If You Live South Of Canada, Best Pay Attention

Sunday, Mexican Army units cornered the head of the Jalisco Cartel. Electing to take his chances with shooting his way out of the trap, the cartel head received the full Bonnie & Clyde treatment. Within hours, the Jalisco Cartel responded by setting much of Mexico on fire: burning busses across roads, arson to houses, hotels, and anything else they could, and shooting anything moving on legs. Think Rodney King riots x Beirut.

That's all fun and games in the dumpster fire/failed state that is Cartelistan, or Shitholia/Mexico.

But now the cartel is vowing to go after tourists, and the U.S. State Dept. Has issued run/hide advice to all gringos in Cartelistan, and thousands of international flights have been diverted from Mexican airspace, because the drug armies are shooting at the airports, the planes, and anyone exiting them.

So, picture this. The cartel minions grab a handful of Americans, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Trump, being Trump, jumps on them and stomps the living sh*t out of them, courtesy of Delta Force, Navy Seals, the 82nd Airborne, and two thirds of the Marine Corps.

The cartels say "Fuck me? No, fuck you!" and order any fifty cartel members (out of the thousands that already reside in the U.S.), to travel to the local malls in Dallas, Houston, El Paso, Phoenix, San Diego, and Los Angeles, and just shoot up everyone they can. And then a couple of NBA games. Disneyland. A few schools full of kids. Take your pick, and there's fuck-all that can be done about that short of putting the factories that makes Mk 82 bombs and all the B-52 bomber wings on a three-shifts-a-day schedule, and just like that, Mexico's cluster-fuck meltdown is now America's war, on American soil, for the first time since Pancho Villa raided New Mexico in 1916. And we aren't going to fix this with Pershing and Patton galloping around northern Mexico, but sending the 1st Armored Division and the 1st MarDiv to occupy a twenty-mile wide buffer zone south of the international border would be the likely result by next Friday.

You want a war where your meat suit is your uniform, where being brown in America is the new n-word, and where 60 million Mexicans caught in the crossfire decide to move into California, Arizona, and Texas, and this is a swell way to get there.

Pay close attention, kids. This might simmer down. Or it could all go Shit Mardi Gras in hours to days, and demonstrate in an international way, the truth of the statement: Good fences make good neighbors.

And own this, in your bones: we got here because too fucking many people who should have known better thought doing drugs was no big deal, and going soft on them was a bright idea. You were down with a Slap Fight On Drugs, With Collateral Damage. If we'd ever had an actual War On Drugs, Mexico and Columbia would look like the surface of the moon.

Legalized Pot Is The Gateway Stupidity

 

Drug Legalization is a disaster: this is my shocked face.

"The Triads are not just in the illegal marijuana business, they traffic in everything from heroin to fentanyl. Legalizing marijuana however provided them with a profitable and semi-legal market that gives them a base to expand their efforts trafficking in even more lethal drugs.

Drug legalization has failed on every level. The legal drug business is collapsing. MedMen, which once promised to be the Apple of weed, fell from a $3 billion valuation to a bankruptcy with $411 million in liabilities. Despite the green crosses and online apps, 80% of Californian’s pot is still the old-fashioned illegal kind. Politicians may be boasting about hundreds of millions in revenue, but the cartels are making tens of billions and they’re taking over entire forests.

The future isn’t pot shops, weed apps or MedMen: it’s Mexican and Chinese organized crime compounds that are spreading across the West and parts of New England like a plague.

Legalization advocates still argue that if the government lowered the high taxes on legal pot, the business model could turn around again, but even without a single penny in taxes, no amount of legal labor is going to be able to compete with illegal aliens smuggled across the border and forced to work for free by gunmen. Legal businesses can’t compete with organized crime.

Drug legalization increased homelessness and drug abuse. It boosted illegal migration and organized crime. It made life worse in every state and city where it’s been tried without delivering tangible benefits to anyone (including weed users who still get theirs the old-fashioned way) except for a few politicians who temporarily have a few million more to pass around to special interests, donors and lobbyists.

And all they had to do was hand over half the country to organized crime."

Gee, almost like The Enemy Gets A Vote, and drug cartels were happy to drop their prices to $0 if necessary to put legal pot shops out of business, then take over the whole industry, and use the revenue once they cornered the market to expand their drug business to every other illegal drug in existence.

In other news, the sun rises in the east every morning, and water is wet.

Only the potheads and f**king retards didn't know this beforehand, yet here we are.

RTWT .

Captain Obvious Makes Another Appearance

 

Tyler Durden: Real world example of  why legalizing drugs is a bad idea. RTWT.

O, if only someone had told them so.

Dear Holland: Rudyard Kipling's estate called. You owe them a nickel. Each and every one of you.

It's Always About The Reefer Madness

Proving once again that when you scratch a large "L" Libertarian, you always find a closet pot-head, comes this slobbering paen of lies to the idiots in NYFS decriminalizing marijuana use, despite the obvious counter-examples from the Left Coast and Colorado about what a disaster it is, on every concievable level. Like we've warned you, and warned you, and warned you.

NYFS To Spend $200M To Fund Pot Dispensaries

"after spending decades generating revenues and expanding the government’s power by waging war on marijuana users, politicians have now found a way to generate revenues and expand the government’s power by making amends to marijuana users.

Through the fund, New York intends to provide financing for 150 marijuana dispensaries throughout the state."

Which plan will fail, epically. 

Marijuana dispensaries will generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the state in licensing fees and taxes.

Oh, REALLY?!? Natzsofast, Guido.

CA Legal Pot Industry On Verge Of Financial Collapse

California's Legal Pot Industry Is Still Failing Miserably

A grower north of Sacramento who has one the nearly impossible-to-get licenses to sell cannabis says that between the wholesale price of cannabis buds dropping as much as 70 percent since last year and taxes up to 50 percent in some places, his customers will turn to underground buying whether he meets them there or not. So he does what he must.

“We basically subsidize our white market with our black market,” the cultivator tells the AP.

“It’s not too hard,” the grower says, to evade the state’s vast, computerized “seed to sale” tracking system. There are few on-site inspections to verify records, and plants vary widely in how much they produce, allowing farmers to get creative in what they report. In fact, the grower says some legal operations unload as much as 90 percent of their crop on the illicit market.

