You're Still Doing It Wrong

We have covered the indefensible asininity of drug legalization, and arguments against prohibition, before. Here.

And now, post-legalization follies, Borepatch takes note of the fact that taxed and legal weederies are being undercut by criminal cartel pricing, exactly as we predicted two years ago. As we noted in comments to his post, "Almost like Adam Smith was onto something in 1776."

We had moved on, but the commentary discussion from one contributor went on to note:

"My thoughts on pot are similar to my thoughts on guns and liquor. Passing laws and creating an illegal subculture is the problem. Would it be better if people did not smoke pot? Yes. Would it be better if people didn't drink alcohol? Yes. However, prohibition fails. It failed with booze the same way it has failed again. It creates an artificial market, high prices, organized crime, etc. How many murders happened during Prohibition, for money or alcohol? Untaxed alcohol, moonshine, is still a problem where I live. Why? Because hight taxes create a market for the homemade stuff. And we all could go on all day about the effects of gun laws."

We replied to that:

 "ASM826 has pegged the meter and will win the 2018 Unintended Irony Award in a walkaway, just about the time he realizes he has made the perfect rational and logical argument for getting rid of laws against murder.
Because prohibition never works.

Well-played, sir!
That's quite a Brave New World for which you've inadvertently advocated.

The crowd will now watch as you extricate yourself from this predicament."

Borepatch then suggests the answer to that conundrum lies in differentiating between malum prohibitum and malum in se.

Sorry, but no sale.
Drug laws are malum in se laws, whether we recognize them as such or not, because drugs themselves are bad, humans being human and all.

We assume, at the outset, that anarchy is not a desired situation.
That necessitates that society has the right to pass and enforce laws for itself.
And that whatever rights you possess end when they transgress someone else's rights, or impinge on the society, because at that point, you're no longer operating solely on yourself, "in private" and thus no longer committing "victimless" crimes.

Anyone who seriously posits that drug use is or ever can be a victimless crime is living in Fantasyland. The police do not kick down doors on the suspicion that you're minding your own business and getting high while harming no one.

That would require firstly, omniscience on their part just to know you were doing something which, by definition, you're claiming affects no one, and secondly, a degree of maleficence on their part far beyond what we routinely observe (and trust me, they manage to screw the pooch hard and regularly, as we've noted times beyond counting on this blog, but not in that way).

They home in on you because, in 99.98% of situations, you're fucking up egregiously, and doing so in public, which was why somebody/everybody else noticed, and they dropped a dime on you. You were simply too stoned to notice all that.

The fact is that nearly all drug use is in fact harmful, and very nearly if not actually no one keeps their habit concealed, under control, or consequence-free.

The argument that they ever could if only drugs were legal beggars credulity, and makes Nigerian banking e-mails from Solomon Odonkoh look legitimate by comparison.

I've spent nearly a quarter-century working in emergency medicine, and an honest 25% of my patients any given night are there because of chronic alcohol abuse, and the sequellae.
That's 6-years-plus, I've got quite a ways yet to go until retirement, and I'm only one nurse. Pile other drug abuse on - all of it flat-out illegal for most of that period - and we're at between 1/3 and 1/2 my professional career just dealing with life's fuck-ups and their substance problems.

And you want to make all that sh*t legal, because it's a "victimless" crime???

You're. Fucking. High.

Cases in point, from all the way back to both nights this past weekend.

Case one:
Two guys, stoned off their asses on opiates, necessitating an entire light task force (six firefighters, two paramedics), four EMTs, two ambulances, four cops, six nurses, two doctors, two radiology techs, three lab techs, and the administration workers  to deal with for most of four hours. Saving the lives of two total @$$holes, higher than kites, stoned out of their mind to the point of near respiratory arrest and hypothermia, who then proceeded to sign out against medical advice as soon as they were competent and able to do so, and will, in fact, pay for exactly not one fucking cent of the $20,000 of emergency response and medical care that saved their lives, to include any of the taxes that made it possible in the first place.

Every minute I and my colleagues are dealing with their bullshit, we're not working on your grandmother's stroke, or your child's asthma or septic fever. And they brought part of their dope bindle with them, which along with any needles are a hazmat exposure nightmare to every one of twenty people who handled and cared for them. When a firefighter ends up in ICU from carfentanil exposure, or some minimum-wage EMT has to deal with HepC and liver failure in his 30s because of those wastrels, define for me what part of that crime is "victimless".

And considering that a fine in court of $1000 in this state is a felony-level crime, these two pieces of human feces will see not so much as a ticket, let alone prosecution, because they aren't worth the trouble.

