If we ended our prohibition, much of this violence would end immediately while sending these black market drug traffickers into a new line of work.Of course. These murdering thugs would immediately become pacifist florists.
Please!!!!
Once a murdering thug....ALWAYS A MURDERING THUG!!!
I do not advocate legalizing all drugs, but if we did I bet a lot of the people involved today, probably most of them, would go on and do some legitimate type of work. That's what we saw at the end of alcohol Prohibition. The hardcore criminal types remained in their lives of crime, but most of the people weren't really hardcore criminal types. Most of them weren't Al Capone types or Al Capone wannabes. Most weren't the muscle men shooting people up with their tommy guns. Most were people who made a few extra bucks helping produce alcoholic beverages, smuggle them, transport them, sell them, etc. Even some of the people that made millions like John F. Kennedy's dad focused their efforts after Prohibition on legitimate business, and in his case, politics. If we took the money out of it these organizations would shrink and mostly only the hardcore criminal types would continue trying to make a living with crime.
That would be good, but of course I think we'd be looking at a whole host of new problems if we legalized drugs like cocaine, meth and heroin and let them be sold everywhere for a fraction of their current prices from nice clean shops where any adult with an ID could buy them. Marijuana is a different story though. The drug trafficking organizations make most of their money from marijuana. It's already cheap and easily available everywhere, and while it's not harmless it's not extremely addictive or prone to causing lots of problems for innocent people like those other drugs. I think we ought to legalize marijuana, but not the other stuff.