Brilliant. The people who used to grow pot illegally and now have a license to do it legally are now selling 90% of their crop illegally, and paying 0% tax on that. Almost like criminals don't obey laws. Who knew? And the state has given them a license to do it. F**king brilliant.

But wait: there's more!

Legalizing Weed Has Led To Ecological Disaster

The unchecked cannabis ecosystem has caused major economic and environmental damage in California. Many of the state’s estimated 50,000 illegal cultivation sites have been found to use banned pesticides that can poison wildlife and water supplies and are believed to account for hundreds of millions of gallons in water stolen from farms and neighboring communities each year.

Just the news you want to read in a region wracked by a severe drought, which produces 70% and more of the nation's - and the world's - market fruit and vegetables.

Oh, and social costs?

Legalizing Drug Use = 700% Rise In Overdoses, 120% Rise In Deaths

Consider what’s happened in Oregon, where in 2020 voters approved a ballot measure to decriminalize hard drugs — and at the same time establish addiction treatment centers. Unconsidered was the possibility that making heroin and fentanyl legal — subject to a $100 fine that could be waived if one just calls a help hotline — might actually encourage more use.

Instead of harm reduction, OD deaths are climbing. At a hearing on the law, a state legislator from rural Eagle’s Pass reported a 700% hike in drug use and a 120% rise in overdose deaths. Oregon’s secretary of state told the hearing that “in many communities in Oregon we’ve seen the problem with drug addiction get worse.”

The harm-reduction movement needs to accept common sense: Acquiescence signals approval.

Anecdotally, when we started in the ER business nearly a quarter century ago, we'd get a drunk a week, and one OD a month, on average. And we never saw anyone for a problem with pot. The very idea of that would have been laughable.

Now it's 4-5 of each, per night, every night, 24/7/365, including multiple people daily puking their brains out from using genetically engineered high-potency shit that's 100 times stronger than the ditch weed from the '70s. And virtually every single 5150 I've seen for the last few years comes back positive for meth, and THC. Those with neither onboard when society finally throws a net over them are so rare as to be remarkable, the 1 time in 50 it happens.

Neither NYFS's Assclown in Chief, nor hordes of stoners hiding behind Libertarianism rather than just admit they have an addiction problem, will tell you about the economic disaster, the wildly blossoming criminal market, the cartel inroads, the thousands of illegal pot grows, the skyrocketing ancillary crime, or the impending moon launch of overdoses and deaths for cities and towns all over the state, just like in every state that's tried this asinine idea, which has failed exactly as we predicted not once, but twenty times over.

Because all they really care about is getting their weed.

So since they won't say anything about any of that until the horse is out of the barn, and ten miles down the road, we just told you again.

Come back in five and ten years, and tell us we were wrong about NYFS. Like we weren't in Califrutopia, or Colorado, or Oregon, etc., etc. I triple dog dare you.

Fucking stoners just want their high, and will cheerfully assfuck society to get it. Like always.

Meanwhile, countries with the death penalty for drug use or sales have a 0% recidivism rate.

Too harsh for ya?

Ban Narcan, forbid any medical treatment by EMS or medical personnel for drug overdose except the accidental kind for first responders, and let Darwin winnow the field on his own.

Somebody's dying from weed or meth laced with carfentanil? "Bummer, dude. You wanted to get that high? You got it. Good luck with that. See ya later. Rescue 1 clear."

Then the idiot politicians (but I repeat myself) that opened Pandora's Box on legalization and decriminalization can own the results, as the bodies stack up on the sidewalks of Main Street.

When Your False Dichotomy Hits Reality

 

Sorry, kids. But gainsaying your fantasies and calling it reasoning just doesn't cut it where the rubber meets the road.

And while you're up, let us know: was the murder rate lower back when we hung the offenders straightaway, or now, given that we've virtually eliminated capital punishment, and substituted a timeout in prison lasting from 5-100 years?

Show all work.

Who Knew?

 h/t OddJob

Unfortunately, this has nothing much to do with how Califrutopia is governed (other than legalizing weed to begin with), and rather a lot more to do with how markets work under capitalism.

O, if only someone, somewhere, had told you (and told you, and told you, and told you, and,,,) that legalizing weed would never work, because the enemy gets a vote, and that cartels would literally give the sh*t away for free to maintain market share, until they had driven brick-and-mortar "legal" weed shops out of business, due to zoning regs, property taxes, sales taxes, weed taxes, robberies, and the myriad problems of compliance with Leviathan's hoops, through which any such "legitimate" business must jump. Oh, wait, that was me.

Almost like capitalism works exactly as designed.

Meanwhile, we've gone from one overdose every month or two, when I started my profession 2+ decades ago, to 8-10 per shift, two shifts/day, 24/7/365, times every ED in an area the size of Wyoming, amidst a population bigger than that of every state west of the Rockies not including Califrutopia itself, i.e. 10-12% of the entire country. Most (i.e. greater than 90%) of that increase has been the time interval from full marijuana legalization to now. But I'm sure that's just another wild coincidence.

The experiment has failed (exactly as predicted); this was never going to work, and never will, and it hasn't been anything close to any sort of tax boon, nor a victimless crime. It was, is, and ever shall be the only organizing principle of Libertarianism: a political excuse to get drugs.

It has now, oh so predictably, blown up in everyone's faces, but the last thing they'd ever do is admit they were wrong, any more than Hanoi Jane Fonda will ever admit she may have been off somewhat on the joys of communism in a re-united Vietnam.

The weedheads who championed this not only achieved epic failure, they've now succeeded in getting government's hands even deeper into the pockets of every taxpayer in this state (that would be anyone who buys anything, ever)  than they already were before, if the bong-suckers had just had a nice, steaming hot cup of STFU, and minded their own business.

Well-played, drug legalization and dope-smoking assholes. You're not only massively wrong, as anyone with grade-school logic knew when this was first proposed, you're also stealing from me, you've increased the scope of the very government you alleged to oppose, and you're both feeding it like a pet hyena, and compelling others to do likewise, at gunpoint.

