If Drugs were ever legalized..

[athenasatanjesus]

...how long before all of the programs designed to help drug addicts,and taxes on companies selling drugs would be called out as being big government by the very people that don't believe our wasteful war on drugs is big government now?

[bighughdiehl]

1. The very next day.

Just think of how those hypocrites sucked
GWBs cock over torture, warrantless wiretaps,
wars, etc, but then anything Obama does is
"big government."

[Warpy]

2. Most programs to help addicts have little support from the state

so I'm sure the heartless bastards would leave them alone. Prison is the drug treatment plan of choice for poor people and that is unlikely to change, vagrancy taking the place of possession charges.

Taxes on drugs would continue to be popular, increasing over the years until a critical level were reached, one that would make them so expensive the black market would start up again. Remember, taxes on somebody else's sin are always popular.

Little would really change except kids would find drugs a little harder to get hold of than they do now. Lower prices and higher quality in the beginning would remove drugs as a source of revenue for gangs, both here and outside the country and if that's all the good that happens, that's great.

Still, it's hard to see how it will be accomplished while we have a corrupt oligarchy who are determined to keep the drug war going as a pretext to kill civil rights and control the population in fascist hell.

[TheDebbieDee]

3. But also, if drugs here were ever legalized, cartels in Mexico

would probably go out of business overnight because there wouldn't be any profit in smuggling the shit into this country. Or maybe the cartels would just find another unenlightened country to sell their drugs to. (Every few years, another country decides to decriminalize drugs (to some extent) and stops making criminals out of large portions of their citizens.)

Also, crooked cops and judges wouldn't be able to supplement their income by taking bribes from drug smugglers.

Also, Americans wouldn't feel the allure of engaging in drug abuse and might acutally work on solvng their problems instead of anesthetizing themselves.

Also, we could stop spending so much money building new prisons to detain drug offenders and spend more money on instead n drug counseling and education, healthcare and a host of other things.