williatw wrote:
What I should have said that the government intervention "priming the pump" blew up the relatively weak market for Opium greatly expanding them into huge vast cartels. Both by legalizing it after conquering China and no doubt pumping lots of money into to cause it to grow so rapidly. Think about it I seem to recall you posting that at one point half the adult pop. of China were opium addicts. Poor rural peasants somehow managed to get their hands on relatively expensive Opium; yes I know production and particularly transportation costs would have been lower than shipping to much wealthier Europe/America was but still. Obviously someone (the British Government) fed the cartels money initially allowing them to quickly blow up the supply and distribution of Opium (probably selling at cost or even below cost) to breed lots of addiction very quickly. It would be "naive" to think otherwise given the facts.
Whatever point you are trying to make escapes me. I consider it axiomatic that those who profit from drugs will do whatever they see as increasing profits. They will "Push" drugs.
Do you not already see how many legal manufacturers of pharmaceuticals constantly push their drugs? It is the nature of drugs to be "pushed". You can't separate pushing and drugs. There will always be pushers if there are drugs to be pushed.
williatw wrote:
I suppose you may have some point with that, but I find it difficult to trust a gov. that clearly greatly expanded the problem in the first place and whose actions to address that, the WOD, has at best produced decidedly mixed results as being the entity to fix it.
This is an argument with which I am highly empathetic. The government seldom does anything well and therefore needs to be constrained from "doing things" as much as possible. However, it is the entity responsible for handling this problem, and so we just have to put up with it's tendency to botch things and work to improve it's efficiency to the extent that it is possible. (But we don't want it to be
too efficient.
williatw wrote:
After all in your favorite example China the various treaties signed in the late 19th or early 20th century didn't end the opium addiction problem the takeover by a brutal ruthless dictator (Mao) did. He solved the problem all right by killing by the 100's of thousands; an then went on to kill 100 million or so more (albeit for different reasons). I would go with legalize it and strictly regulate it putting the illegal criminal cartels out of business as much as possible.
Regulation is just a milder form of prohibition. It still creates a supply/demand differential, and that still creates a black market. H*ll, there is a black market for Viagra, Lortabs, Cigarettes, etc.
Are we to use the same standard that people apply to the "War on Drugs" and conclude that because a black market exits, regulation is a failure?
Also with the Dictator thing. My theory is that if you collapse a society, you will always get a Dictator. By the 1930s, China was so weak it couldn't even repel an invasion from Japan.
I regard it as axiomatic that Anarchy gives way to the strong man form of government, and that this will always happen.
(This is a very old theory.) It is the nature of Humans to demand order in the midst of Chaos, and the man who can bludgeon his way to the top becomes the defacto Leader of any society seeking to exit Chaos.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —