You are right.

The best way I know how to explain is during prohibition America was useing tax payer dollars to stop bootleging. It didn't work because the tax payers were takeing what was left of their money and buying illegal liquor.

When prohibition ended the liquor money started going to companies that provided a safer product and a safer place to buy it. Liquor taxes helped fund America getting back on its feet.

Now many years later there is nobody at the end of my street with a gun trying to sell booze. Liquor did not turn out to be as bad as it was made out to be, and the world didn't end when it was legalized.

What happend was it took liquor sales away from mobsters. Mobsters were the inventors of drive by shootings and massacres. All of the violence ended when prohibition did. So if you think we need to keep up this war on drugs than you are going to have somebody on your corner with drugs and a gun.

Drug dealers are not carrying a gun to shoot customers they carry guns to protect themselves. If you shoot customers, you go out of business. If their customers could go to the bar or liquor store to by their product noone would buy from the guy on the street with the gun. They would go to a well lit store where they would be safe. The dealer goes out off business because all of the sudden there is no money to be made on the street.

If you don't want a someone dealing in your neighborhood help stop the drug war. Like I said it will take drug deals out off the dark. Addicts can get help not prison. Last year almost a million families have been hurt by this constant road to nowhere. It is a road to nowhere because look at where we have gotten "NO WHERE".

I agree with all I have read about the folly of our present policy, but I would add one more thing. Anyone who supports "prohibition", is supporting an ongoing criminal enterprise, which in almost any jurisdiction is a crime itself. Allow me to explain. Prohibition, puts the criminals in charge.

If civilization is defined as the elimination of opportunities for acts of barbarism, then the continuation of drug prohibition in places such as Mexico, Colombia and the rest of the world fails the civilization litmus test.

If the consequences of a legal policy are made the determining factor for that which is regarded as right or wrong, then drug and alcohol prohibition is wrong and drug and alcohol regulation is right.  Regulation prevents victims, while prohibition creates them.

Obviously, the law isn’t always civilized.  When different states in the U.S. failed to come together to agree on equal taxes on cigarettes, an interstate crime was created involving the smuggling of cigarettes between states with differing tax rates on tobacco.  People went to jail for being enticed into a seemingly easy and harmless crime.

A similar situation existed in pre-revolutionary France with its burdensome tax on salt.  French citizens living on or near the French border with other countries took advantage of the salt tax by smuggling tax-free salt into France.  Prohibition of the practice was the only remedy chosen by French authorities.  Stories of the disastrous consequences include those of women miscarrying during salt raids conducted by French authorities on the homes of people suspected of salt smuggling.  The salt tax and its enforcement was one of the precipitating factors leading to the French Revolution in 1789 (see Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky).

Regardless of whether Mexican gang members get their heads lopped off by competing drug gangs, or whether arrogant government officials were beheaded using a guillotine during the French Revolution, dead is dead, and prohibition is often a root cause.

Hopefully, future lawmakers will keep their heads by enacting regulations which reject barbaric prohibitions and which carefully consider the human dilemma and predilection for easy opportunities in the face of harsh economic realities.  Regulation is the key.  It’s the civilized thing to do.

Giordano

Violence is not just a word that people say it is an action that everyone goes through and it can be a scary thing for young boys and girls and it hurts everyone around us.