Drug Laws are a Solution to the Problem of Policing a Liberal Society

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.