I’m just saying that I think a lot of legalization advocates close their eyes to the fact that the distribution-related crime problem isn’t going to shrink to complete insignificance as long as there remain *any* restrictions on who can get the stuff, how much, and at what price.

Bootleg alcohol is a problem, still. But it’s a smaller problem by many orders of magnitude than it was during Prohibition. Underage drinking is a problem – but it’s not a directly economic, or violent, or civil liberties problem.

I don’t know of any “legalization advocate” that claims everything will be perfect if we go with legalization. The claim is that things will be overall better if drugs are legalized and regulated than the current ‘drug war’ regime.

Not really. When was the last time you heard of law enforcement having any real problem with ‘bathtub gin’? There’s still moonshiners in the south but aside from tax evasion they aren’t really giving anyone any real problems. As for ‘distribution crime’, where? When was the last time you heard of moonshiners killing each other over territories?

I’ll just wind up by saying that I’m not trying to make the point that legalization is necessarily a bad idea, or that it won’t reduce the distribution-related crime problem significantly. I’m just saying that I think a lot of legalization advocates close their eyes to the fact that the distribution-related crime problem isn’t going to shrink to complete insignificance as long as there remain *any* restrictions on who can get the stuff, how much, and at what price.

I mean, after all, those bathtub gin guys are law enforcement problem, are they not?

My purpose for pointing out the differences was to suggest that the black market in alcohol is greatly *reduced* compared to what it was during prohibition, and is no longer an activity of organized crime. This is probably largely due to the fact that it is hard to create *a large amount* (equivalent to what you’d get out of a shipment of cocaine, for example) and distribute it without easy detection. As I said, you can’t put gallons upon gallons of it in your hoodie. Sure, people brew unlicensed stuff here and there, but it isn’t large scale. But that only proves that even something relatively cheap and widely available to those of age is *still* produced on the black market despite legalization.

Now take drugs. Imagine that there would continue to be a market for an unregulated version — for those cut off for medical reasons, for those underage, for those seeking to avoid what would probably be very high taxes (at least most schemes I’ve seen for legalization suggest taxing it highly to pay for the negative social and medical effects.) It is much, much easier to smuggle, process, and distribute than alcohol. Yes, there’s the meth lab thing, but the people who are into meth labs don’t usually rank self-preservation as high as the average person, or they’d be doing something else anyway. Leaving aside the risk, it’s logistically EASY to produce and distribute a vast quantity, compared to alcohol.

So you don’t need a tanker truck? A truck full of bottles is still a lot easier to legally search (and even visually identify for probably cause) than a guy with a few grams of something stuffed down his pants. The difference in bulk DOES matter, a lot.

I guess if it isn’t obvious why something that intoxicates by the gram and can be stored in almost any dry…

…distilling alcohol isn’t that hard, but hardly anyone does it at home.

Underage drinkers don’t make their own alcohol, or buy it from people making their own. They get it by fraud, or by suborning of-age drinkers. Economies of scale drive that sort of thing – both production and quality-control are easier in such situations.

Given that transport of marijuana and other drugs is at least as easy as transporting alcohol, why wouldn’t the exact same economies apply there, too?

The most important difference is that you can’t carry enough hooch to send 50 people over the moon in your hoodie, and it’s a heckuva lot harder to smuggle $2M worth of it into the country at a time.

Actually, prohibition shifted alcohol consumption to harder liquors. If you were going to break the law, why bother getting a mild buzz from beer when you could get snockered from whiskey?

And don’t forget inflation. A dollar in 1933, when Prohibition was repealed, was worth ~$17 in today’s money. So, a 75-cent shot of whiskey then is more like $13 today. It doesn’t take all that much liquor to get to $2 million in today’s dollars at that rate. More than fits in a hoodie, true, but you don’t exactly need a full-size tanker truck.

Al Capone’s operation pulled in north of a hundred million dollars a year – before you account for inflation. In modern terms, that’s getting awfully close to two billion dollars a year.

the bootlegging trade was always a large-scale operation that quickly became unprofitable when alcohol became legal.

You never heard of bathtub gin? Not large-scale at all, but also became unprofitable once alcohol became legal. At this point, only hobbyists make their own alcohol – and certainly not for profit.

if it the black market can make available untaxed to underage people, why would creating a taxed, regulated market available only to the qualified, eliminate the black market?

It’s possible to make alcohol at home. I’ve made beer from a kit before; it’s not complicated, it just takes time. (Making it from scratch is a trifle harder – gotta get, and manage and preserve a colony of, brewer’s yeast.) And unlike producing, say, meth, there’s no risk of a fiery explosion. Even distilling alcohol isn’t that…

It’s true drugs take up less space than alcohol. Alcohol too, though, has been subject to those economics. That’s why we had a Whiskey Rebellion and Moonshiners smuggled moonshine rather than wine or beer. But I’m not sure it’s all that different. Drugs smuggling and distribution does take a lot of infrastructure…hence the discovery of tunnels going from Mexico to the US

Given it’s not that differnet, it’s telling that there’s no huge black market operation for alcohol. I suppose there’s some illegal moonshine and absinthe happening in the US but aside from tax evasion it’s not a big deal. There is underage drinking but the problem has been at least partially created by having a 21 drinking age rather than 18, which teaches teens to bing drink rather than drink responsibly.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and the availability of legal DVD’s on Amazon for $10 a pop actually did kill piracy?

The most important difference is that you can’t carry enough hooch to send 50 people over the moon in your hoodie, and it’s a heckuva lot harder to smuggle $2M worth of it into the country at a time.

It doesn’t follow that the solution is legalization of all drugs in all contexts, but I think the author here is blind to the reality of the times he lives in. We’ve tried it his way for quite a while now and we now have failure. IMO we should explore lowering the criminalization of drugs (that’s NOT the same as legalization, but for some types of drugs it might be), esp. opening up the ability of those with drug convictions not to have their lives robbed from them.