Libertarians are fond of telling you that smoking pot is a”victimless” crime, a dubious claim at best especially when one considers that the money used to purchase pot is then used to finance turf wars between rival gangs that end in multiple fatalities.
The money Americans spend on getting high also funded this house of horrors in Mexico:
MEXICO CITY — Mexican officials said Saturday that 36 bodies were found buried in the backyard of a house in a city across the border from El Paso, Texas, and they believe that number represents the final tally.
Mexican federal agents began digging behind a Ciudad Juarez house allegedly used by the Juarez drug cartal two weeks ago after receiving an anonymous tip, officials said.
In the raid, investigators found 3,740 pounds of marijuana in the house. They initially found six dismembered bodies, but as excavations proceeded the tally rose.
[…]
Ciudad Juarez has been plagued by violence as Mexico’s crackdown on powerful drug cartels stokes turf wars among traffickers that have been linked to hundreds of killings in the past two years.
Cartels frequently use “safe houses” in border cities to store drugs, house gunmen and dispose of dead rivals.
The standard Libertarian answer to this sort of story is that if we decriminalized drug use the gangs would be pushed out by legitimate business owners. Ones who are impervious to bullets.
We all know that once prohibition was repealed organized crime never again took over strip clubs, liquor distributers or nightclubs from the upstanding citizens who run those establishments. Just ask the folks in New Jersey.
No the Mafia and the Russian mob and the biker gangs are all to busy looking for some other illegal racket, like construction or running the unions.
I challenge any libertarian to explain to me what the mechanismis that would make drug gangs just walk away from drug dealing if it were legal, instead of extorting money from anyone who tried to sell legally. Bikers extort money from strippers and dancing is legal. Mobs of various types extort money from bars and bars are legal. In both case plenty of people who refuse to pay are killed.
Why are violent street gangs less likely to continue their brutal ways than the Hell’s Angels or the Gambinos?
Anyone?
Amen brother.
So… if I’m to understand correctly… pot should stay illegal because of the crimes that are committed due to pot being illegal?
That’s just… stupid.
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I don’t know where you live, but I’ve worked in a number of bars and I’ve never heard of anyone extorting money from any of them. The “dancers” I’ve known are paid well by their customers, who include bikers, but would never hand money over to them. They’d be more likely to kick a little biker ass.
Your argument is that criminals will exhibit criminal behavior and if pot were legal they’d move on to to other criminal activities. Well, duh! Bad guys will be bad guys, no matter what. If we made sugar illegal I’m certain there’d be a black market and turf wars over it’s sale. Would you then argue that sugar is the cause and it should remain illegal? Of-course not. The same applies to pot.
We’re paying billions to arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate pot growers, sellers, and users. Sure, a few of those people are genuine bad guys who deserve to be in prison. And yes, if pot were legal those people would move on to other illegal activities; that’s what bad guys do. But the majority of people arrested for pot related crimes are otherwise normal non-violent people.
Your argument makes no sense. It isn’t logical. Relaxing pot laws would reduce crime and save billions of dollars. It’s obvious to anyone with any common sense.
Josh, the point is that if I dealt to you, then the laws were repealed, why would i stop expecting my hundrend dollars a week from you. Sorry kid I’m from East Orange NJ, East Coast Blood territory and I swa plenty of White kids like you come to buy, and the day they didn’t buy the dealers robbed them.
Do you really expect that a newstand or deli could one day start horning in on a gang’s profits, for something legal or not, and not face the consequences? Sorry that the world isn’t a magical place where a wave of the magic wand makes problems go away. But explain why construction and casinos are mobbed up if legalizing vice remokes the criminal element from it.
Kirk I don’t know where you live, but I assume it’s your parents attic and the bar you tend is in your head. You’re kidding right?
The 110 pound “dancers” (and it’s nice you put that in qoutes as if you really call them whores or something) you know just up and kick the asses of 1% who carry knives, guns and orders from above to rape and kill anyone who doesn’t do what their told. I included a couple of biker trail links from to 1%er clubs above. Read through them especially the parts where the bikers raped their “property” (strippers who weren’t given a choice to join them) and set clubs on fire when they didn’t get the money they demanded. In one case the women and the club owners were each required to pay the Pagas $400 a week or suffer.
I’ll let you do the research and find more. The thing is the business they target i legal, but many biker gangs started out shaking these places down decades ago when cops still raided them. The fact that America is more accepting of them and there are few raids hasn’t stopped them form being involved.
Nor has it stopped the mob from being involved with Unions or casinos. It defies logic for you to say that gangs who fund themselves with drug deals, mostly pot to white kids, will give up that income. They’ll extort the legal businesses and threaten the consumers into buying theirs.
