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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   20614 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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Strict drug laws and closing the border. The latter won’t do anything about this issue but the former can at least plausibly reduce the tendency of rich young people to do drugs.

My inclination is that if anything, strict drug laws make events like this more likely, because even very rich people end up getting drugs from underground sources. who knows where this batch of fentanyl originated? Where if drugs were legal, this kid would probably have gotten top-brand shit.

In Japan, drugs are illegal and almost nobody does drugs. The secret, oddly enough, is getting rid of the underground sources because they’re illegal.

The whole ‘if it’s illegal people will do it without supervision’ business is half people who think it’s fine and probably do it themselves, and half people whose moral codes proscribe actual enforcement of the laws

Unless the secret is, you know, being Japan.

The numbers I’m seeing here are all over the place, but the largest seizures were like 2,000 kg/yr. Meanwhile the US border seizes 82,000 kg/yr of meth alone. This can’t just be lack of enforcement.

Because in Japan nobody is stupid enough to try it, and if they do they don’t have the layers of procedural and legal protection they would in America. Japan has something like a 90% conviction rate.

Obviously there are other factors, most notably land borders, but I think the vast majority of the discrepancy comes from severity of enforcement.

With all these other factors, why do you think severity of enforcement makes the difference?

People mostly take criminal actions with the expectation that they will benefit. I am suggesting that people try to smuggle much more drugs into America than Japan because they think they will be able to sell them.

If dealers keep getting arrested trying to sell this merchandise, and customers are too scared to buy it, nobody will bother shipping.

In short, I propose the causality is the reverse of what you suggest.

(I.e. the problem is not that heavy enforcement works in Japan but wouldn’t in US, it’s that American attitudes cripple enforcement.)

I don't feel too strongly about this, obviously there's a whole bunch of factors involved here, but it's not like enforcement cannot result in a dramatic decrease in crimes that need enforcing against (see El Salvador) or lack of enforcement resulting in an increase (see post-BLM murder rate).

It’s definitely possible. Which is why I find it a bit premature to say the secret is getting rid of underground sources.

Weirdly I would say rich young people want cocaine to be expensive. If you could buy coke at 7-eleven for the price of a Red Bull it wouldn’t be a status symbol having the coke in the club/after-party but a lower class stimulant.

Anything can be a status symbol if it comes in an expensive, fancy bottle.

"How expensive drugs are" has little to do with how likely the children of billionaires are to experiment. "How likely you are to be arrested and prosecuted for simple possession" has a lot to do with it; we like to think of 18-20somethings as thinking they're invincible, and they certainly have a high tolerance for risk, but upper class kids are actually keenly conscious of living in a zero sum competition to stay at the top of the ladder. I'll bet this kid would never dream of getting a hooker because of the legal risk(which seems like it's probably not that high), despite being young and male and probably wanting some casual sex, because he knew getting prosecuted for solicitation would leave him with a permanent record. Putting drugs in that basket is at least theoretically a thing that strict drug laws can do.

Rich young people still smoke weed though, and that’s cheap now.

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