[feklar]

Police seem to only want to manage the war on drugs not defeat it, as was explained to me by a friend who's a cop and became totally disillusioned, just counting out his days until retirement. This means working with one criminal group to help arrest the other groups. Of course by interfering in the drug dealing free market by propping up various mid level street gangs and arresting the others they create an extremely dangerous powder keg where these targeted groups go to great insane lengths to survive, and the propped up group is often dismantled and arrested by police whenever they become too confident and do something stupid like their untouchable gang members terrorizing too many innocent people. The demise of the dominant group once propped up by police means a power vacuum forms and streets become a warzone as all fight to take over the dominant position of police protected status.

I'm pretty sure that without police 'managing' these mid level street gangs, they would just exist as smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent as we would stop creating Tony Montanas and instead just have disorganized criminal activity on a smaller income scale since honest police would be able to easily disrupt these networks into bankruptcy. Instead we get police helping to form supergangs, with multi millions to spend on weapons and corrupt all aspects of a city with criminals getting into mafia-like construction industries to influence city tenders, bribe city employees or unchecked extortion of local business. Either legalize it all or end the strategy of selective enforcement, which means we likely need to double police budgets as cost is a major factor in this strategy of enforcement that relies on criminal cooperation.

[pixl97]

>Police seem to only want to manage the war on drugs not defeat it

Because they cannot defeat it. You will never win a war on vice. We didn't learn our lesson when prohibition was enacted. When you target vice and addiction a violent black market is created.

>they would just exist as smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent

Being sure is pretty different from knowing. It's just as likely the street gangs would congregate power because there is a whole lot of money in illegal drug sales anyway you look at it. This is no different than non drug gangs, and even businesses themselves.

Decriminalization of most drugs, and clinics where drugs are given in free, metered doses is probably the best way to remove massive amounts of money from the drug black markets.

[x0x0]

By the by, because it's really interesting, prohibition wasn't intended / wasn't understood to apply to beer and wine by the vast majority of supporters of the amendment. Some people leveraged white nationalism / anti-german racism, including the fact that many brewers were German, to pass the Volstead act which banned all alcohol. And by all alcohol I mean nothing like all alcohol -- there were many widely used loopholes, including getting a prescription from your doctor, buying grape juice with a warning to drink it within X days or it would ferment and become alcoholic, or even becoming jewish (10 gallons per person per year!). It really was a ban on some persons some of the time.

If you're interested, read Daniel Okrent _Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition_

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/07...

Good thing the American public learned our lesson and never did anything stupid like that again.

[kapitza]

You will never win a war on vice

That would come as news to Singapore:

https://www.mfa.gov.sg/content/mfa/media_centre/press_room/p...

[typon]

This portion of the speech reveals the main requirement for this to be successful:

> Death penalty for traffickers, in our experience, has been an effective deterrent, as part of a framework of laws, coupled with effective enforcement based on rule of law. Drug traffickers stay out of Singapore now, largely, because of the knowledge: first, that there is a highly professional and incorruptible police force and there is a high probability that they will get caught; and second, there is rule of law, an independent judiciary and a high probability that, based on the laws, they will face the death penalty. So we do not have slums, ghettoes, no-go zones for the police, or syringes in our playgrounds.

I don't think you can have the latter without the former.

[twblalock]

Japan has very low rates of drug crime, and the punishment is far more lenient than the death penalty.

Both Singapore and Japan have low rates of crime in general, especially drug crime and gun crime -- two kinds of crimes that depend on criminals having access to items that are highly regulated or completely banned.

I think the conclusion to draw from this is that islands are able to control their borders pretty well, and they can prevent a lot of contraband from coming in. That alone is sufficient to explain the low rate of drug crime in Japan, where drug trafficking is not a capital crime. It's probably also sufficient for Singapore, which means that the death penalty explanation is probably overdetermined.

[donw]

Japan has low crime, by and large, because they have only a single criminal organization: the Yakuza.

They are not nice people, but as criminal organizations go, having one that views itself as the protector of the people isn't so bad.

After the massive earthquake a few years ago, the Yakuza were among the first to offer aid and assistance to the region -- ahead of the national government, even.

And, if you are going to engage in criminal enterprise in Japan, you need their blessing. If you attempt to sell drugs here without their permission, you will quickly find yourself suffering from an acute case of death.

[twblalock]

The Yakuza is far from being a single, unified criminal organization.

Even if there were a single organization controlling all drug trafficking, that would not explain why drug crime, and drug use, are so low in Japan.

[abandonliberty]

Wow, I had no idea.

How do the facts back this up?

It helps when your country is smaller than most international cities.

http://www.travelersdigest.com/7390-how-big-is-singapore-in-...

[greggman]

Smaller than most international cities? Which cities are these? Singapore us bigger than all but 4 European cities and 1 U.S. city

[imron]

No, I think it's the high probability you'll be executed for this sort of thing that keeps people in line.

[BurningFrog]

> Because they cannot defeat it.

Or because they don't want to defeat it?

The war on drugs is a big source of income for the police.

[jshevek]

> You will never win a war on vice.

Maybe, (depending on your definition of "war"), but we can culturally transcend vice.

[kabdib]

Gambling: nope.

Alcohol: nope.

Marijuana: nope.

Cocaine: nope.

Obviously the list goes on and on. If by "transcend" you really mean "ignore" or perhaps "aid those in trouble, leave the others alone" then, okay. But to eliminate the demand: I think the evidence, over many decades, many cultures, and despite billions (possibly trillions) of dollars of direct and indirect cost, the evidence speaks for itself.

[stevetrewick]

>smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent

Maybe, maybe not. The problem is that those businesses are still illegal and so have no recourse to the law for dispute settlement. When fraud, theft, delinquent payments, etc cannot be addressed with the force of the law they can only be addressed with the force of, well, force. Which likely escalates recursively until the biggest bad ass is holding all the marbles, taking us back to where we started out. It's that lack of recourse to legit dispute settlement that fundamentally guarantees that illegal markets for high demand, high value goods will attract and/or create violent actors, IMO.

[pbreit]

Even in the USA eradicating corruption is difficult. Can you imagine how difficult it would be in a country with a culture of corruption and much weaker rule of law?