This is basically the moral and ethical equivalent of vegans running a slaughterhouse and animal experimentation lab. And selling bootleg albums of the animals' death screams.

Perhaps do civilization a favor, and just kill yourselves now. Take one for the team.

We Told You So Dept.

SiG has a post (RTWT) wherein the CATO Institute has noticed that opioid abuse isn't Rx meds, but rather exclusively street ODs on heroin and fentanyl (CATO is still rather clueless, it's not fentanyl, it's carfentanil that's responsible, the home-cooked-only synthetic version with toxicity on a par with nerve gas).

We told you this here long since. (So did SiG, BTW.)
And told you.
And told you.

I don't know everything, but what I do know is generally correct to about 9 decimal places.

The solution is simple, and two-fold:
Ban Narcan for 5 years.
Build. The. Wall.

Bonus: it requires neither doubling down, nor outright surrendering in the War Mutually Beneficial Slapfight On (Some) Drugs, With Collateral Damage.
Libertarian drug-lovers, rejoice.

Within a year, you'll be able to count opiate OD deaths on your thumbs in most states, annually. Because after addicts die the first time, recidivism drops off precipitously!
Mirabile dictu!

They'll be a brief spike in indigent funeral costs with no Narcan, but that will be more than offset in savings from lack of welfare and disability payments to junkies, and reduction in needle exchange and urban needle discard clean-up efforts. Due to Darwinian selection weeding them out in wholesale batches again.

And under The Enemy gets A Vote:
When the cartels decide that to preserve market share, they have to get kids hooked early, (which they'll do in a heartbeat, just like ever) can we finally, FFS, agree to execute street-level dealer m*****f*****s for their first offense, same day as sentencing, from here on out?

That's all I ask.

I'll even donate one day a month at the state prison to put in IVs for lethal injections if necessary, to help this along.
More forward-thinking states can just switch back to hanging, gassing, shooting, and electrocution, as previously practiced. Guillotine would even be acceptable.

LA and FL trying to televise them being fed alive to gators and hogs, while hilarious and a madly profitable endeavor, will probably not survive the obligatory court challenge, but the cable revenues would probably subsidize all prison costs for the first year.

Economics 101 For The "Legalize Drugs" Crowd

h/t to Kenny @ Knuckledraggin' blog

Write this on your hands, kids:
When we're right about something, and we've pointed it out, in depth and detail, ten times over, arguing against it is a waste of electrons.
Stop beating your dead horse; it's never going to rise and carry you to victory.

Illegal pot sales outpace legal cannabis in California

"SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California’s marijuana industry is undergoing some severe growing pains -- and it’s much bigger than just licensing permits.  

Nearly two years after recreational marijuana became legal in California, the black market is still much bigger than legal sales of marijuana. 

At All About Wellness, a Sacramento pot shop, business is thriving. In fact, owner Phil Blurton is planning to expand into a bigger building next month. But, he’s also worried about his illegal competitor(s) who don’t pay taxes. 

“Our city license now is $20,000 a year,” Blurton said. “The state license is $96,000. Then we pay 8.75% sales tax to the state." 

Blurton said he also pays an additional 4% cannabis tax to the city, on top of an additional 15% tax to the state, “which is making the cost of our product so expensive the black market is booming now.” 

It's booming to the tune of $8.7 billion in illegal sales this year. That’s more than double the legal market."

Waitwaitwait.

Legalizing it was supposed to "drive the cartels out of business" and lead to a Utopia where the government collects mountains of cash from pot farms fertilized by flying unicorns shitting strawberry-scented piles of cash.

And, Holy Obvious, Batman, who knew that criminals, by definition, don't obey the laws???
(Oh, besides every swinging Richard - by the thousands - that told you, going back decades, that legalization as a "solution", was a giant steaming mound of fresh hot horseshit?)

So how's it working out day to day, in Reality?:

(CHICO, CA) — The Special Enforcement Unit of the Butte County Sheriff’s Office made 12 arrests Monday after discovering $164,200 found stashed in a vehicle during a traffic stop on Nov. 6. 

The traffic stop spurred a search warrant on properties along Bonnie Meadow Lane in Brush Creek, said a press release issued Thursday by the Sheriff’s Office. 

According to the release, deputies believe the three arrested during the traffic stop were en route to buy a large amount of pot while armed. 

When serving the warrant, multiple men ran into the woods but deputies detained 15 people and arrested 12, all from Mexico. 

Detectives think the operation was being run by a Mexican drug trafficking organization. They destroyed 1,204 live marijuana plants, collected 278.91 pounds of processed marijuana bud, 457.32 pounds of marijuana bud on stem and 184.02 pounds of marijuana shake.
The Special Enforcement Unit also located and collected two illegal AR-15 rifles with high capacity magazines, one of which was a short barreled rifle, one AK-47 with a high capacity magazine, three pistols and ballistic rifle rated body armor. Detectives seized $14,380 in U.S. currency.

Roberto Estrada, 38, was arrested on suspicion of maintaining a residence for drug sales, employing a minor under the age of 21 to sell marijuana and possession of marijuana for sale.
Nestor Ortiz, 32, was arrested on suspicion of maintaining a residence for drug sales, cultivation of marijuana and possession of marijuana for sale.
Cristobal Briseno, 19, was arrested on suspicion of cultivating marijuana and possessing marijuana for sale.

RTWT

Waitwaitwaitwaitwaitwaitwait.

Legalization was going to make the stupid, futile, impossible, nasty, evil, mean, rotten, unwinnable War Mutually Beneficial Slap Fight On (Some) Drugs, With Collateral Damage go away forever and ever, and peace would guard the planets, in the dawning of the new Legalized Pot Age Of Aquarius.

We've been assured this would happen in 5000% percent of cases. Apparently neither the Mexican drug cartels, nor the Butte County Sheriff's Office, got that memo.
How...curious and surprising. Not.

WTF?

It's almost like bad ideas are always bad ideas, and criminals are going to criminal.
This was just one raid, on one day, in just one county in Califrutopia.

And those were just ordinary, decent, hard-working illegal aliens, growing the pot that Americans won't grow, right?

WHO was it that said “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists."
Because I forget sometimes.

