Reply #11: Legalization and taxation makes perfect sense....

[Moostache]

which is exactly why it will never happen!

Americans bought a snake-oil salesman pitch back in 1980 and we are STILL paying for it today, 30 years later!

Reagan sold this country on "trickle down", "free market", "war on drugs" and all manner of other harmful as hell policies. Those policies have wrought their destruction on this nation and now, even amidst the chaos of another depression and a hopeless outlook for the future without structural change (NOT Obama's kinda-sorta "change") we STILL have masses pining for a return to the "good old days" of St. Ronnie...

The War on drugs may have it origins in the fantasy world of Tricky Dick, but it really kicked into overdrive - and began to focus almost entirely on interdiction under Ronnie. This created a de-facto police state in south Florida as part of the effort to "reclaim" Miami. The trouble is that instead of solving anything, the "cure" has become something akin to insulin injections - we cannot quit the shots for fear of what would happen...but in this case the what would happen is a bunch of out of work, power-mad, paramilitary types...you know, just the kind of people that became the Gestapo and SS in another context.

To starve the beast, in this case a bloated and ineffectual police state of drug "enforcement", we need a plan to detoxify the system and slowly wean it from its current state. We need an immediate phase out of drug prohibition and a 10-year effort to industrialize and tax the entire operation. Within a decade, we could eliminate the killings in Mexico, end the political chaos in Colombia and Ecuador, and alleviate the overcrowding and expensive cost overrun of the United States prison population.

Instead of losing money (and lives and freedoms and sane national priorities) fighting drugs, we could MAKE money by taxing and controlling their distribution much like alcohol and tobacco. People are going to do drugs period. The sane society does not seek to manipulate the behavior of so many of it members, it seeks to maximize the benefits of such behaviors for the greatest number of its members. Currently too few win and too many lose for use to stay on this path much further...