The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work. It's possible they'll go "legit" like the mob did after prohibition and get into the Casino business, but it's also possible they'll switch to human trafficking or gun running or some other harmful trade.
This is an especially big danger if you're talking about a gang that currently deals mostly drugs but also smuggles forced prostitutes over borders on the side. Take away the drugs and they're likely to expand the side business.
If they could expand the side business, they already would have. The massive profits of illegal drugs gives them the capital to invest in new side businesses, take that away they can't expand anything.
The Mafia was all about prostitution, gambling, and protection rackets. The prohibition gave them a business where you could make far more than all the others combined, and all you needed to do was to kill people who got in your way.
I dont think human trafficking is as easy as drug trafficking and gun running is a much smaller market than drugs. Legalization will be a severe impediment to the activities of the cartels.
> The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work
Is that a counter argument? There are bad actors (in society). Some bad actors have social, moral, physical, intellectual barriers that prevent them from acting WORSE. Raising the social barrier (marketplace) isn't any different than the social barrier (legality). If you rather not compete bad actors out of the market because of what they might do, why legally punish them out of the market? Why bother trying to stop them at all?
Society doesn't want to consider certain transactions to be legitimate.
Allowing a marketplace for murder or human trafficking (or the other nefarious things organized crime gets up to) allows the most efficient and effective bad actors to prosper, as markets are designed to do. But society doesn't want bad actors to prosper, it wants them prevented from acting badly.
I agree. This is why the "counter-argument" doesn't make sense. It assumes that it's not preventative (so it's a negative effect?). Might as well let them carry on?
The point is that gansterism will become a smaller part of the economy, have "less funding" if you want to think of it that way.
Gangsterism is funded by various econmic oppornities which for one reason or another are illegal. Some things like assasination and extortion need to be illegal by their very nature.
But by passing laws that make new things illegal, we increase the amount of resources available to fund criminalality.
The counter-counterargument is that we can legalize difficult-to-police but high-volume "sin" crimes, such as drug use and prostitution, regulate them to the point it's impossible to be a criminal syndicate in those realms, and leave the syndicates with lower-volume crimes, such as murder for hire.
Sure, we can't possibly legalize murder for hire and still have a functional society, but how much profit can you really make filling those kinds of contracts, especially in a world with no illegal drug trade and no human trafficking because hookers are now clean and legal? They can try to expand side businesses all they want, but some of them have a natural cap to how much demand there can be.
This is an especially big danger if you're talking about a gang that currently deals mostly drugs but also smuggles forced prostitutes over borders on the side. Take away the drugs and they're likely to expand the side business.