{"id":141663,"date":"2014-11-07T23:40:06","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T23:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=141663"},"modified":"2014-11-07T23:40:17","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T23:40:17","slug":"surprise-drug-war-isnt-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/surprise-drug-war-isnt-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"Surprise: The Drug War Isn\u2019t About Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Kevin Carson<\/em><\/p>\n<p>On the morning of November 6 the US Federal Bureau of Investigation\u00a0trumpeted its takedown of the Silk Road 2.0 website and the arrest\u00a0of alleged operator Blake Benthall.<\/p>\n<p>In so doing the FBI\u00a0demonstrated, once again, that the War on Drugs has nothing to do with anything its propagandists claim it\u2019s about. If drug criminalization is a public safety issue\u00a0\u2013\u00a0about fighting violent crime and gangs, or preventing overdoses and poisoning\u00a0\u2013\u00a0shutting down Silk Road\u00a0is one of the dumbest things the feds can do. Silk Road was a secure, anonymous marketplace in which buyers and sellers could do business withou the risk of violence associated with street trade. And the seller reputational system meant that drugs sold on Silk Road were far purer and safer than their street counterparts.<\/p>\n<p>This is true of all the other selling points for the Drug War. Hillary Clinton, in possibly one of the stupidest remarks ever uttered\u00a0by a human being, says legalizing narcotics is a bad idea \u201cbecause there\u2019s too much money in it\u201d \u2013 referring, presumably, to the lucrative drug trade and the cartels fighting over it.<\/p>\n<p>But\u00a0there\u2019s so much\u00a0money in it, and the cartels fight to control it, only because it\u2019s illegal. That\u2019s what happens when you criminalize stuff people want to buy: You create\u00a0black markets with much higher prices, which\u00a0organized crime gangs fight to control. Alcohol prohibition created the gangster culture of the 1920s. It\u2019s been with us ever since. When Prohibition was repealed, organized crime just shifted to fighting over other illegal markets. The more consensual, non-violent activities are made illegal, the larger the portion of the economy that\u2019s turned into black markets for gangs to fight over.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/c4ss.org\/content\/33340\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kevin Carson On the morning of November 6 the US Federal Bureau of Investigation\u00a0trumpeted its takedown of the Silk Road 2.0 website and the arrest\u00a0of alleged operator Blake Benthall. In so doing the FBI\u00a0demonstrated, once again, that the War on Drugs has nothing to do with anything its propagandists claim it\u2019s about. If drug criminalization [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":115790,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-141663","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}