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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!duke!unc!tim
From: tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: drugs and criminals
Message-ID: <5883@unc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 19-Sep-83 00:04:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: unc.5883
Posted: Mon Sep 19 00:04:27 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 19-Sep-83 08:31:57 EDT
References: uiucdcs.2844
Lines: 61


    Here is a recent conversation on this group.  Quotes are
absolutely, literally verbatim from the originals.

            [First person]  I suppose that I might support
        legalizing and taxing marijuana, however it is
        difficult to decide what happens next.  Two of my very
        best friends were killed by drug traders after they
        'stepped up' to cocaine.  Their offence: not
        recruiting more customers. I'm sure that their parents
        and myself will never feel too secure about this
        issue.

            [Second person]  But the only reason that scum
        like this sell drugs is that the drugs are illegal.
        Legalizing drugs is the ONLY way to put these people
        out of business.

            [Third person]   Bull manure, the only reason that
        scum like this sell drugs is that it makes them a lot
        of money!  If legalizing drugs is the ONLY way to put
        these people out of business, how do you explain the
        existance of organized crime in Nevada and Atlantic
        City.  After all, those people are supposed to leave
        when gambling is legalized, at least according to your
        logic.  Not on your life.  Show me one incident where
        scum didn't *increase* when vices were legalized.  The
        existense of scum is one reason why harmful drugs
        should NOT be legalized.

    All right, Larry.  Do you remember Prohibition?  Remember how they
made the "vice" of drinking illegal, and directly created the worst
period of gangster activity in the country's history?  Remember all
the lives that were lost or ruined during that time, all because
people were forced to deal with criminals to get the product, and
because the product available to them was made in illegal and unsafe
conditions.  After Prohibition was lifted, this situation of violence
and poison vanished, thus providing a clear example of that thing which
you assert never happened.

    I hope the meaning of this is clear to you, although you show
every evidence of being proud of your closed mind on the subject.
When one makes a thing illegal, one hands control of it to criminals.
Is that too hard for you to see?  Once the criminals are in control,
then of course the business will be associated with the normal
criminal methodology, as exemplified by the machine-gun tactics of Al
Capone.  The truth of this is so clearly attested to in this nation's
recent history that I cannot understand your blindness to it.

    To put it as plainly as possible:  If the government controlled
the sale of other recreational drugs the way they control ethanol, the
only legal over-the-counter intoxicant in this land, then the "scum"
you are so concerned about would be immediately out of a job, no
longer capable of preying on those who dealt with them, and with no
more relevance to other drugs than they have to ethanol now.

___________
Tim Maroney
duke!unc!tim (USENET)
tim.unc@udel-relay (ARPA)
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill