My job is security consulting and investigations.

Try harder.

And what are the vast majority of drug dealers going to do when prohibition is over? Go back to their wage slave jobs, droning away to create more big profits for companies like Wal Mart, McDonalds, and Pizza Hut. They're not going to become Gus Fring because that is not the personality of 99% of drug dealers.

dblbarrel,

you have some pretty bizarre posts in this thread.

im just curious if you would categorize the following people as 'an opportunistic criminal, likely to engage in violent behavior if unable to deal drugs'? :

-40 year old accountant who grows 50 plants in a house he owns in the woods. he then sells to a number of friends, most of them for their personal consumption, and a couple of them in bulk who then go on to sell at the local university.

-25 year old in colorado, who is growing 40 plants in his basement and then selling to local dispensaries and to friends.

I'm taking issue with your use of the term "inherent." Drug dealers are violent for a lot of reasons. I doubt the black market would work if all of them were just nasty violent people who were violent without provocation. I know those type exist and are drawn towards the black market. But most of the actual dealers are just guys who are trying to feed their family or addiction.

This is exactly what happened after prohibition. The bootlegging families all went into more violent trades.

I've dealt with the fallout of a situation where a group of drug dealers firebombed a mobile home with a woman and 2 small children inside after barricading the doors, over drug money.

But this is justified because these people would simply sue if it wasn't for the absence of the ability to do so, right?

Gruesome:

Vast majority of drug dealers are underemployed wage slaves that are sick of being exploited for 90% of the value of their labor, don't have any true business skills to propel them into the middle class, but are savvy enough at business and tactics to provide a valuable service for people (at a high risk), and would rather do that than slave away to produce more profits for WalGreens.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I still don't think you can correlate violent crime rates in the US (or anywhere else) with any one thing. The data just doesn't back it up.
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16...es-in-america/

You can't be serious. People demand a good, other people supply it, regardless of the legality of the good.

fyp

Source

That is a horrible story, but what about sample size? I would guess that of all drug dealers, a small minority of them are or ever have been or would be violent.

If you couldn't call the cops when you got robbed, yet people were trying to rob you all the time, I'd bet you would be violent as well.

It is not justified, but the more you push a wolf in the corner, the harder it bites. You just had an experience with a wolf, the vast majority in this trade are sheep as you and me.

From all I have read Mexico is very violent.

DblBarrel,

In the West Virginia Mine Wars, corporate gun thugs brutally massacred workers for as little as being associated with unions or union workers. Based on this, I am pretty sure all corporations are inherently violent and should be banned.

That doesn't really support your claim that the drug trade is keeping inherently violent people from being violent.

Would be very interesting to me as well.

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In some areas, sure. But scratch the surface a bit and the story gets a lot more complicated.

If you read that article, the areas that are participating heavily in the drug trade are very violent. It's jsut that this is offset by other regions far from the border that are doing well.

check out narco violencia, there was a blog not sure it still exists - I know of one woman blogger who gave out names or something on the blog, and the cartell send killers that cut of her head an presented it in her front yard with a message.

A friend of mine was in some city in Mexico and she saw people hanging from street light posts.

DblBarrel, you don't suspect that since your job is to end their job, taking away their ability to make money, their freedom, and your people are pretty well known to use violence on them, that they respond in an inappropriate yet understandable fashion? Sure, they don't have to fear for their lives, but they do have to fear for their livelihood, family and freedom. Put people in that situation, see what happens.

That's what your job does to these people. That's not a knock on you, as you're just following orders, but that's the reality of it. Just because the government deems their profession illegal doesn't mean it should have the right to take their money, freedom, etc. In any other context the government doing that would result in riots.

I'll concede most of my issue is sample size, because I've dealt with many "wolves" and few "sheep"

When the term "drug dealer" pops into my head, three images pop into my head:

1) The charred remains of a family, clutching together as they gasped for air and died the most painful death I can imagine

2) My best friend, who was killed while working undercover attempting to get to the bottom of a stolen car/bike operation and got caught up in a drug argument,

3) A body rotting in the trunk of a car, left in the Wal-Mart parking lot until the stench attracted attention from someone who reported it to 911.

My theory on this is that these people aren't going to magically become non-violent with legalization.

I still agree with legalization, this whole issue essentially stems from Fear's assertion that the police would have little to do without drug laws.

My gut tells me drug legalization isn't going to be the solution to make the people involved in those crimes above magically become model citizens. Pretty sure the police will be dealing with them with or without drug laws.

I don't think anyone thinks those types of people would change with legalization. We're arguing that they're the minority.

True. And Medellin used to be the most violent city in the world. When Escobar and his cartel went down, crime only dropped a little. After a program to get rid of FARC and other militias, crime rates stayed high. Now they're creeping even higher during the reign of smaller gangs who are trying to cleanse the city of all the things that supposedly made it so dangerous in the first place.

Tourism has been booming, too.

All of this proves... nothing.