Wednesday, May 8, 2019

and, just to be clear on the point.

what the government does here in the prohibition regime is two things:

1) it claims to prevent the sale of narcotics. this is with minimal, if really any, success. what it actually does is just inflate the price.
2) it protects drug dealers from violence at the hands of the community.

this is really just an instance of the same error that the libertarian right makes over and over and over again. it seems to think that if you just take the government out of the way, you'd have this perfectly free market and you'd be able to sell whatever you want at whatever price you want, because property rights exist in the ether or something. there's this broad, general lack of understanding of the need to have a state come in and actually define what a property right is and then uphold it and enforce it with violence.

so, you might think that all drugs would be decriminalized in an anarchist society, and there would be acceptance and permissiveness and the whole thing. but i have to disagree - and you just need to ask the family members and friends of drug users to learn this. the more substantive effect of removing the state would be removing the protection that dealers enjoy. they'd get lynched in public; it would be more dangerous than it is, now.

mushrooms are certainly a least concern, and i might imagine a level of permissiveness for adult use, however obscure it may actually be. but if i caught you selling to my underage daughter, i can tell you you'd walk away with a pretty busted up face over it.