12/02/2022
Didn't you get what Spike Cohen means? See Milton's Friedman long version of the story:
"See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.
What do I mean by that? In an ordinary free market–let’s take potatoes, beef, anything you want–there are thousands of importers and exporters. Anybody can go into the business. But it’s very hard for a small person to go into the drug importing business because our interdiction efforts essentially make it enormously costly. So, the only people who can survive in that business are these large Medellin cartel kind of people who have enough money so they can have fleets of airplanes, so they can have sophisticated methods, and so on.
In addition to which, by keeping goods out and by arresting, let’s say, local ma*****na growers, the government keeps the price of these products high. What more could a monopolist want? He’s got a government who makes it very hard for all his competitors and who keeps the price of his products high. It’s absolutely heaven.
Legalization is a way to stop–in our forum as citizens– a government from using our power to engage in the immoral behavior of killing people, taking lives away from people in the U.S., in Colombia and elsewhere, which we have no business doing."