Mexican cartels have overtaken the U.S. heroin trade, imposing an almost corporate discipline. They grow and process the drug themselves, increasingly replacing their traditional black tar with an innovative high-quality powder with mass market appeal: It can be smoked or snorted by newcomers as well as shot up by hard-core addicts.
They have broadened distribution beyond the old big-city heroin centers like Chicago or New York to target unlikely places such as Dayton. The midsize Midwestern city today is considered to be an epicenter of the heroin problem, with addicts buying and overdosing in unsettling droves. Crack dealers on street corners have been supplanted by heroin dealers ranging across a far wider landscape, almost invisible to law enforcement. They arrange deals by cellphone and deliver heroin like pizza.
Then there was this chilling line:
Libertarian theory looks upon the "opportunity" to traffic in drugs as a hallmark of individual freedom. I look upon it as one of the most heartless and grotesque forms of murder.Pellets bursting [inside the carrier's intestine] was a courier's worst fear. Once in Lorain, Ohio, a courier started foaming at the mouth, and his handler called down to Mexico to figure out what to do. As authorities listened via wiretap, the handler was told to cut the courier open and retrieve the remaining drugs.
Do you have the same attitude about alcohol, Bill? Libertarians believe that criminal prohibition of stuff adults crave and could use safely, but that a black market instead provides in unsafe ways, produces more harm that would a free and properly watched open marketplace. The repeal of alcohol prohibition, I think, proved this hypothesis accurate 100 years ago for alcohol. The repeal of gambling prohibition, in my view, has also reduced harms associated with black markets.
This is a horrible story you highlight, but I read it as still more evidence that prohibition creates horrible outcomes and we ought to be open to different approaches to public health problems. We learned that lesson with alcohol and gambling, we are starting to figure this out with marijuana, we have had constitutional help figuring this out with firearms. Why is that not the real lesson?
Doug, it is true enough that the widespread availability of legal gambling has "reduced harms associated with black markets." I expect that it is pretty rare nowadays to have one's legs broken for failure to pay a gambling debt.
That does not mean that those harms have not been replaced by other harms, though. I think it is nearly certain (though I do not know of any hard data) that many more people are gambling away significant portions of their income now. From where I am sitting, there are three Indian casinos within an hour's drive, and they do booming businesses. Much of the money pumped into the slots is your tax dollars at waste, coming from welfare, disability, and Social Security checks.
That is not to say that I think gambling must necessarily be illegal. I have been known to sit down at a poker table myself (one of the few games in a casino where it is possible for an individual player to get the odds in his favor under the right conditions). My point is merely that there are tradeoffs, and the balance of considerations does not always point in the direction of legalization.
With drugs that have a strong, physically addicting effect, I think the case for continued prohibition is much stronger.
Drugs like tobacco and alcohol, Bill? I agree that there are all sorts of harms and benefits from freedom vs. government control for all potentially dangerous activities and products --- from guns to cars to football to sugar to gambling to boxing. I just always think it best, for all sorts of reasons, to err on the side of freedom whenever possible.
I surmise for you and others who often embrace prohibitions, you often conclude we should trust the government more than individuals to make choices about balancing harms and benefits. I run the other way on most matters.
"I just always think it best, for all sorts of reasons, to err on the side of freedom whenever possible."
Depends on what the error costs. If we were to decide the content of criminal law based on generalizations about the high value of freedom, and leave it there, there would be no imprisonment for anything, not so?
Heroin addicts have a "freedom" of sorts, but it's a hellish freedom because the normal capacities for choice that the word "freedom" implies have vanished. The supplier has considerable (although not exclusive) blame for this, so I have no problem curtailing his freedom, preferably for a considerable period. The opinions of the electorate (which you call "government") overwhelmingly support my point of view.
Exploiting the weak and vulnerable for fun and profit used to have a bad name among liberals. But then again, I guess I'm old fashioned. Once again, guilty as charged!