Drugs and Money

Vox has put forth a very good overview article on the main options for decriminalizing drugs and I think all Americans need to read this.

If ever there were a more obviously disastrous social policy, save, say, slavery, or child labor, it would be difficult to find it. Tens of thousands incarcerated without much to show for it except a lot more hardened criminals as users. Tens of thousands still overdosing. And tens of thousands more dying at the hands of drug lords in countries that are in virtual states of war trying to regain the rule of law. It is, if nothing else, a testament to willful ignorance by those who wear the blinders of authoritarian moralism; so steeped in extreme religious and work ethic over simplification that one can only shake their head in disbelief.

The one aspect of this, however, that even the decriminalization advocates seem loath to even consider here is the very fact of how easy our current economic model makes anything, more than a few people might desire, a commodity. And in making it a commodity, with the fungibility of money, can it then be so easily provided. And the more difficult to produce and distribute the better for it only adds to the premium that can demanded from the user.

What is also interesting here are the contradictions that become all to glaringly apparent; contradictions inherent in the whole idea of profit, and caveat emptor, in the first place

Just consider what really differentiates the vast sums made from drugs, as opposed to, say selling defective products you know are defective, or various substances industry is hooked on that poison either as a part of extracting and refining it, and/or in its actual usage. So many of the same people who condemn the human weakness towards addiction hardly ever seem to question the money being made on industrial addictions, or the damage they cause.

Let us also not forget that it is money that makes the corruption required for these various addictions to flourish so easily possible as well. Power and money. Money and power. Corruption, in one guise or another, almost always seems to flow from their interaction. And at the end of they day, what addiction could be more a part of societies, since the dawn of their beginning, than money and power.

America can end its war on drugs. Here's how.

by German Lopez on April 25, 2016

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