And now, a word from the sponsor of this sort of fairytale happy horseshit:

Stop me if you've heard this one...

Cue the "If only we paid the government MOAR TAXES so they could raise or manufacture and give all drugs away free for anyone, free for the asking, forever, by the metric fuckton...!" Argument, in 3, 2, ...

So, tell me, how's that worked out with food?
Have we somehow won the War On Poverty with that?
Or do we just have nearly half the country addicted to being shiftless, fat, lazy, welfare-sucking piggies at government's trough?

(Hint: Check out People Of Wal-Mart and get back to us. I'll wait.)

Asking for the 50% of the country still pulling that wagon for Uncle.
So far.

Spare me the touchy-feely let's-buy-the-world-a-Coke 1960s hippy Left-wing party-line bullshit.
When your Utopia turns to a pile of shit after 15 seconds in the real world, your map is not the terrain. And never was.

And illegal drugs will ALWAYS outsell and underprice the government competition, even if drug cartels have to give them away and pay you to take them, just to capture market share and drive the competition out of business. (They can -and will - always jack the prices once they have a monopoly, and you're hooked. Google "rich heroin addicts", and get back to us.)

It's almost like they might have paid off some of the government @$$holes who enacted this nonsense in the first place (who now get money for and from both sides of the current farce),  to simultaneously make it fail, and yet end any enforcement on their otherwise-contraband, as if they were running a criminal fucking business where the only rule is "Succeed."

("Drug cartels pay off government shitweasels? That's crazy talk, Aesop." said no one ever.)

Politics is the continuation of war by other means.
The Enemy ALWAYS gets a vote.

Put The Bong Down, Man

Sweet Suffering Shiva.

"Yesterday, Mike Adams of Natural News alerted us to a directive signed four days ago on Oct. 3, 2019, by Marine Corps Brigadier General Daniel L. Shipley, ordering Marine Corps Reserve units to active duty “in support of” the United States’ civil authorities."

RTWT 

(FTR, 19th Ward is usually not a whackjob site, but someone got suckered on this one, bigtime. I yell because I care.)

DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE.
Say no to drugs, m'kay?

Pres. Trump signed an order authorizing calling up USMCR units for duty if requested by the state governor(s) involved, for duty in support of a declared disaster.

Y'know, like floods, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc.
The last time that happened, AFAIK, was during the Rodney King riots in L.A. in the 1990s.
As a rule, governors call up their Notional Guard units first and last, they don't call SecDef and ask for the Marines unless all hell has broken loose.

But, as anyone with an IQ higher than their shoe size, and/or 5 seconds' time in the actual military can tell by reading the order, no one has been called into active duty by it.

It's a m$#;%^f@;*%ing CONTINGENCY order, dumbass.

Anyone seriously peddling the twaddle that this is "to thwart a coup attempt", and that the entire Marine Corps Reserve has thereby been called into active duty, needs to untwist their tinfoil hat about 42 sizes, after they pull their head out of their fourth point of contact.

Which means Mike Adams (for Alex Jones, it already goes without saying) is an idiot, bucking for full jackass, as is anyone in the Headless Chicken Posse buying their bullshit, based on their recockulous misanalysis of a standard contingency order.

Oh, and I got a collect phone call from Heaven, at 8th and I St.:

Your move.
But for openers, I'd stop reading nonsense like that fairytale Natural News website and thinking it's hawking serious info.

The Stupid Is Strong With These

This is what happens when you screw with things above your IQ.

Now you see the problem arguing with people, using facts and logic, in trying to convince idiots who didn't reach their positions using facts and logic. You're trying to teach a pig to whistle.

It's like throwing tennis balls at tanks.

And they keep overlooking the 800 pound gorilla in the room:
The cartels exist now.
They're rich beyond the dreams of Croessus, brutal, utterly ruthless, and will not stop unless you're going to kill them, in your quixotic quest to get the 1-5% dopers of society their high, legally.
Tell me how you're going to deal with them without making things 10-20 times worse by simultaneously legalizing everything, everywhere.

That fight is the exact "War On Drugs" we've never had, and some here say we will never have, except once you legalize it will be that same war on steroids and crack.

So by
a) ignoring its necessity, like planning the Normandy invasion and leaving that whole annoying Germans-on-the-beach thing out, and
b) admitting it will NEVER be dealt with adequately
you who think we can legalize it all are knowingly and deliberately opting to make things ten to twenty times worse everywhere simultaneously, and arguing some imaginary savings after you create, by design, at least 3-4X as many addicts nationwide.

Show. Your. Work!

Answered nor explained has been not one single objection nor observation I've raised in three days dealing with this moronic policy suggestion. You can't, so you don't.

(Hint: gainsaying doesn't count. Neither does ignoring the points entirely, because they undermine your position, and then trying to change the subject. Yes, we noticed.)

Before pot legalization here, I never -zero, nada, zilch, not once in fifteen years - saw anyone in the ER for pot use. It simply didn't happen.
Now I get two to three a night, 24/7/365/forever.
At multiple ERs I've worked in just the last 5 years.
Three potheads in a ten-bed ER is a big deal.
Three potheads in every ER is yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge.

The idea that adding in legal heroin, legal methamphetamine, legal cocaine, legal PCP, and legal everything else will not impact things beyond disastrous is a flatly jackassical delusion, yet one and all in favor cheerfully accept the loss, for all intents and purposes, of most capacity in most ERs in perpetuity as no big deal.

Being yourselves entirely clueless of the fact that, without any disasters at all, we barely have enough (and many times far less than) adequate ER capacity in any locale on the planet, you want to literally destroy the resource, in order to accommodate a flood of dopers. Fuck all those people with heart attacks, strokes, and 300 other legitimate medical problems, right?

I tell you honestly, we'll start euthanizing them. Mark my words, it's going to happen. They'll be shunted to the side and left to expire, and the body count will rise to the hundreds of thousands, all chalked up to OD. And people will quit in droves, and stop entering the medical profession.

And that's just the acute side. It doesn't even consider how many will impact ICU and less-serious hospitalization, to say nothing of the problems with EMS, fire services, law enforcement, and yes, the courts.