That doesn’t even begin to deal with the slave labor on the South and Central American drug plantations. growing tons of pot is not labor effective, add the free market and you’ll have more incentive for cartels to kidnap and force people to work. How would your increased demand stop that?
I think you confuse the rich kids who show up to clubs on Suzukis for bikers and your friend biff for a dealer. In the real world bikers and dealers eat people aalive, alsmot all the violence in the inner city is funded by people like you who buy pot from gangs, and legalizing pot will make gangs more money, not less.
I see. Leave pot illegal because it keeps the criminals from getting organized & greedy.
Wait.
Let’s try: leave pot illegal to keep South America free!
Oh.
I got it! Leave pot illegal because drug-dealers need the job security!
No… I was right: this whole article is just stupid.
You’re missing the point Rob, not too surprising given your naive outlook. The 1% that perform illegal acts will always perform illegal acts. We’re wasting huge resources putting otherwise innocent people in jail solely because they smoke or sell a little pot. Make it legal and those resources could be used to go after the bad guys.
It’s easy if you’ll just give up your prejudices and think about it a bit. I bet you can think if you try. Here’s how it works.
1) Bad guys will always do bad things.
2) Using pot does not make you bad.
3) If we stop persecuting people who aren’t bad we’ll have more resources to go after people who are bad.
I agree with Josh, the article is stupid; so is it’s author.
Kirk I guess you don’t know much about the bikers you make so many assumptions about. A 1%er is a general term for an outlaw biker, to be a 1%er means you’re a “real” biker and not some weekend warrior. One of the ways you prove you’re a 1%er is to be willing to commit crime.
But I guess I’m stu;id, even though you and Josh cannot explain the magical process in which violent gangs lose interest in a proven money maker when the law changes. I’ll pay you to give me a good logical explaination as to why, if I was a dealer and you were my customer, I’d allow you to stop paying me and move on?
If I ran a crew that made thousands a week and then suddenly pot was legal, are you really so naive as to think I’d just go find something else to do? Why wouldn’t I treat the people selling pot legally, the delis etc, the same way I treated another gang i.e. with bullets and drive bys.
Using may not make you “bad” although if you’re over 17 it makes you a bit immature, but you do bear the moral responsibility for the crime your dealers are involved in. Pot isn’t legal and every bullet that ends the life of some kid in the ghetto is purchsed with money provided by White kids like you who care more about getting high than about the people who die because you can’t face reality.
It’s clear you’re both liars, especially “kirk” because I’ve never met a person who has worked in bars bikers frequents who doesn’t know what a 1%er is, and because your entire counter arguement consist of calling me stupid it’s clear that you know you’re wrong and are lashing out to avoid accepting the guilt. You know that you’re habit has paid for the gun that killed someone. Your money recruits new gang members who are initiated into the drug peddling gang by killing someone.
Call me stupid, but until you give a better explanation for why you think repealing the drug laws will end gangs dealing it your the ones who look kile lazy stoners.
Hey, cigerettes are legal but in New York gangs deal tax free ones. How do you explain that?
If that’s the logic: people bootleg alcohol, operate stills, and use fake IDs to get into bars, clubs, and taverns — I guess we oughta try outlawing it…
Oh, wait. THAT must be why the bars, taverns, nightclubs, and sports-arenas are being torn-up in drive-bys!
I knew there had to be a reason.
Yep — let’s get that Prohibition thing going again.
What?
Put the blunt down before writing. My point is that bars and nightclubs are often targeted by criminals. Read the biker links above and you’ll see that. Criminals target anyone with money, so legalizing pot wouldn’t stop criminals from being involved.
Your still not able to tell me exactly why, given the evidence, that you cling blindly to the notion that legal drug bars are anathema to criminals. Why? Why would gangs suddenly not want the money they already make?
You don’t have an answer do you?
While we’re ranting, how’s all that smoking pot treating you? I’m working on my sites and counting my money, you’re typing out sentence fragments at 11:30pm. Guess you’re not working tommorow?
Seriously, why do you care what I think? And more importantly why can’t you just admit that when you buy pot you fund criminals and you don’t care? You don’t care if people die so you can sit around high, and if you were a man you’d be comfortable just putting it out there.
But sorry kid you can’t have it both ways. You give money to crooks and that makes you at least morally responsible for what they do to control their turf.
Rob, I have a question for you. Given that it is highly unlikely that anyone can convince you that legalizing marijuana would eliminate related crime, (a claim which I myself am skeptical of) can we at least agree that if it were legal to grow it in the United States, the level of crime related to smuggling would decrease? That is, that it would be less likely that this particular crime, involving the thirty-six corpses, would have occurred? And that the overall rate of drug-related crime would thus decrease?
Of course. However the drug smuggling operations make a good deal more with human traffic so it wouldn’t eliminate it. But if you were growing your own why would drug dealers not “tax” you if enough people were following suit to cut into their profits?
