On Feb 24, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Patrick Coskren wrote: > On Feb 24, 2009, at 10:07 AM, Chris Gehlker wrote: > >>> There is an alternative. We could start buying Afghani >>> poppies for legal opiates. Pay more than the Taliban does to Afghani >>> growers. It is not as if there is no legitimate market for opiates. >> >> This is silly. I have seen the small farm in California that produces >> all the legal opium used in North America. Unless we supply addicts >> we >> do nothing to reduce the demand for Afghan poppies. > > Simply buying all the stuff and then burning it might still prove > cost- > effective, compared to the alternatives.
But you would set off a crime wave in the west as addicts turned to armed robbery to finance their more expensive habits. And there is no guarantee that whatever group in some other country steps up to meet the demand won't be as repressive as the Taliban. Certainly that's what happened when efforts against the cartels in Columbia gave a boost to Shining Path in Peru. There are simply no examples of a case where efforts to reduce supply have succeeded against inelastic demand. --- Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970) _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