Because even were you to make taxes as low as 1¢ per metric fuckton on everything, drug addicts will go broke feeding their habit, at any price point you could imagine.  Because addicts don't keep normal jobs and lives for beyond the time it takes to get hopelessly addicted. Like they do now. (Something else you overlook.)

There are virtually zero treatment programs now, for 99% of all addicts.
A few, for rich dabblers, and they relapse too. WTF do you think the second time, even Charlie Sheen's entire family said "Fuck him." And most people don't have a $1M/episode cushion in the bank from 5 years of sitcoms to fall back on. They snort and shoot up their job, their house, their car, their savings, everything they own, and then they turn to crime.
It's what addicts do.
(And you want to make orders of magnitude more  of them?)

And then they'll rob people, break into cars, steal them outright, burgle homes, and you'll have added millions of addicts-turned-felons, and jack the crime stats virtually overnight, in perpetuity.

Which will take the anemic current MBSFO(S)DWCD*, and turn it into a Stalinist wet dream of enforcement, because the cops, and society, will be under siege from the exact plague of junkie-criminals you all want to create. When the only tool on your belt is a holster, all of your problems look like targets. The police state you'll necessitate at that point would make Beria cream his pants.

And also, the only thing you'll eliminate when the cartels take over all legal distribution, (like they will) is them shooting each other up, and transition that to people shooting Normies up to feed their habit. Well-played.

[I've largely left out any mention of what the inevitable spillover will do to kids from 0-17, despite the fact that it will be horrific - and you know that too, but you clearly don't GAF - because some asstard will Godwin his pseudo-smart "It's for the chirren!" into the commentary, and because I don't need the damage to children to make my case. It's honestly only about the 17th most idiotic and monstrous thing your ideas would do, so I can live without it and still make my case on the other 16 points. But you simpletons will own it, and the human carnage that follows, for generations yet unborn, if your feeble-minded evil ever comes to pass.]

And if you try to set taxes at the point where they'll cover the cost of using drugs, you'll jack prices beyond what they can be smuggled in for, and create the exact market in which smuggling and untaxed drug sales will flourish, like it does now, but with multiple times more people doing drugs. What a boon to cartels!

Think about that, idiots: drugs are cheaper now, with no taxes, than they'll ever be with taxes. Enforcement is a negligible expense, (never and nowhere has the current anemic MBSFO(S)DWCD effort shut even a notable fraction of supply down) and taking enforcement away via legalization just lowers the cost of smuggling in  more illegal untaxed drugs.

You'll accomplish the exact opposite of what you intend.
WTF?!? Are you  idiots congressional Democrats, or what? 

And then some fucktarded lackwit (with which Team Legalize is vastly oversubscribed) will posit the obvious answer to all that crime:

"Well, obviously we need to have the government just give the drugs away free, to anyone who wants them."

So then you're going to tell working people that their taxes must be raised again, to grow, produce, and distribute literal fucktons of dope to dopes, rather than just ending the whole boondoggle. And you'll be there to say that, because you're that moronic, that unhinged, and that evil.
QED

UPDATE: Just checked in with the OP of this cockamamie idea-set:
No points for guessing what the ultimate answer suggested is , but suffice it to say we nailed this outta the park without looking.

All of this to be administered by The Government:
The same government that can't run the VA, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the State Department, BATFE, Social Security, welfare, food stamps, the Post Office, the census, the Park Service, AMTRAK, or even the DoD, not even the parts of it in charge of driving Navy ships without hitting container ships - the absolutely biggest, slowest ships on the ocean - will suddenly be able to make and distribute drugs, for free.

And it will totally work.

Word to your mother: When your policy suggestions make AOC sound sane,
it's time for a major psychiatric intervention.

Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.





And that's the point when I, and hopefully hordes of sensible people, will start shooting you assholes in the face, along with the druggies you created, for daring to shill for and then inflict this plague upon society, with a cheery smile, while blithely ignoring all the "Bridge Out" signs on your way to push that society over the cliff.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”  - C.S. Lewis

That's Team Legalize in a nutshell, preaching that society must be "cured" of wanting to ban drug abuse and mitigate the consequences, by the horrific "cure" of legalization.

We'll lay waste to you lunatics out of self-preservation, and you'll be the most surprised of all when it happens.

We can barely afford you (and your beloved druggie pets) now, but at that moment, you'll become a dystopian luxury, and you're going to go. And if you don't go quietly, you'll be fighting a war to preserve open drug use. That ought to be one helluva recruiting poster for your side!

With the same surprised, stupid looks on your faces as the French nobility had when they faced Robespierre, and Madame Dafarge.

From here on out, anyone advocating legalizing drugs is merely virtue-signaling their abject cretinism, and malign intent, for the entire country. This entire idea is exactly the psychotic horseshit I correctly identified it as earlier in the week, and all anyone espousing it is doing is indicating that they're crazy, don't care that they're crazy, and aren't interested in coming in off of the ledge.

So be it.

Jump, you fuckers.

The sane part of society is loading magazines.

You want to commit suicide by jumping off the ledge, go on ahead.
You won't be missed, I assure you.
Just stop trying to drag the entire society with you.








*(Mutually Beneficial Slap Fight On (Some) Drugs, With Collateral Damage, for those who just tuned in.)

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

Economics 102:

Adam Smith called. He said this scheme is still a load of
codswallop, and he's getting his mailed glove to have another
swipe at your head with his Invisible Hand.

So, despite earnest entreaties, some folks still can't grasp basic economic fundamentals that would and do make "Legalize and tax" schemes with respect to drugs a financial and sociological impossibility.

In the military, the standard instruction, upon receipt of an utterly asinine order, was to follow it to the hilt. First, because rules is rules, and mutiny was a hanging offense, but mainly because the easiest and least insubordinate way to show some gold-braided asshole how big a jackass he was, was to do exactly what was ordered. Good and hard.
(I'm here to tell you that in peacetime, that approach works like magic. I wartime, I suspect grenades with the pins pulled are part of the alternative therapy. C'est la guerre.)

Similarly, with philosophical constructs and hypotheticals, usually the easiest way to watch them crumble and fall on their metaphorical ass, is to grant the recockulous premise.

Thusly:

Okay, all drugs are legalized. You're going to tax them and put the drug cartels out of business. You imagine.

So, Poindexter, let us examine your scheme.
1a) Where do coca leaves come from, to make cocaine?
2a) Who controls that real estate, for miles and miles?
3a) Who will set the price for which they'll deliver you the product, to sell in the U.S.?
4a) Who will control all distribution of same to you?

1b) Same set of questions, for opium.

1c) Same set of questions, for marijuana.

So, Pablo Escobar being out of the equation now, when his successor, Pablo Hersheybar, Lord of Bolivian Marching Powder, determines he will only sell you coca leaves or processed cocaine at 20 times the current street price, WTF are you going to do about that?
[You're going to eat shit.]

When he thusly makes your legal and taxed cocaine orders of magnitude more expensive, and short-supplied, than his illegal, untaxed cocaine, which he has in boundless quantities, and you're funding his illegal activities to boot, what are you going to do about that?
[You're going to eat shit.]

When Bolivia, Columbia, etc., decide they don't want you buying cocaine after you completely reversing course on drug policy, and their government doesn't want their number one export to be drugs, and they don't want a fully funded drug cartel to become the de facto government, because they're tired of paying the price there, in lives ruined, policemen killed, and society subverted for your gringo loco addictions, and they're not as fucking insane as you are, and they shoot down your planes and sink your ships trying to pick it up, WTF are you going to do about that?
[You're going to eat shit.]

Will you invade a sovereign allied country, and fight a jungle war, to subjugate entire countries to force them to let you buy your dope?
(History majors, stop me if you've heard this one.)
[You're going to eat shit.]

If not, HTF do you think you're going to get your cocaine at a lower price than Pablo can sell it illicitly?
[You're going to eat shit.]

Now do that again, for heroin.
Except for Pablo, we'll substitute the Taliban.

Repeat, for marijuana.
Now it's Mexico, and those cartels.

Oh wait, for pot, you'll just grow it in the U.S.?
Genius!

Tell me, how many battalions of security troops does a cornfield require, currently?
Think that'll be true for a pot field??
[Nope. More shit for you to eat.]

If not, tell me how you're going to sell at a lower price after hiring all that 24/7/365 security, for acres and acres of land.
[You're going to eat a party sub of shit.]

Especially when Pedro and his buddies from Guadalajara are willing to hump it across the 100° desert in 80# bundles now, for a few pesos (and not getting his head cut off).

So you're over a barrel, forever, and every cent spent to purchase the product you NEED for the U.S. "legal" market will go directly to drug cartels and the Taliban, destabilizing entire regions, FOREVER, just to satisfy your plan for "Legalized and taxed" drugs, to supply the 1-5% of Americans who are fucking dope fiends.

That's asinine, moronic, insane, and evil, all at the same time.
Well-played.
QED

Some old enough may recall that when they got tired of Western exploitation, oil producing countries got together and jacked up the price of their oil to the West.

So, econ geniusii, WTF are you going to do when the drug countries resolve to form the Drug Origin Producing and Exporting Countries organization, and DOPEC tells you the new street price for heroin and cocaine is now 50 times what it was last year, because they don't like gringos and infidels?
[You're going to eat a big shit sandwich, at a 5000% mark-up.]

And then, after bleeding you dry financially for a few years and a few trillion dollars, they then decide to give their shit away by the metric fuckton virtually free, just to give your tottering drug-addled country a push into the shitter of history?
[You're going to choke on shit.]

Historical note: Alcohol was legalized when Prohibition was repealed in 1933.
So tell the class in what year moonshining stopped in the U.S....?__________

That would be never. It's NEVER stopped.
So why will "Legalize and tax" work with drugs, when it hasn't worked for alcohol once in 86 years??

Tobacco has never been illegal.
So, why are people smuggling untaxed cigarettes in 24/7/365?
Shouldn't "Legalization and taxation" have stopped all that?
If not, why not?

So, how do you go after that criminal conduct, plus do it for drugs, without continuing the exact same War On Drugs you say you want to end, because it's stupid and wasteful???

Answer those last five questions first, or admit this whole idea is full of more shit than a Christmas goose, and Let. It. Go.

It will never work because it can never work, and never has.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part V

Yes, Anyone Can Play

But, like the US Open, there will be a hierarchy fairly rapidly, and eliminations from competition.

Peter, over at Bayou Renaissance Man, refereed his own feelings on the most recent topic, and declared us both right, in his estimation. {And to be fair, I agree with Borepatch unreservedly on one thing: the current half-witted half-baked half-assed Mutually Beneficial Slapfight On (Some) Drugs With Collateral Damage [abbreviated MBSO(S)DWCD] is absolutely a cluster-fuck boondoggle of epic jackassery. Nota bene: That does not, ergo, mean surrender is the correct second choice.}

Then, there were comments there, some of which I'd be interested in discussing.
Or mocking, where appropriate.
And so we begin:

CDH said...

Don't some Western European nations have 'drug ghettos' for lack of a better term where drugs are basically legal? It isn't much better than a death sentence, but hey, if you are going to go kill yourself slowly while shooting that crap into your veins or nose, may as well get it all in one nice convenient place!

July 11, 2019 at 3:46 PM

Except that the government (meaning you and me) is still paying for it. If you're going to execute a m*****f****r, execute him. Don't pay for his food and drugs until he does the job himself.
If you want to make instant lethal injection a massive heroin OD instead of Valium, succinylcholine, and potassium, I'm OK with that.

Flyfish said...

The law of supply and demand doesn't care about the legality of the trade goods, currently the status of illegal drugs constitutes a federal price support.

I believe that until you are willing to execute all the consumers of drugs the demand will not go away. I'm not advocating this, just observing that the law of supply and demand doesn't care.

July 11, 2019 at 4:29 PM

Full marks for an excellent grasp of economic reality.
But I'm experimental: let's execute all the producers and suppliers of illegal narcotics, and then see what needs doing after that.

stencil said...

The WOD is a failure to the nation and its people, but not necessarily to those who benefit from either the trade or the War on it. Follow the money.
Much more should be made of Aesop's call to remove all support for the (self-created) victims of addiction -- not just denial of medical insurance and supprt programs like methadone maintenance, but refusal to provide medical care. Probably EMT's but possibly even physicians may want to draw a line at the point where Do No Harm conflicts with Give Him What He Wants.

