14 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
Johann Hari can sometimes sound terribly libertarian for a leftie. He wrote last month (and I missed it then) about the benefits of legalizing drugs. Compare and contrast with Korea and prostitution. As I noted then drugs and sex are businesses. If you disagree with people using them then you need to look at different methods of prevention such as education and marketing. As Hari notes legalization has a very very important benefit:
Nobody will be shot in Chicago today because of a dispute about alcohol. That is because the supply and distribution of alcohol were brought back into the remit of the legal economy in the United States in the 1930s. The problems inherent to a vast illegal trade – and the network of criminal gangs that it necessarily involves – quickly disappeared. True, some of the gangs transferred to other criminal activities, like protection racketeering. Most went bust and found their way into the proper economy, sometimes as licensed alcohol sellers. We have travelled so far from that world that it would seem bizarre today to imply there was anything illicit about liquor store or even a recovering alcoholic in the White House. One day, this is how we will think about the legal suppliers and users of drugs.
And he also makes a good point about how drugs are driving the illegal firearms market and that most of the deaths by firearms in the UK are due, directly or indirectly, to drug trafficking. Of course then he goes off the rails a bit because he is so radically opposed to firearms of any description and fails to apply his previous logic to the firearms issue.
Once ordinary people begin to fear unexpected gun crime like this – a moment getting closer every day – they begin to believe that they need guns to protect themselves, and a terrible spiral is created. This is the case in the United States, where ordinary people get guns for self-defence and a whole panapoly of social problems are unleashed: their arguments are far more likely to descend into shooting, terrible accidents happen when children discover their parents’ guns, criminals get even bigger guns than everybody else… anybody who has ever watched ER could continue this list in several different ways.
As with drugs the point is that firearms are better off legalized, regulated and available to those who have fear of assault. This all comes down to what engineers call gracful degradation. An unarmed society collapses when an armed criminal tries to impose his authority. An armed society tends to shoot him. Of course there are
It has occured to me that the left is generally good at identifying the problems while the right (and those terms are used in an exceedingly general sense) is better at identifying the solution. the problem is that the left seems to think that the solution to anything is government action whereas the right, once they have had a problem pointed out, tend to look at more imaginative ways to fix it such as by changing the risk/reward or supply/demand ratios. And it is impossible to alter these ratios if the product under discussion is judged illegal.