legalization will do what?

Fester over at Newshoggers proposes that we legalize all drugs and put high taxes on them in order to drive drug lords out of business. He makes an excellent point that drug lords are only becoming more and more powerful, and that Mexico is becoming destabilized, possibly to the point of becoming a criminal-controlled state, which would be a disaster for the US. This argument is good in theory, i.e., US pharmaceutical companies could make heroin and cocaine, etc., much more cheaply than the drug lords and could then drive them out of business.

What it fails to recognize is that drug lords don’t compete along capitalist lines, they compete along lines of both market and projection of violence. If big US pharmaceutical companies become competitors, then drug lords will have the executives executed, chemists murdered or kidnapped, and normal employees bullied and harassed. There will be no way the companies can provide sufficient security; they would have to secure every employee’s home. Also, if the companies have to greatly increase security, then that greatly increases their costs, meaning the drugs they produce won’t necessarily be that competitive against drug lords with established markets.

As a side note, high taxes will be counter-productive, decreasing the competitiveness of legally-manufactured drugs, as I noted earlier.

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h/t Instapundit, who seems to like the idea.

the war on drugs

In response to this post on a no-knock gone wrong: Live hand grenades — best self-defense weapon EVER for protection from drug dealers AND police entry teams. After Claymore mines, but those are a bit much for home defense. Of course, that depends on where your home is.

On the WOD. Clearly it’s gone WAY too far, including no-knock and property seizure. I think we should apply the alcohol rule to drug legalization: If it’s no more harmful than alcohol, legalize it. There do need to be case-by-case provisions. E.g., you can’t get a contact buzz from sitting next to someone drinking whiskey, but you can from someone smoking cannabis, so laws need to take things like that into account. I also think, at least initially, only domestically produced recreational drugs should be legal; we need to cut the money going to criminal and terrorist organizations.

However.

The failure of the WOD to eliminate illegal drug use in America means . . . What? We should legalize murder? I mean, laws against murder have failed for millenia; when do we give up and say, ya know, it’s cool?

Tax it big time! Yeah! Oh, so these people who are happy to support murderous drug dealers, terrorists, and drug lords who destabilize weak nations, just to have a little fun on Saturday night, are now going to become good little citizens and pay really high taxes to get their kicks? No. Really high taxes are just going to result in the continuing criminal trade in drugs.

Lastly, these people are financing murder and mayhem here at home, FARC et al abroad, and heroin buyers specifically are very possibly supporting the Taliban in their drive to kill American soldiers and return Afghanistan to a state of wretched tyranny. And, they are doing this for FUN, not for any greater principle or for FREEDOM!!!!!! They are vermin. Destroy their lives. Throw them in small cages and let them rot.

Or, consider it treason in a time of war and off ‘em. If you’re sending cash to the Taliban, or to FARC, or to any number of other criminal / terrorist organizations that buys their bullets and bombs with drug money, you are as much a traitor as if you were buying war bonds from Hitler in 1944.

Naturally, due process should be observed, dogs should not be shot senselessly, and people who are addicted should be treated, not hung. And for the rest of us, grenades. I’m telling you, a live grenade on the floor is a great and immediate disincentive to shoot dogs, harass old men in underwear, etc. It also gives the missus an excuse to redecorate.*

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*If you’re married. Hmm, maybe my reliance on hand grenades as a form of self-defense is why I’m still single . . . Nah, that’s silly. Women love a man in hand grenades, right? Right?