Making Drugs Illegal Makes Them Valuable
The more difficult the government makes it to acquire illegal drugs, the higher prices black marketeers can charge. The harsher the penalties for dealing drugs, the more freedom the dealers have to commit other crimes in their pursuit of the economic and social power their trade gives them. After all, they're already criminals and have little more to lose: low risk, high reward. The tighter the crackdown by the government, the scarcer the supply of drugs, and the more potential for money and power individual dealers have: the more strongly the window of opportunity and power buttons get pushed.
As we discovered during Prohibition, the good the government does by reducing drug use must be weighed against the harm done in supporting the criminal underground that serves this black market, not to mention the loss of individual freedom caused by the state imposing its group morality on everyone.
Notes:
...and supports the criminal black market.
Folksonomies: drugs law enforcement
Taxonomies:
/health and fitness/weight loss (0.395397)
/law, govt and politics/government (0.290497)
/society/crime (0.220105)
Keywords:
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Concepts:
Crime (0.961150): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Economics (0.772212): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Drug (0.756034): dbpedia | freebase
Drug addiction (0.665248): dbpedia
Morality (0.636322): dbpedia | freebase
Political philosophy (0.631494): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Gang (0.608759): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Illegal drug trade (0.602002): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme