Toronto drug squad cops sentenced to house arrest
Benn @ Sun Apr 14, 2013 10:15 am
Dayseed, it's hopeless. Don't waste your considerable logic an enlightenment arguing with someone who is likely working on his umpteeth joint of the day.
Someone send him a few bags of chips and he'll calm down once he starts satisfying the munchies.
Curtman @ Sun Apr 14, 2013 10:35 am
Benn Benn:
Dayseed, it's hopeless. Don't waste your considerable logic an enlightenment arguing with someone who is likely working on his umpteeth joint of the day.
Someone send him a few bags of chips and he'll calm down once he starts satisfying the munchies.
Someone send him a few bags of chips and he'll calm down once he starts satisfying the munchies.
Oh go back under your bridge troll. We're having a discussion here.
I hope to get a chance to respond to you tonight Dayseed, after I get back from watching leadership results.
for the good discussion so far.
Curtman @ Mon Apr 15, 2013 5:59 pm
Dayseed Dayseed:
Curtman Curtman:
Why not use a more appropriate analogy? Lets say they were looking for a murder weapon. It would be appalling behaviour for a cop because it would jeopardize the evidence collected for the trial. Maybe your right and the whole thing is as silly as looking for rare action figures. There's one thing you can be certain of: If cops were kicking in doors looking for rare skylander figures, the price would go way up.
The inevitable truth is, they should have been out looking for murder weapons instead of going looking for collectibles.
The inevitable truth is, they should have been out looking for murder weapons instead of going looking for collectibles.
Curt, I left murder out of the equation because the Supreme Court already decided about that sort of conduct 27 years ago in R v. Feeney. I'm not going to retread it (do a search here on CKA for it, I've explained it before) but it will suffice to say that warrantless entry into a residence to search for evidence of murder and arrest the murderer were irredeemable Charter breaches.
The actual search itself wasn't so much the problem as the attendant cover-up.
If you say so.
http://www.canadaka.net/forums/post1961795#p1961795
$1:
"People like me can't be stopped. It's a war. They lose men, and we lose men. They lose their scruples, and we never had any. In the end, you'll even blow up an aircraft because you believe the Colombian president is on board. I don't know what you have to do. Maybe sell cocaine in pharmacies. I've been in prison for 20 years, but you will never win this war when there is so much money to me made. Never."
Corruption is endemic in the war on drugs.
Dayseed Dayseed:
Curtman Curtman:
It does not decrease their supply! If it did, then prohibition would be a success. Users would have no access to their drug, they would suffer withdrawal, and get on with their lives clean and sober.
Um, Curt, you know there's a difference between limiting a supply and eliminating a supply, right? If you conflate the two words, then sure, you've got a point. But, I don't and that's why I chose my words.
Curtman Curtman:
Prohibition does nothing about demand. That's where your economics lesson missed out. It's economics 101. If you decrease supply in any substantial way, the price goes up. The market creates new supplies faster than they are removed. If you're the gang that gets supply to the market, you gain users and increased profit. The war on drugs is failing because of the same economics that we depend on to make capitalism a success! And gangs get meaner and more violent through the same evolution that created us. We spend money enforcing laws that only create more profit for meaner criminals.
Okay Curt, that's what I've been saying all along about decreased supply and price. Your idea that the market creates new supplies faster than they are removed would decrease the price, you realize that, right? If the supply increases and demand is stagnant, price drops. Prohibition works to increase the price because it just houses the shit out of supply.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/04/18/cocaine-prices-business-smuggling_n_1435028.html#s297557&title=Norway_154_per
$1:
In a recent article at Slate, Brian Palmer reports that coke prices have fallen between 80 and 90 per cent in the past 30 years. He attributes the drop to a rapid evolution in the cocaine business that has seen smugglers move to small aircraft, cargo ships and even submarines to move their wares.
“In their early days, even legendary drug kingpins like Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers had to smuggle their cocaine out of the country in their own suitcases,” Palmer writes. “With the surge in demand that began at the end of the 1970s, however, the kingpins built out their empires, modernizing processing, transport, and retail networks, and managed to lower prices by more than 60 percent over the next 10 years.”
“In their early days, even legendary drug kingpins like Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers had to smuggle their cocaine out of the country in their own suitcases,” Palmer writes. “With the surge in demand that began at the end of the 1970s, however, the kingpins built out their empires, modernizing processing, transport, and retail networks, and managed to lower prices by more than 60 percent over the next 10 years.”
Marijuana cheaper and easier to get than ever
$1:
Billions of dollars have been put towards nipping the drug-trade in the bud, yet the ease of obtaining marijuana and its potency have bloomed, while its price has dropped, according to a prominent group lobbying for cannabis legalization.
A new report by the Stop the Violence BC coalition of health, academic and justice experts will be released today to demonstrate the result of current anti-drug policy.
It uses government-funded data to show that cannabis trends are thriving, despite decades of huge cash injections to law enforcement agencies in both Canada and the U.S.
Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/marijuana-cheaper ... z2Qa7W1prw
A new report by the Stop the Violence BC coalition of health, academic and justice experts will be released today to demonstrate the result of current anti-drug policy.
It uses government-funded data to show that cannabis trends are thriving, despite decades of huge cash injections to law enforcement agencies in both Canada and the U.S.
Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/marijuana-cheaper ... z2Qa7W1prw
You are correct, and yes I realize that.