Believe me I was a Libertarian once and I still have little interest in pot smokers going to jail but I am tired of the spurious claims of pot smokers who act as if their not efecting others. It’s pretentious, niave and based mainly on bumper sticker slogans we Libertarians used to vomit forth. Show me a pot smoker and I’ll show you a bad parent; a selfish, immature cretin who doesn’t have the willpower or morallity to do as you sugest and grow their own. They don’t grow their own because most cannot grow enough to support the shiftless lifestyle of sitting around all day getting high.
It would be a wonderful first step if people grew their own, but then when the local crips demanded a farmer’s tax the rest of us would still be on the hook to protect these smokers from the criminality they expose themself to, in a sense no different than the situation we have now.
Actually, I was referring to large farming operations, but the problems you describe would obviously apply to them too. Nonetheless, I choose to believe that the first step in changing the culture is making marijuana legal. Call me naive if you so desire, and I readily admit that you may well be correct, but I disagree with your opinion that change must not be allowed to occur lest it does.
In any event, what of medical marijuana, grown by the pharmaceuticals for the severely ill? Do you have a different argument against it, or roughly the same ones?
I think pharmaceutical companies are taking advantage of a fad and their large security forces. I’m in my late 30s and in high school I knew people who got THC pills, but pharmas now believe (correctly) that there’s a movement afoot to have legal avenues to grow pot. They’re waiting for the day it will be total legal and then they’ll form a seperate corp. that’ll load joints up with nicotine and sell them by the billions.
The point isn’t whether or not pot should or shouldn’t be legal it’s about whether or not we as a society pretend that legal pot will be free from crime, child neglict or play a part in some failed live as it does now. When you go to a stip bar and their are a bunch of bikers hanging around or the dancers don’t speak English you know that something criminal is going on. The girls are trafficed or the bikers are shaking the place down. Legal alchohol and exotic dancing didn’t remove the criminal element.
The real point is for pot legalization activist to admit that crime won’t go down, daily pot smoking is pretty much the hallmark of bad parenting and that smoking pot isn’t the best thing you can do with your time. When I was a Libertarian I said drugs should be legal because people should be allowed to make bad choices. I and the L.P. at that time also support employers absolute right to fire a person just for knowing he or she smokes pot even in their free time.
The “real” Libertarian position isn’t that pot doesn’t hurt you, it’s that the rest of us shouldn’t care when it does and shouldn’t be on the hook for social programs that work with any drug addict. I really believed that the solution to drug crime was to let addicts die in the gutter, that my friend is Libertarianism.
Over the years I worked with kids in non-profits and many had parents who smoked pot, which was often the least of their problems but when you see a child who doesn’t have a new pair of shoes while the parent spends $10-20 a day on getting high you realize that even in the most benign circumstances adults who haven’t outgrown smoking pot, especially ones with children, aren’t just hurting themselves.
I don’t have a problem with people getting high, as long as we can take their kids and put them in a safer enviroment, and I don’t begrudge a person who is sick their vice, until people begin to make up a whole myth about drug use being harmless. That’s my problem. I also have a problem with healthy people who smoke pot and don’t work and expect social services.
I also think that corporations shouldn’t have different rights than the rest of us but that’s just me.
this is all about money the drug doesn’t matter take the money out by legalization and regulation. Let us talk about reality and….. hippy…..cmon now….. redneck.. take that ha oops we’re people right.
in the uk in 2002 114,000 people died from tobbacco smoking related disease
in the uk in 2002 114,000 people died from tobbacco smoking related disease yes this is a stupid art… bye
Spoken like a true Pot Head.
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Just came across this article…I know all of these comments are from two years ago. I just had to explain why legalizing pot would decrease crime. (before you call me a pot head, know that I have never touched pot in my life) It’s a matter of supply and demand. Legalizing pot would open the market for large corporations to get into the business. This would drive down the price of pot significantly, thereby eliminating the market for small time pot growers/dealers. There would be no money in it. You’ve never heard of an alcohol dealer, or a tobacco dealer have you??? It’s true that bad people would just move onto other things, but at least with a little common sense, we could use our resources to stop legitimate crimes.
Did legalizing alcohol decrease the involvement of the mafia in alcohol related businesses? No. Did it stop the mafia from killing people? No. Did it decrease the cost of alcohol? No.
History proves that decriminalization only “reduces crime” by erasing a class of crime off the books. But the Mafia killing people is why Guilani became Mayor of New York … he was elected after a huge Mafia war. Organized crime runs most nightclubs.
And people who abuse alcohol still commit plenty of crimes.
I am not for or against decriminalization, but for honesty. When you open up a pot shop[ where it’s legal you will be “taxed” by gangs, and if you don’t pay you’ll die. It’s already happening in other places.
Decriminalization will not solve problems that are inherent in a drug culture.