In a comment to Sonic Charmer's post,
It’s Important To Understand Why ‘We’ ‘Need’ The Drug War, If We’re Ever Going To Be Able To End It, Steve Johnson writes:
The progressive Supreme Court has made crime legal (well, more
accurately, they made it impossible to actually enforce the law) as a
result, criminals have full protection when committing actual crimes
against people. Mug people? No problem – just have your confederates
waiting outside the court when the witnesses against you are leaving.
Beat a few of them into comas and voila, no more witnesses will testify!
All crimes against people have the same flaw.
The reaction to this, of course, hasn’t been to challenge progressive
“reforms” but to simply try to route around the damage. People pay
loads of money to live in segregated neighborhoods to avoid being around
high risk people (i.e., black people). Security cameras are everywhere.
Why? Because you can’t intimidate a tape into not testifying. People
don’t carry cash. When the thought of carrying cash is brought up people
think “it’s too dangerous to carry cash” without ever directly thinking
that criminals make it too dangerous to carry cash.
Most importantly, law enforcement has completely shifted to an area where you don’t need witnesses.
Did that guy have crack on him? Well then it doesn’t matter if he can
scare the hell out a witness – the only witness to that crime is the
arresting officer. To get out of that crime he’ll have to kill or
threaten a cop Pablo Escobar style. The state still has enough health
that someone who does that will die pretty quickly (Pablo Escobar
getting killed by a Delta force sniper, frex). In fact, the state can
never decay so badly that the cops will be unwilling to protect their
own – when you reach that state of progressive decay the cops won’t fear
the state enough to not simply turn into another gang – one that simply
executes criminals.
Libertarians are damned fools for even thinking about drug
legalization until we solve the more important problem of crime
legalization.
This is astute. Sonic Charmer replies:
on reflection, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the drug-war really gained steam at around the same time that Miranda Rights,
patients’ rights etc. hamstrung (wrongly or rightly) law enforcement.
We have a drug war as a backdoor way of imprisoning criminals. I think there's a strong element of truth here. Still as I wrote over there, that's still pretty repulsive.
Also, USG has criminalized far more stuff than it needs to for this cryptic mission of locking up criminals. We could easily decriminalize marijuana and opiates, for example, and there would still be plenty of ability to get at criminals via cocaine and meth. And personally, I’d much prefer the underclass to spend its leisure time (ab)using demotivating drugs than alcohol or motivating ones.
An effective state would not need drug laws at all.