Comment by duped
8 days ago
I mean, prohibition works while legalization just makes more people use whatever you legalize and increases the negative externalities of its use. You see that almost universally (alcohol, drugs, sex work). The exception is it gets rid of the black markets and some (but not all) of the violence associated with them.
So if the goal is to put cartels out of business then yea, full legalization would help. If the goal is to stop overdoses and addiction then absolutely not.
Alcohol is legal. We don't have gun battles between gangs of smugglers, or between them and the cops. We also don't have people dying or going blind from trying to drink wood alcohol.
But we still have a depressingly large number of alcoholics. The campaign against drunk driving has helped reduce one set of negative side effects, but not others.
The decline in alcohol consumed by Gen Z is interesting though. We’ll see if it holds with Gen Alpha, or if it can just be chalked up to Gen Z dealing with Covid during their formative years when other generations would have been partying quite a bit.
Maybe an unintended positive externality of marijuana legalization?
So alcohol prohibition worked at reducing alcohol consumption. The organized crime and violence are negative externalities that were real, but my point is that if you're just looking at the goal of stopping drinking, then prohibition worked.