[oinksoft]

Oh, come on. Joe Blow wants to buy weed, blow, crank, and dope because his life sucks, he's bored, or he just likes the stuff. Very few people like that are in the market for a human being. You really can't compare the profitability of an easily produced and smuggled commodity with something like the trafficking of persons.

[gregbair]

I'm not, I was simply saying that if all those things were legal, criminals (the cartels, not the users) would find something else illegal to peddle. These people look for an easy buck, and right now, that happens to be in illicit drugs. Take that profit away, and they'll just find something else.

[lambda]

You are not going to eliminate organized crime, but you can reduce it substantially. Drugs are in incredibly high demand, and are quite easy to hide and trade illicitly. Many people get into organized crime because they see that it's an easy way to make lots of money. Take away one of their biggest moneymakers, and you're not going to eliminate it entirely, but you will cut off quite a lot of their money, making it harder for them to recruit and less powerful.

You can also reduce their profits in other areas. The whole reason they are able to make money is that there is demand for services that cannot be provided legally. Now, some of these services really should be illegal, as they are scams or have very harmful externalities, but for many of the more lucrative ones, you need to ask yourself "is banning this really worth the cost of enforcing it and the costs of the black market generated?"

For instance, human trafficking happens due to demand for labor that isn't being met by local markets, and the illegality of prostitution. Could that demand be better met by making our immigration easier, and making prostitution legal, spending the money saved on programs to help people who may be trapped in bad situations rather than perpetuating the situation by putting them into a permanent criminal class?

I don't pretend to know all of the answers. But I think it's a question that we need to consider seriously, and without resorting to knee-jerk "soft on crime" rhetoric against anyone who suggests that maybe this system is incredibly expensive, damaging to liberty, and producing more harm than good.

[mjallday]

But some easy bucks are easier and less damaging than others. No doubt if drugs are legalized they will move on to something else but the total market they can address will be smaller.

[DanBC]

People trafficking is the second largest organised criminal activity. It's low risk with bigger profit margins than drugs. Data is hard to get, partly because there's little international agreement about what should be measured as well as the difficulty of finding the victims.

Here's a UN document which is reasonably cautious.

(http://www.ungift.org/docs/ungift/pdf/knowledge/ebook.pdf)

Global profits are > $30billion USD.

> the total market they can address will be smaller.

Bigger profits.