all our problems. Drug addiction is a serious issue. Repealing some drug laws will likely lead to an immediate increase in drug addiction cases in the short term. But if that is the price we pay for saving lives, it seems worth it for me.
Using drugs is an individual choice. (I don’t actually believe this in most cases, but it’s a belief popularly held by most people.) The taking of a life is an act that removes individual choice. By repealing drug laws we would be reducing the instances of forced removal of choice by increasing the freedom of choice.
Lets start with just weed (since most sensible people believe that it isn’t as bad as alcohol) before we repeal all drug laws.
The criminal science professors over at Samefacts.org talk about this stuff quite a bit. There was a post some time ago (I can’t find right now) that speculated tax revenues from legalized pot would be pretty minimal
I did find this post looking at the economic effects of pot legalization. The original author thought it would be a drag on GDP. An economist that responded thought just the opposite was the most likely scenario.
On topic though, to use a slightly different term, decriminalization would reduce the danger involved in the illicit drug trade. The price goes down and so do the profits. That assumes we don’t tax it to the point of creating a black market. In short, I agree this should reduce violence. I not sure only legalizing pot would have much effect though.
That guy is really pulling teeth with the whole economic activity vs. economic welfare thing. He seems to be equating black market activity as purely up front economic activity but there is so much tax revenue lost from it. Sure, the drug kingpins may be making less money if they go legit, but they will be paying employees who pay taxes as well as pay corporate taxes. To argue that that is somehow a net loss for the economy is ridiculous.
The real economist not withstanding, I assume it is mostly neutral. I think the over all price per oz would decrease. Whatever users save I feel is mosr likely to end up being spent on other goods. Actually, since so much drug.money heads out of thw country I would rhink it is probably a net gain.
I started looking for the article arguing the tax gain was very mnimal. When I couldn’t find it thought this one intwreating enough to throw up instead.