Quote from: fatoldsun on April 25, 2013, 11:18 pmThen maybe, maybe just maybe, the future generations will engage in more responsible drug use and it'll encourage governments to tax rather than ban.Ahhh, me and my wishful thinking... I should get a vendor account and wholesale it worldwide.That won't work either. Taxing I mean. The weed legalization people think it solves all their problems, mainly the price will be a lot cheaper. But it won't because vice taxes are enormous on everything else. That is why there is a vast illegal gambling and tobacco trade on the black market in the USA, and both of those are completely legal in one form or another. The markup on counterfeit cigarettes is often on par with that of cocaine and heroin. I did some research once and found that the markup on tobacco is in certain cases about 50% of the markup on heroin from Afghanistan to mainstreet USA. You'd be an unusual person to have the right connections all along the route, but the point stands.Taxing will introduce some benefits, more quality control and standardization (although I would argue we are about to enter the Factory age of industrialization for illegal drugs shortly thanks to darknet services), but the price will be sky high. To be blunt, running to the government will earn you a bloody mouth. Not from me, from them. See, you'll have good people in the government who want to help you make a better world. But it's like a bait and switch operation! Then you got the rentseekers who want positions of money and money without toiling for it, and they'll squeeze you like a tube of toothpaste, using your societal position and political pressure until your means of production becomes effectively theirs in all but name. The latter are the real operators within the government. Basically they are modern day bandits but without the candor.There are solutions to the Drug War, but none of them are as simple as legalization or criminalization. Frankly without government intervention we'd have solved many, but not all, of the problems by now. I think the Silk Road and its competitors are a large part of the solution, but it's not a panacea either and it shall also take a long time.To some people blaming the government for drug gang shoot outs and cartels sounds mad. It's not. Look at the government's housing projects for the poor. They single handily created a veritable 3rd world culture in a western country with that. The US government is funding the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. Some of your tax dollars are going towards guns and money laundering schemes for an enterprise that regularly separates people from their heads (albeit they are still the less violent of the Mexican cartels, so it's not 100% dumb, just 90% dumb). I mean to me this sounds almost like a surreal kind of conspiracy theory, except that it's front page news in the mainstream media.Seems to me that if the US gov can give guns to the Sinaloa people, they ought to cut us a break as well, since we haven't killed anybody to date. In this world, that makes us practically eligible for sainthood.