Mexico Drug War: Your Thoughts?

[CaptainObvious]

mrstickball said:

CaptainObvious said:
Legalizing it won't solve the problem it will just make it worse. Who can use it and who can't? How much will you charge for it(maybe cheaper buying it on the streets)? If a drug dealer gets arrested will he/she be charged with selling drugs or tax evasion? Drugs are a different monster then alcohol most aren't addicted to alcohol but with drugs your hooked till you die or get help for it.

Only thing i can compare drugs to is gambling cause legalizing it will only increase the crime rate. It's sad how it is but it is one of man's hardest crime to fight.

 

Not quite. Many people are on pot that are not addicted. Concerning price - you can buy drugs cheaper from medical dispensaries than you can on the streets, and the quality is considerably higher. Its like comparing home-made bathtub liquors and Budweiser - there is little incentive to make crappy stuff that can kill you vs. stuff that won't.

In the case of Portugal, drug dealing was still a crime. However, incedents of arrests for drug dealing went down, as fewer and fewer people did drugs (remember what I've said - Portugal de-criminalized drugs and drug usage among all drugs dropped 30-35% over 6 years, with the harder drugs like Heroin, Meth and Crack dropping 60-70%).

Your argument has no factual basis whatsoever. You are building your case off of opinion and emotion, not facts and logic. Drugs are certainly bad, but so are many things in life. Bad things exist in life. Rather than banning every act that one engages to harm themselves, we should let Darwin work and weed out the stupid ones.

 

@Farmageddon:

CATO produced a white paper on a savings analysis last year: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12192

Their findings are as follows:

• $41.3 billion savings in government expenses (lower incarceration rates from de-criminalization saving millions of people from going to prision on the taxpayer's dime, no monies spent on War on Drugs, ect)
• $46.7 billion in tax revenues per year from tax rates similar to tobacco and alcohol

This assumes all drugs. Most of the savings comes from de-criminalizing the harder drugs which are the focus of more interdiction efforts.

Not really thinking about a teenager drugs like pot but the other ones like heroin, meth and crack .  America is a larger population then Portugal and has a chaotic country run by drug cartel in Mexico that Portugal luckily doesn't have. 2009 statistics: drug arrest in the USA 30,567  Murdered in the USA 15,290 drug death in the USA 63,846 while Portugal drug death is only 290 kind of makes you wonder.

 

I think it would make it worse in the USA if you legalize it there's a domino effect to it like gambling crime goes up across the board United States culture different from that to western European's culture but not as bad as Russia's or Mexico's thou.