Legalize Drugs: Zero Tolerance, Prohibition, Drug Laws, and the War on Drugs - Ron Paul
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4lwQvqYgP8 ~~August 26th, 1988 Ron Paul Interview (Good)
Thomas Sowell - Why Drugs Should Be Legalized
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZbHndilYsI (below quote is this video)
It is a dangerous omnipotence to have the illusion to think that we can undo every evil. A crusading mentality can easily make things worse.
Drugs are inherently a problem for the individual that takes them, but they are a much bigger problem for society, precisely because they are illegal.
It is there illegality that makes them costly, and drives people by desperation to get the money by any means and anybody else's expense. The mere cost of production of drugs can be very inexpensive.
If an addict could support his addiction for a few dollars a week, he would still be an addict, but he would not have to steal, mug, or kill other people to support his habit. Neither would drug pushers have the financial incentive to try to get children hooked on drugs, if there was no big money in it.
Crusaders cannot accept the fact that they are not god, that they have neither the right, nor the competence to run other people's lives.
The years that preceeded prohibition saw private citizens take the law into their own hands, entering saloons with axes, to destroy bottles of liquor. It was ego boosting, moral exhibitionism. When the crusaders finally succeeded in getting their prohibition bill added to the U.S. Constitution, it was their crowning triumph, and the nations tragedy.
Organized crime blossomed, so did the corruption of the whole political process. When national prohibition ended, many localities passed their own bans on liquor. Bootleggers sometimes financed the campaigns to ban liquor. Their profits depended on liquor's being illegal.
Legalization would similarly destroy the profits of today's drug pushers. There is no way that they can compete with drugs that can be mass produced cheaply by big pharmaceutical companies. This is not a complete solution. No where is it written in stone that there are always answers in the back of the book.
What we can do as a society, is to cut our losses. It is bad enough that some people destroy their own lives with drugs. We don't need to add vast numbers of innocent victims, who are robbed, or murdered by addicts, who are trying to get money for a fix.
Like alcohol, drugs can be regulated for content, age required for purchasing, driving under the influence, etc. But this is just one more area where we have to recognize that government has it's limits. Ignoring those limits is not only reckless arrogance, but dangerous. We finally learned that painful lesson from prohibition, we need to remember it, when it comes to drugs.
~~~~~~~~~November 29th, 1984 ---- Thomas Sowell