July 11, 2019 at 4:30 PM

I'm fine with EMTs and paramedics stamping DNR on junkies where found, and then driving away, leaving them right there. That much should be a Libertarian laissez faire wet dream.

Also, let's play Historical Spot The Flaw:
Methadone was made to get people off of heroin, which was made to get people off of morphine, which was made to get people off of opium.
Bonus: guess how many of the above are opiates?
a) All of them
b) All of them

Angus McThag said...

When you make recreational drugs legal, make narcan illegal.

Things sort themselves out if you let them.

We're at the point where having the drugs being illegal is worse than letting them be legal.

That doesn't mean that legalizing them is going to make things good, but it will make things better.

Just like when prohibition ended.

Prohibition didn't cure the ills caused by booze and created many more problems. Ending prohibition didn't end all of the problems, but it mitigated much of them.

Things ended up worse than before, and the lesson should have been to not ban things people take to get euphoric.

But we don't like that answer, so we keep trying to force people to be moral.

July 11, 2019 at 4:48 PM

Angus would probably be tickled to know that more than a few paramedics with local agencies have expressed the exact same "Legalize heroin. Ban Narcan." thought, verbatim after delivering the lastest wastes of skin and oxygen to the E.R.

But that only covers opiates. It does nothing about methamphetamine, cocaine, and 37 other drugs. My story at Borepatch's OP was a young lady totally methed out. Banning Narcan would still leave me (and society) dealing with her times 500,000. Unless I can push intubation drugs, and then not intubate, the problem is still here.

The solution is to not bring them to the hospital, ever.
The problem with that is it's a Final Solution, and that phrase has a certain track record regarding audience approval.

Also, legalization isn't going to be better.
Making Corleone Italian-American Importing or Medellin Narco-Cartel Inc. a Fortune 500 company isn't going to stop them whacking the competition, and the profits, now pure as snow, will be untouchable.

We know what that looks like in practice: Mexico.

"Forcing people to be moral" has a name too: laws.
They've worked since Hammurabi.
They've also failed since Hammurabi. Because people are people.
Doing without them has never worked, not even once.

Sevesteen said...

If you're talking about narco-cartels "not paying taxes" or profiting more, you're missing most of the point of legalization. Cartels will not be able to compete with legal businesses unless the tax rates are absurdly high. This is a huge reason for me to support legalization, I'd much rather a mostly legal corporation profit (with the lower margins that real competition brings) than a full-on criminal.

Leave the penalties for illegal import, illegal sale. Make it legal to use or posses in private, in a willing business but a felony on a playground or similar--use will move. We don't really have a big problem with opioid overdoses in general, we have a small OD problem attached to a big fentanyl OD problem. Instead of using fentanyl as an excuse to ban normal opioids, make it a felony to adulterate with fentanyl. Where junkies can get known dosages of known drugs, OD rates will be lower. Legal for adults, felony to sell to children--when I was in junior high, I knew where to get pot or speed, but alcohol was much more difficult. Junkies may rob...but they won't need nearly as much. Let police focus on crimes against decent people instead of dealing with the aftermath of drug dealer disputes.

I don't take illegal drugs, nor would I if they were legal. But I believe that decent people like me are harmed by indirect effects of drug laws more than we would by their elimination.

July 11, 2019 at 5:05 PM

Lad, this is going to hurt you more than it will me.
I'll say this as tenderly and gently as I can: you're a total idiot.
Cartels will give drugs away to get market share, and drive legal competition out of business.
Then they'll tell the board of directors at Big Pharma Inc. they think it would be a shame if their factory accidentally burned down next week.
Then their CEO would find a horse's severed head in his bed.
Then their employees' heads would keep appearing in duffel bags in front of the main gate every Monday, without their bodies attached.
Then the Mob and the cartels would own Merck, Bayer, Glaxo-Smith, etc., after buying them for $1 apiece.
Big Pharma has their hooks into your congress now; how d'ya figure the country will do with President Corleone then?
Sweet Suffering Shiva, this was TV and movie plotlines in the 1970s. FFS, try and keep up.

"Leave the penalties for illegal import, illegal sale".
Okay.
So you want the current Mutually Beneficial Slapfight On (Some) Drugs With Collateral Damage to stay in place, and you want to legalize everything here, and enforce no laws?
Except you want the government to prosecute people for f**king with junkies' heroin?
Call it the Junkie Protection Act of 2019?

Dude, we should be mandating that dealers put carfentanil into every heroin dose. It wipes out the cities' entire heroin addict populations overnight.
That's a feature, not a bug.
Problem solved. Next question.

And you think that ensuring a clean heroin high for everyone who wants it is going to magically be better for you and the country than things are now??

And "Let police focus on crimes against decent people instead of dealing with the aftermath of drug dealer disputes."
Srsly???

I was doing CPR On Norm Normie, who was capped with one 10-ring AK bullet to the chest, because two drug @$$holes got into a tiff, and with typical drughead marksmanship capped Norm 100 yds away, whilst he was carrying his elderly mother's groceries home, right next to his wife. He was DRT, deader than canned tuna, and that was twenty effing years ago. You think if you make drugs legal tomorrow, the drug culture is suddenly going to become intelligent, thoughtful, law-abiding, tax-paying Rotarians and Elks???

My main ridicule of your position was simply putting what you said out there to see, for the embarrassment factor. But you win the prize: Say hello to my little friend.

Peter said...

@McThag: I wouldn't make Narcan illegal. It's used to treat good people who accidentally come into contact with fentanyl and other illegal substances - cops, EMS workers, etc. They're going to need it, whether or not we make illicit drugs legal.

One might argue that Narcan should be reserved for the "good guys", but denied to the "bad guys". Trouble is, how can one tell? It's not always obvious whether or not someone affected by fentanyl touched it accidentally or took it on purpose. Any delay in making that call might be fatal.

July 11, 2019 at 5:14 PM

That.
But it isn't that hard to tell them apart. Anyone who enters the premises in uniform, on duty, gets the Narcan. No one else does. After one, maybe two cases of innocent bystander deaths, and they'll be dropping a dime on the drug cookers at the speed of light.

