I apologise for the overly blunt nature of my last couple of posts - having researched it a bit more, I can see how there are astonishingly huge issues with US drug policy that could be doing huge amounts of damage to poorer parts of the country. Chalk that up to me seeing it in British terms - our drug policy has the occasional flaw, but is for the most part positive and it would be ridiculous to accuse it of societal damage - I definitely acknowledge that that's not so much the case in the US.
However, I still stand by my assertion that that DailyKos article is drivel.
Absentia wrote:Drug dealers are nasty people in large part because the drug trade is criminalized, not the other way around. The black market has that effect on people. They have to look out for themselves because there's no legal authority to protect them, and the lack of oversight means nobody has an incentive to play fair. On top of that, the need to avoid the authorities encourages them to do all kinds of nasty stuff: bribery, intimidation, even murder.
In short, if selling crack were like selling hamburgers the free market would push the shadiest guys out because nobody would want to deal with them.
Do you know what most drugs do to people? Do you think the kind of person willing to sell heroin to people is a bad person because heroin is illegal, or because they're the kind of person willing to sell that poison to people?
While I acknowledge that a lot of drugs
pushers are simply disaffected youths who have been failed by the system, born into poverty and with no other immediate options, most of these don't go into it as a full-time job - they're usually moral enough to not get too heavily involved (and that doesn't necessarily mean they're saints, it just means they've got at the very least some semblance of compassion). The ones who actively make a career out of selling drugs - they're bad people. They just are. They're selling addictive, dangerous chemicals to people who they know will keep buying them, and will ultimately die because of it. They're prioritising their finances over the lives of other people. It's not being poor that does that. It's being a bad person.