It seems the shining example of free love and drugs that Americans point to when wanting the same here has a problem with “money laundering, extortion and human trafficking…”
My point here is this: Legalize drugs and prostitution and crime will not go away. It will not decrease. It will morph and find another way to break the more liberal laws. Whoever thinks legalization/government regulation of these things will help is dangerously foolish.
Amsterdam is tightening its belt. What more proof do you need?
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So, the situation appears to be this:
If prostitution and recreational drugs are legal, you get prostitution, drug use, and organized crime.
But if prostitution and recreational drugs are illegal, you get prostitution, drug use, and organized crime. You also get an expensive and intrusive government enforcement operation and wind up throwing hundreds of thousands of people in jail.
Why prefer the latter over the former?
Amsterdam is tightening regulations of prostitution, but there will still be hundreds of legal brothels in the city. They’re not rejecting the legalize-and-regulate model, just adjusting it.
Because, as the Dutch officials said, these activities when legal have provided the growth medium for other, even less desireable, and illegal activities.
You mean extortion, money laundering, and human trafficing aren’t a problem when these activities are banned?
The article was noticably short on actual statistics. I’m looking for evidence not merely that organized crime continues to be a problem when prostitution is legal and drug use is decriminalized (meaning it’s still illegal, but the laws aren’t enforced — the article makes the distinction), but that legalization makes the organized crime problem so much worse that it’s worth the cost and collateral damage of the War on Drugs to avoid it.
For years laundry mats where used for money laundering and human trafficking too.
Anytime you have cashed based busness that’s only allowed in one area things get seedy. It’s sounds like the seediness is more of an issues than anything else.
First off, let me state flatly: any so-called "conservative" who claims that he’s for putting more power on the individual and less on the state, but supports drug interdiction, is a hypocrite and liar. You either want more state control of people’s lives or you don’t. So let’s get that out in the open: you WANT a lot of state intrusion in people’s private lives. You just don’t want that intrusion on areas that affect YOU PERSONALLY.
That said, here is the simple answer:
No one ever said prostitution, drug use, extortion, and money laundering would go away. No one. Not me, not anyone that I’m aware of. So you’re using a Straw Man argument here: you’re beating up on an argument no one made.
There WILL be prostitution, extortion, fraud, gambling, drug use (including alcohol, which is much worse than most other drugs), and many other crimes. THESE WILL HAPPEN. THEY WILL NEVER STOP, SO LONG AS HUMAN BEINGS ARE STILL AROUND AND STILL FLAWED.
Period. Full stop. These things will always be with us no matter what the Hell we do. Until the Second Coming, anyway.
So. Given that these things will always be with us, the question is, what is the best strategy for minimizing them and the damage they do?
I submit to you that the Netherlands (which Amsterdam is one city in) have a better answer, precisely because they’ve given up throwing sick people in jail for being sick. They no longer have the pretense that they love their brother by throwing him in jail, and that they’re helping families by locking their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters IN FUCKING JAIL for doing something irresponsible like using drugs.
You can say anything you want about my on-and-off struggle with alcohol: do you really think you’ll be doing my sons a FAVOR if you throw me in fucking jail the next time I (God forbid) happen to fall off the wagon?
The city of Amsterdam has decided to cut back a little on what is allowable in its borders. So what? Back 15 or so years ago, Mayor Guiliani had a crackdown on porn merchants in Times Square. The mayor did not–DID NOT–make porn and such illegal. He just said, "you can’t open a legitimate business in porn HERE."
And that’s a big part of why the courts backed him up: he wasn’t stupid enough to say "porn is illegal within the City of New York." He said, "You can’t open up a porn shop in THiS part of the city."Â
It worked. Porn is still legal, but you can’t put up big porn shops and porn theaters in certain districts, including Times Square.
I have zero problem with saying "you shall not sell marijuana in this zone." I have zero problem with saying, "you shall not sell marijuana to anyone under the age of 21, subject to incarceration if we catch you." None. Zero. Zip.
I have a big problem if you say that simple possession of marijuana is a felony subject to years of imprisonment. That’s not just unChristian, it’s stupid.
(And for the record, I don’t even LIKE pot, that’s not the point. Putting people in jail for using it, now THAT I have a HUGE problem with.)
Dean,
You’re being obtuse. Just because you’re a conservative doesn’t mean you’re for NO government intervention at all. Indeed, if you are a conservative, you must support SOME government intervention.
So stop being stupid and get real.
Drugs are a real and present danger to the people of the country. It isn’t unconservative to demand government get involved in its regulation. And, frankly, hearing a liberal telling a conservative what it is to be conservative is ridiculous.
It’s like a very liberal friend of mine that started to tell me what the Republican party needed to do to get back in power. Guess what? It called for them to be more liberal.
So, thanks but no thanks. I’ll kindly ignore what you think real conservatives should do on this issue and, instead, seek the advice from actual conservatives.
And they agree with me.
Dean,
(Note: I think that the war on drugs is an immoral waste of time, money, and human life.)
It’s not unconservative to want the government to ban drugs; all that’s required is to believe that drugs are more powerful than people are. Once you posit the idea that people exposed to temptation won’t be strong enough to resist, the conservative response is for government to take care of people by keeping temptation away from them, mostly because that’s the only really sane response (from someone who isn’t a hardcore libertarian) to a destructive temptation which people can’t help but give in to.
Government exists first and foremost to protect its citizens, after all. And this is one of the big differences between the libertarian arm of the republican party and the conservative arm of it. Even much of the agreement is somewhat incidental; libertarians dislike big government, while conservatives prefer private charity.
The problem with this position is one of facts, not broad logical strokes. Drugs (especially marijuana) aren’t as dangerous as they’re made out to be and people can resist the temptations posed by drugs.
Plus, there’s the fact that prohibiting broadly popular activities accomplishes virtually nothing besides wasting a lot of time and money. There are dangers that the government can’t protect people from. A war on the flu could soak up a lot of money and time and effort, but it wouldn’t get rid of the flu. It’s not un-conservative to want the government to have large programs that soak up money and human life but produce nothing valuable, so long as the aims are good. It’s merely foolish. But you can have foolish conservatives as well as foolish liberals. Big government generally accomplishes nothing, whether you want it to protect people from dangers you can’t protect them from, or whether you want it merely to make everyone rich regardless of their abilities, effort, or lack of self-destructive choices. But that doesn’t make it an incompatible tool to use to accomplish those goals, it merely makes it a stupid tool to use to accomplish those goals.
I’m pretty sure marijuana is NOT legal in the Netherlands. Making something illegal invites organized crime. Making something illegal <i>and</i> generally tolerating it, even more so, as the licit businesses continue to shy away from the industry while the illicit ones become more brazen. Legalizing it outright does not. Why would truly legal pot do anything more for organized crime than the repeal of Prohibition (or, for that matter, the fact that tobacco was never banned in the first place) did for the Mob?
Setting aside the moral/rights arguments, the practical question for banning pot, hard drugs, or any other undesirable activity is not whether the activity in question can be extricated from organized crime (of course they can be, if fully legalized), but rather, how much more organized crime are we willing to tolerate in exchange for how much less of the activity we were trying to discourage.
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Kevin,
"What more proof do you need?"
How about some proof that amsterdam is worse than here, with our rampant crime, drugs, prostitution, organized crime, other organized crime, and a police force that’s ridiculously empowered and kills people not that infrequently through things like no-knock raids on the wrong houses.
Seriously, no one suggested that legalizing drugs would lead to utopia. Just that it would be preferable to the clusterfuck we have now.
You’re being obtuse. Just because you’re a conservative doesn’t mean you’re for NO government intervention at all. Indeed, if you are a conservative, you must support SOME government intervention.
Kevin I agree. The ONLY difference between you and dean’s…
I have zero problem with saying "you shall not sell marijuana in this zone." I have zero problem with saying, "you shall not sell marijuana to anyone under the age of 21, subject to incarceration if we catch you." None. Zero. Zip.
…is the degree of regulation.
Personally I am for legalization and non-government interference for any and all drugs. Especially all prescription drugs.
I don’t think I’m being obtuse, Kevin. I think I’m telling you why I no longer consider myself a Republican, although I did consider myself one for a while (and I did vote for McCain).
No, I think I’m telling you you’re lying to yourself if you think "true conservatism" is about giving more power to the individual and less to the state. I call bullshit. You want lots and lots and lots more power for the state, and lots less for the individual, so long as the state’s laying the smack down on whatever you personally disapprove of.
You don’t actually deny this I notice.
Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me why you think putting my sister in jail for having some pot actually lives up to your "less government" mantra, your "more power to the individual and less power to the state" ideas. Go on, explain it to me. I’m eager to hear, I really am.
Until then, I submit that you don’t actually want less power for the government at all. You want more power for the state to enforce your personal ideas of appropriate behavior.
What, I’m wrong? I’m being unfair? OK, tell me how.
I think everyone here is being obtuse. It said that they are shutting down about half because of links to organized crime.
The half that have links to organized crime are being shut down.
The half that don’t have links will remain open.
Seems to me, this article is more about organized crime, and not about the decriminalization of marijuana and prostitution. Taking that position is like saying that shutting down mafia run garbage companies would prove that we need to make garbage collection illegal.
Kevin,
You thought legalization was the answer to what?
(you may have been lied to)
"Government exists first and foremost to protect its citizens from the government itself, after all."
Fixed that for ya.
I’m curious how making drugs legal, cheap and socially acceptable is going to help addicts quit. Throwing them in jail probably isn’t helpful, but neither is making their weakness more available. Removing whatever social stigma is left probably won’t help either.
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Violent crime is what we’re concentrating on here. The Netherlands saw violent crime plunge dramatically, and it’s never gone back up to where it was before decriminalization. So, now they’re having some minor problems and are adjusting somewhat the zones where this stuff is legal. Okay, so what?
Decriminalizing something does not make it socially acceptable. Education and treatment are key. At one time fully 3 out of 4 Americans smoked cigarettes. Now less than 1 in 4 do. There’s a reason: education.
What addicts need is treatment, not jail bars. Decriminalization will allow REGULATION of something that is not currently regulated. You can tax it, you can punish people for giving it to kids, you can punish people for driving under the influence, you can fire people for showing up to work drunk or high, etc. You can educate, you can treat.
It’s obscene that we put them in jail because we’re too afraid of letting adults make adult choices.
Legalization probably won’t help addicts quit much. I’d expect drug use to go up a bit under legalization. But legalization will help addicts in several ways. Being addicted to legal drugs won’t be as financially ruinous because legal drugs will be cheaper. Legal drugs will be less likely to kill you because quality control will be much better. And it’s better to be addicted to drugs than to be addicted to drugs and serving 5-10 years in a federal prison for possession with intent to distribute.
The main benefit of legalization, however, is to people who want to use drugs responsibly in moderation. I doubt it’s possible with all drugs, but I know there are responsible recreational users of pot and ecstacy because I’ve known several of them. They’re not hurting anyone, even themselves, any more than I hurt anyone by having a glass of wine with dinner.
"The city council says that some other businesses are also related to the decay of the city centre, including peep shows, sex shows, mini-supermarkets, phone and souvenir shops, and they will also be shut down."
Emphasis added. Smells like Kelo spirit!
Not that it’s really necessary for me to point that out, though, since I’ve already had all yer criminalizing butts pwned on this for a month now.
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