Dayseed Dayseed:
Curtman Curtman:
Regulation, the antithesis of prohibition and subset of legalization, instead targets users - through public health policy not justice, to decrease demand. Demand goes down, price goes down, supply goes down. Usage goes down.
Here's where we disagree. Regulation is a tacit endorsement of a practice. Cigarettes are regulated, but they are becoming practically prohibited through the combined social pressure to look down on smokers and government restricting their sale, advertisement and usage. Alcohol is sold exclusively by the government (in Ontario) and thus, appears endorsed by the government (The Beer Store notwithstanding).
Another example is the prosecution of vigilantes. When a shopkeeper beats the fuck out of a robber, the government is obligated to prosecute that shopkeeper as a deterrent to the practice. It can't turn a blind eye to assault, no matter how justified it may appear, or otherwise the practice can become commonplace.
It is not necessarily an endorsement. Shifting drug policy from justice to health is more effective, and less costly. The government does not endorse cigarettes, it actively encourages people not to use them.
Dayseed Dayseed:
Curtman Curtman:
You're still comparing apples to oranges. Can you imagine a world where heroin which is easily derived from a plant is more valuable than the diamonds you used as an example? Or Marijuana, a raw unprocessed plant is more valuable than gold? It's what prohibition created, along with the monsters who traffic it. Prohibition ensures its own failure through the profit it generates.
I don't know to what this relates as you've wandered off into left field. If this is supposed to convince me that artificially limiting the diamond supply hasn't jacked their price up, you've failed, or if artificially limiting any supply jacks up the price, ditto. If your point is that marijuana is overvalued because of prohibition, who cares? It's also bizarre to accuse me of comparing apples to oranges when you're comparing gold to marijuana.
This is only to show you that prohibition has created a hyper inflated price with the result of producing massive amounts of profit for criminals. Cartels that have larger profits than debeers. Cigarettes, although more addictive than heroin sell for a fraction of the markup and provide revenue to pay for health services.
Originally, your point was:
Dayseed Dayseed:
2. The legality of drugs isn't a motivator for criminals.
I'm saying that it is. The legality of drugs creates the profit that motivates criminals to enter the market.
Dayseed Dayseed:
Curtman Curtman:
Look at cigarettes, another of your examples. The government sets the price. Highly taxed, in excess of 100% of what the manufactures and distributors are taking combined. The black market is subject to that price, not one that it sets itself. We saw the government reduce taxes to lower the price, and the black market took a significant hit. We targeted smokers with advertising, and offered quit-smoking kits to them. Usage dropped even as prices dropped. We've since raised taxes 50% higher than they were the last time we did any significant harm to the black market, and its become a problem again. What do you think the solution is? Make tobacco illegal, and drive the price up?
You realize that the point of commodity crime is to bring to market something illegally as your price advantage, right? Illegally selling cigarettes off reserves to non-status Canadians is a hell of a price advantage over Mac's Milk. The various smoke shops on a reserve will compete with each other.
Unless you're talking about collusion, Adam Smith's invisible hand will eventually set the market price for anything; black market, legal market, Kijiji trading. Nobody is "setting the price".
This is the part about how regulation will drive the price down. Making it much harder to bring to market something illegally as your price advantage.
Right?
Dayseed Dayseed:
Curtman Curtman:
You'll have dealers pushing cigarettes in schools in no time.
Making cigarettes illegal will not cause cigarette dealers to hang out front of schools. Highschoolers are already prohibited from getting them and we don't see the practice now. You're flat out wrong.
Highschoolers buy their cigarettes at the store just like every other smoker. Or someone buys them for them. You're flat out wrong. There isn't the same profit to be made selling smokes or booze at school as there is selling pot, or whatever else, because there's a regulatory framework controlling the price.
Dayseed Dayseed:
Curtman Curtman:
Regulation does. Or it can anyway. Alcohol is regulated, but not in the same way. Regulation of drugs could impose controls on consumption as well as the taxation level. You could give users access to a cheap, legal supply, taxed, and give them prescribed amounts. When she runs out of that supply, she would turn the black market, but its price would likely be higher than the legal supply. If we put users in that position, and had data on their usage we could target the problem addicts with treatment.
Well holy sheep shit, we agree on something! There's already a burgeoning market for prescription medications. Not junkies looking for a high, but normal people strung out by oxys that need more than their prescription allows.
There always will be. Having the legal supply to direct users at treatment is significantly better than having those users interact only with their dealer.
You send addicts to jail, they get worse. You send them to treatment, they get better. Portugal has shown this. Insite has shown this.
Dayseed Dayseed:
Curtman Curtman:
Yes, part of regulation. If you make cigarettes illegal, the price will immediately skyrocket and new people will be trying to find ways to get in on this fantastic opportunity. They will set about trying to drum up new business in any way they can. They will defeat the advertising that we do because it has become extremely profitable, where it used to be just easy money. If we were to lower cigarette taxes again for a period, traffickers would decrease in number. If we raise them, even infinitely as prohibition does, traffickers will multiply.
Making cigarettes illegal would limit the supply, causing price to go up provided demand stays stagnant. Lowering taxes decreases the price advantage smugglers or reserves have. Why would anybody drive to a distant reserve to save a couple bucks when they're spending more than that on gas? The answer? Cheap native gas.
There you have it.
Dayseed Dayseed:
The legality of drugs isn't a motivator for criminals.
It is.