Free Market Consequences of the Nanny State

By Zach Foster

Best read with the companion article: Legislating Morality in the Nanny State

Apart from the reduction of individual liberty that comes from the Nanny State’s constant need to legislate morality, this moral crusade also has profound consequences on the free market and people’s quality of life.  Everyone knows that the federal government’s War on Drugs has been a massive failure.  All in all, the people who are going to consume drugs are already consuming drugs unapologetically.  Whenever someone gets caught with narcotics and arrested, they may temporarily regret the error of their ways, not because they regret the drug use that has been pleasurable to them, but simply because they got caught.

Criminalizing narcotics has only cemented their use,[1] much like Prohibition laws in the 1920s saw a hike in the consumption of alcohol.[2]  Prohibition laws, meant to “protect the citizens” from themselves failed to do so, and they put citizens in more danger as organized crime rose up in the streets of cities across America, fueled by alcohol sales on the black market.  Such a scourge never left society, as criminal enterprises intelligently branched out into other business front, both on the black market—prostitution, narcotics, underground gambling—and in the legitimate business world—casinos, burlesque houses, hotels, and many other ventures.

Organized crime today is primarily fueled by drug trafficking and weapons trafficking—when people are buying industrial quantities of narcotics, they need guns to defend those drugs from police and competitor raids.[3]  This underground enterprise makes gang life profitable—at the expense of the lives of gang victims[4] and the futures of many young inner city children—and the damaging effects on society can be seen in Mexico[5] and Columbia,[6] where powerful drug cartels are wealthy and strong enough to fight multiple-front wars against government police and soldiers and other cartels.

When drugs are made and sold on the black market, the health of citizens is in exponentially more danger.  Apart from the risk of becoming addicted—a risk that also applies to legal drugs like alcohol and pharmaceuticals—there is no way for a person to know what is in the narcotics he or she is about to consume.  Columbian cocaine, after the harvest of the coca plants, is known to be made with cement, ammonia, quicklime, and sulfuric acid.[7]  Those chemicals make it portable and compactible, and those chemicals go into the nostrils and lungs of human beings. 

 

Continued in Part 2: Underground narcotics, prostitution, and skyrocketing prices

---

[1] War On Drugs A Failure! http://tabacco.blog-city.com/war_on_drugs_a_failure_criminalization_doesnt_work__time_.htm

[2] Did Alcohol Use Decrease During Alcohol Prohibition? http://www.druglibrary.org/prohibitionresults1.htm

[3] The War On Drugs Has Failed. http://thebuzzcincy.com/international/1230amwdbz2/the-global-war-on-drugs-has-failed/

[4] Drugs and Guns Are Killing Two Thirds of NY’s Black Men. http://newsone.com/nation/newsonestaff4/drugs-and-guns-are-killing-ny-two-thirds-of-murder-victims-are-black-drugs-involved/

[5] Mexico Under Siege. http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/its-a-war

[6] Columbian Drug Wars: Guerrillas, Paramilitary Groups, and the Government. http://www.bookrags.com/research/colombian-drug-wars-guerrillas-para-hbh-01/

[7] Why the war on drugs in Columbia may never be won. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/16/colombia-drugs-cocaine-trafficking