Evils

I just got done reading "Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls".

It's pretty decent.

He's got some suggestions for fixing the prison system.  They might work.

But it all got me thinking about drugs.

Boy howdy do we have a lot of people in prison over drugs.

It occurs that most of the evil associated with drugs is because drugs are illegal and not something inherent with the chemicals themselves.

It's the point of irrational departure for Miguel.  His response to legalization was to post pics of what the cartels do with regards to brutality.

My response is that we've been here before and it went mostly away when Prohibition was repealed.

Unless there's a vast backlog of cases where drivers from Budweiser have been hijacked and murdered by Smirnoff distributors, I think we can dial the rhetoric down a tad.

Budweiser and Smirnoff use LEGAL means to settle disputes.  Because they can.  Illegal enterprise devolves to brutality because it cannot take the matter to court.

The vast sums of wealth garnered by drugs would evaporate in a heartbeat if they were legalized too.  I've seen how simple meth is to make if the precursor chemicals are readily available.  Those chemicals are cheap too.  Nearly everything horrid you read about meth is because the cooks are having to reduce other chemicals to obtain the precursors; and since this is organic chemistry; impurities are introduced and retained by the very process that's been developed because there are legal restrictions on the base chemicals themselves.

Is taking pure, unadulterated, meth good for you?  Fuck no!  That's true of any substance you can metabolize and drugs are way worse than most things.

If drugs are legalize, people will still die.  But people will likely not be murdered over it any more.