For starters, because both were homeless, at least one of them almost certainly here illegally, and neither of them owned any private space to enjoy their dope, even were it legalized.

So let's get serious here: you'd be talking about legalization only for people who had a private domicile in which to partake of their drug(s) of choice; anyone homeless, by definition, lacking that, would be violating the victimless user rules the minute they shot up, because they're ALWAYS "in public".

Case Two:
Couple wasted off their ass in someone's apartment parking lot, bugging out on the ground.
So we've got a tenant complaint they you're violating their right to quietly enjoy their own place of residence.

Stoned in public.
As in completely freaking out, puking everywhere, crawling on all fours, and requiring the whole circus, for the second night in a row in a small, busy ER.
Again, two cops, 6 firefighters, two paramedics, an ambulance, two medics, and the whole ER kit and caboodle, because you thought someone else's residence you were visiting was okay to get stoned off your ass on Ecstasy or or meth or bath salts or whatever shit you ingested, wasting everyone's time for a seven hour process, and for which you will probably skip paying one thin dime.

Had I been the tenant/complainant, it'd have been 50/50 whether I called 9-1-1, or just retrieved a stout pipe, and beat your fucking skulls in, and let cats and possums clean up the mess. Society would be the richer for it.

What should happen?

Let's start with six months at hard labor, in a chain gang, shoveling snow in the winter with a child's sand castle plastic beach shovel, or six months slinging hot tar in the desert sun all summer. Cold nasty gruel breakfast and dinner, protein only if you can catch bugs or rodents in your cell at night, and a daily beating of ten stripes, delivered by the former NFL linebacker kicked out for being too aggressive and violent, every day of that six months. That's for a first offense.

Pass that law, and legalize any damned thing you want, as long as they never impact anyone but themselves.

DUI? Same penalty.
Impaired in public? Same penalty.
Any other crime under the influence? Same penalty.
Too stoned to pay alimony or child support? Same penalty.
Bounced a check? Missed a tax payment? Same penalty.
Not feeding, sheltering, and/or adequately parenting a minor child? Same penalty.
So effed up in public or private that someone had to have your ass dragged to the ER? Same penalty.
Because when you're that fucking addicted, you're going to let it affect your entire life, and quickly, and it will. You've just violated every argument in favor of legalization.

And the minute it does, you're not committing a victimless crime.
So, you pass laws that punish those that can't keep that addiction in their pants, and we can talk. Make sure the judicial daily beatings are included without fail, and I'll even pay you $1 for every second offender you can find. I suspect at the end of six months of that, I'd still have change from a $5 bill.

Third offence: LWOP. Chain gang for life.
We're going to have the cleanest roads and beaches in the country five minutes after that day, and the smallest drug problems.

Harm anyone, anytime, in any way while under the influence:
A short drop and a quick stop. No appeal, no commutation, no parole.
Executed, same day you're sentenced. That's a victimless crime, because you're a societal liability, not an asset.

Not willing to do that?
Fuck you, and your legalization arguments.
You're just a pothead who wants to get high, or someone too lazy to give a shit about what you're doing to blast civilization with caustic acid until you destroy it.

The problem with the so-called "War" on Drugs, is that it's been a forty-year slap-fight on drugs.

You start killing people and bombing cities like we did when we fought a by-God war, and this b.s. would have been over 39 years, 11 months, and 5 days ago. Stop mollycoddling dopers and dealers, period.

We fire-bombed Dresden for lesser offences than Medellin.
Mexico should look like the charred aftermath of a brushfire, all the way to the Guatemalan border, and Panama should be inhabited by nothing but crocodiles and jaguars.

The problem isn't a War On Drugs.
It's the total lack of one.

And the correct solution isn't doing even less, and multiplying the problems.

Oh, and exactly as I suggested in 2016, you can't just legalize; you're going to have to give the shit away free, otherwise the cartels get a vote.

Which means spending my taxes to pay for giving dope to dopers.
O Hell No.

Predictable as sunrise every morning, what was the next suggestion made by the original commenter?

"It would make more sense to legalize it and give it away to anyone that wanted it."

Almost like I knew what I was predicting way back when.

So, to be absolutely clear, you're against government going after Al Capone or Pablo Escobar for wantonly violating laws enacted by the directly-elected representatives of the people in a republic, including murder, because that militarizes the police, but you're in favor of using the IRS to demand, at gunpoint if necessary, and on pain of prison or death, that I pay taxes to provide unlimited drugs to whomever should wish them, from out of the fruits of my labor?

You've simply swapped one criminal enterprise for another, waved your magic wand over it, and called it "better".

Best wishes defending that plan.