[juliusgeo]

We tried that. It was called The Prohibition. It was a massive failure for many reasons but to your point: it created an environment where only the most violent, most criminal gangs end up controlling the entire market. The justifications given were also almost interchangeable with what you just said, mostly relating to scare tactics being perceived as a panacea to “society’s ills”. Most of the time if your solution is “scare people into doing what’s right” it’s been tried before by someone else and failed because it is a fundamentally broken method of solving societal issues in a meaningful way.

[skellyclock]

From 1870 to 1910, annual consumption per capita rose from 1.7 gallons of alcohol to a peak of 2.6 gallons. Prohibition raised the costs of consumption, created legal risks for violators, and, in much of the country, helped create a widely accepted “dry” culture. Consumption of alcohol from 1920 to 1925 fell by 50 to 70 percent, and fell by 30 percent for the entire period of prohibition, which was the steepest decline in the whole of American history. Rates of cirrhosis of the liver dropped by 10 to 20 percent, deaths from acute alcoholism fell from 7.3 per 100,000 people in 1907 to 2.5 in 1932, and arrests for public drunkenness and rates of alcoholic psychosis declined as well.

People who peddle opiates need a shotgun shoved in their mouths, and so do the users.

[juliusgeo]

Yeah, consumption went down, but it caused numerous other issues that proved to be far greater. All you’ve shown is that reduced consumption of alcohol reduces the metrics of social problems associated with alcohol. That says nothing to my point which is that the other problems end up being far greater when you go in with such a profoundly callous mindset. Prohibition caused a 24% increase in crime overall with murder in particular going up 13%. And at the end of Prohibition people still drank and we still have all the same issues with alcohol and drugs now, just worse. And then Reagan tried the same approach again, and it failed again. How many dead bodies do you wish to see on top of the 100k overdoses to somehow solve this issue? Would a stack of dead bodies twice as tall satiate? At some point we as a society gotta realize that murdering people en-masse as a response to social issues is just not effective.

[namaria]

>People who peddle opiates need a shotgun shoved in their mouths, and so do the users.

What the actual fuck? Take your fascist ass to some authoritarian country and see how that works out for you.