Jerry said...

Create Drug Treatment Centers where drug users can use their drug of choice. The drugs would be free to the users. The treatment centers provides meals and a place to sleep. If you want to get out you have to be clean for 30 days. If you decide to use drugs until you die it's your choice.

The drugs would come from dealer stocks when they're arrested.

Doing this will reduce crime. Users no longer have to commit various crimes to get money to buy drugs. Dealers will soon have to find more profitable for ventures.

The drug treatment centers will also be a draw for do-gooders intent on saving these poor people from their destructive impulses. They will leave us alone.

On the downside people will die in the treatment centers but I believe the net death toll will be less than what we're doing now.

July 11, 2019 at 5:38 PM

Jerry, what you've called a Drug treatment Center?
A place you can't leave?
We call those prisons.

But you've helpfully added providing narcotics to their daily menu. This will be a big hit with the 50-80% of criminals who use drugs, but for the guy paying for it, not so much. And the guards will quit en masse before they'll cater drugs to their charges, because they don't wanna deal with junkies freaking out there any more than I do in the ER.

And the only way you're going to get dealers stocks when they're arrested is to continue the current MBWO(S)DWCD.

So quit pussyfooting, cut to the chase, shoot the druggies in the head, and turn them into worm food out back. For two cents, I'd throw the do-gooders into the same pile. But that's only after decades of first-hand experience with both populations.

If you're not willing to go there, you're not really helping.

JWM said...

@Sevesteen:

First, it is wise to separate the marijuana market from the hard drug trade. Like it, or not smoking weed has become part of our culture. Kids are going to sneak a joint just like a beer. Better they don't have to get it through a black market where the hard stuff is sold.

But "legalization" in CA has been disastrous.
Under the old 215 laws pot was available, inexpensive, and the requirement for a "Dr.'s Rec" kept the riff-raff out of the dispensaries.

Under 64, the State taxes on weed are so egregious that everyone is going back to the black market, or gray market. The same ounce of weed that costs ~$180 on the gray market will cost about $500 in a State "Legal Cannabis" shop. To boot, now CA continues to ignore the federal weed laws, yet calls in the National Guard to raid unlicensed pot farms. The State of California has become the new cartel.

JWM

July 11, 2019 at 6:50 PM

JWM, your are evidently complete unacquainted with the fact that the current weed is about 200 times more potent than the weak scraggly Mexican sh*t that was around in the 1970s. We see two-three people a night in every ER in CA for being f**ked up on marijuana. It's epidemic, but no one talks about it in public. It includes little kids and grannies that didn't know Junior Pothead's "brownie" or Gummy Bears were 100% potency sh*t, that messes them up for hours, at a cost of thousands of dollars and an ER bed unavailable for anything else. And this is true only since and because of legalization. Color me shocked, Califrutopia doesn't want to hear about this, because "it's just pot".

Your other observations regarding the new idiocy of TPTB in California stand.
Um, fuck them, sideways, with a rusty chainsaw.

JaimeInTexas said...

Mine view is that I lost. There is no Constitutional authority delegated to the FedGov to prohibit drug use.

Jaime,
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. You're apparently totally unaware of the Opium Tariff Statutes of 1832, the Pure Food and Drug Act, Import and Export Regulations, the Harrison Act, the Narcotic Drug Import and Export Act (all of these passed before 1922), followed by the Porter Act of 1929, the Federal Bureau Of Narcotics, The Informers Act of 1930, the Marihuana Tax Act, the Vehicle Seizure Act of 1939, the Opium Poppy Control Act, the Drug Legislation of 1946, the Increased Penalties of 1951 and 1956, the Narcotics Manufacturing Act, and the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act.
And that only covers federal laws before 1970.

[It should be noted that the largely laissez faire approach of the 19th century, so enamored by pseudo-historians online as "how it oughta be forever" got the U.S. between 500,000 and 1M drug addicts by the turn of the century, when the US population was only 76M. So between 1/2 and 1% of the country was hooked on drugs, before doing drugs was cool.
That, now, would be more addicts than we have troops in the US military, 1.75-3M druggies.
It may be more or less than that, and frankly I don't care, it's too goddamned many.
And that's not counting the criminals involved in supply and distribution, nor any sort of accounting for the crimes committed by today's addicts.] 
Which is when things really got going, with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. 

Sorry to wake you from your stupor, and please, return your H.S. diploma immediately, and request a full refund for the substandard civics education you received.
Then use the internet for something worthwhile, and educate yourself properly.

There was Constitutional authority for all of this, since a century and more before you were born, upheld by eleventy different federal courts, including SCOTUS.
Welcome to Reality. Take off your coat and stay awhile.

So the truth is, we've tried everything people decry before, over and again, and it hasn't worked. Nor, in most cases, was it ever intended to work, for any reasonable value of that word.

The bureaucracy is a self-greasing axle.
Blow up the car, and all the riders, once and for all.

Over a century ago, if you only robbed or stole from someone it meant prison.
If you stole their cattle or horse (life-threatening offenses), killed them, tried to kill them, maimed them, or raped them, we just hanged you.

Put drug sales and distribution into category B, re-instate the former jurisprudence, and be done with it.

Post-death penalty recidivism  stands, perpetually, at 0%.

Game over.

As I said in previous Comments:
Are there some things that are so bad for society they cannot be permitted? Y or N.
If Y, cost isn't a consideration, except prudential economy with the public purse, to get the mostest result for the leastest bucks. 

I'll even throw a bone to the large and small "L" libertarians:
IDGAF what you do, in your home, privately, as long as you're the sole victim of your predilections.
(The inescapable fact that there are no such things as private addicts in 99.9999% of cases is not my problem.)
But the minute it affects spouse, children, neighbors, or anyone else, or enters the public street in any way, your ass is grass.

And sooner or later, either the state recognizes this, or the neighbors will dig in and do the job themselves, and the Three S's will kick in with a vengeance.

You could look it up.




Coincidental sidenote:
Check out Daily Timewaster's Catch Of The Day.

Part I

Part II
Part IV
Part V