I mean, you also can't advertise illegal drugs either. Doesn't seem to curb demand though. It may actually be more beneficial to allow these things more broadly, because then social safety features can be wedged in between consumers and suppliers more easily and they don't have to deal with a gigantic shadow market that already gets stigmatised to death by the rest of the population. Just accept that a certain percentage of the populations has screwed up dopamine households and try to keep them away from gangsters as best you can. That would probably help society as a whole more than banning everything and pretending the problem goes away if you close your eyes.
>I mean, you also can't advertise illegal drugs either. Doesn't seem to curb demand though.
Making drugs illegal does not eliminate demand, but it absolutely curbs it. The converse is also true, for example legalizing cannabis in Canada has significantly increased demand for it [1]. While it's true cannabis use had been gradually increasing for decades prior to legalization, there was a significant spike afterwards which has since levelled off.
> The converse is also true, for example legalizing cannabis in Canada has significantly increased demand for it
The relevant thing that link actually says is that more survey respondents admitted to cannabis use after legalization, the obvious problem being that before legalization they would be admitting to a crime, which will suppress response rates.
The same link also points out that the legalization happened right before COVID and then you have a major confounder because even if cannabis use is actually up, you don't know if it's because of legalization or people turning to cannabis over stress from COVID. Moreover, the reported usage increased during COVID but started to decline in 2023. This implies that either the apparent spike was COVID, or that it was something like media reports about recent legalization acting as temporary free advertising and causing a temporary increase in usage. Neither of those is evidence of a sustained increase in demand.
Meanwhile legal options do cause people to prefer legal sources over the black market, and then you get fewer people becoming addicts because the thing they thought they were buying was spiked with something significantly more addictive by a black market seller. Or the black market products have higher variation in the dose and then customers can't predict how much they're getting and occasionally take more than expected, leading to a higher rate of overdose and stronger dependency-inducing withdrawal.
>Meanwhile legal options do cause people to prefer legal sources over the black market
In the case of cannabis it's been showing to lead to less underage use too. If it's a crime, then selling to anyone of any age is still just a crime. But if it's only a crime to sell to under 18/21 then legal shops will avoid selling to the under age to avoid revocation of their license.
> If it's a crime, then selling to anyone of any age is still just a crime. But if it's only a crime to sell to under 18/21 then legal shops will avoid selling to the under age to avoid revocation of their license.
That isn't true; crimes can have aggravating factors and selling drugs to a minor could aggravate the crime of selling drugs.
I don't think the laws were written that way, but they could have been.
There is an incentive to commit a crime when the benefit of committing the crime exceeds the penalty times the chance of getting caught plus the cost of measures taken to avoid getting caught.
This is why increasing penalties have extremely fast diminishing returns. As the penalty goes up, the relative cost of measures to avoid detection goes down, and the penalty needed to counter them becomes exponentially larger.
If the benefit of doing the crime is a million dollars and the penalty is a 50% chance of a year in prison then you have a problem, because plenty of people would be willing to take the risk. But it's actually worse than that, because spending $100,000 on countermeasures might lower the risk of getting caught to 1%, and they're still making $900,000. That might not be worth it when the penalty is a year -- maybe $100,000 in profit is worth a 50% risk of one year? But if you set the penalty to 20 years then it is. Then the gain is $900,000 but the expected penalty has actually fallen to 1% of 20 years, i.e. expected cost of 2.4 months instead of 6. To deter someone with a $900,000 profit who values a year at $120,000 with a 1% chance of getting caught, you would need the penalty to be 750 years, which you can't do because people don't live that long. And spending even more on countermeasures might lower the risk of getting caught even more. If spending $500,000 makes it 0.1%, that may not be worth doing when the max practical penalty is ~70 years, but the option for it means that even 750 years would be insufficient even if it was possible.
This is why there are things it's very difficult to deter. The profit from doing them is more than the cost of making the probability of detection small and then the size of the penalty can't be made large enough to be a deterrent.
That all changes when you legalize most of the market. Now the profit isn't a million dollars, it's $100,000, because anyone can enter the market so increased competition drives down margins. Moreover, $90,000 of the profit was from selling to adults. So now the profit from selling to kids is only $10,000. Not worth spending $100,000 to lower the risk of getting caught. And then you can easily assign a moderate penalty that acts as an actual deterrent.
That seems like the only sensible path forward, if you assume that the only lever a society can pull to make punishment harsher is “longer prison sentences”.
What if the penalty for selling drugs to kids was death?
It seems like that would change the risk/reward calculation pretty substantially.
Would it though? How different is that than life in prison without parole? There are plenty of people who, given the choice between ~$1M and a ~1% chance of the death penalty, are going to pick the money.
You could hypothetically try to make the difference in the penalties larger by making the penalty for selling to adults smaller, e.g. a $10 fine, so that there is minimal incentive to pay for countermeasures when selling to adults and thereby have them already paid for and in place when selling to kids. But then you're just de facto legalizing selling to adults and trying not to admit it.
> For dealers this would mean almost nothing when the punishment for dealing already lead people to do things like get in shootouts with police.
I think you're getting at something valid, but it isn't quite what you think.
The punishment for dealing drugs is, as I understand it, mostly applied to major distributors. In this sense, selling drugs wasn't a crime before anyway.
If you're too low-level for prosecution to be much of a concern, it doesn't take much to guide you away from fundamentally similar crimes where prosecution is a real concern.
Oh come on. Weed use and addiction has absolutely surged since legalization everywhere I'm aware of - US states, Canada, other countries etc. Use everywhere / anytime / as a part of daily life has been completely normalized, it's not uncommon to see people hitting a weed vape in the middle of a work day. Not to mention the potency is far higher and this has been normalized, so one incidence of cannabis use is essentially a mind-blasting wave of THC vs. a casual joint with friends. It would be as if you went from say 12% of Canadians having two beers after work to a fifth of vodka. That the median casual dose in 2026 would have the median casual user in 2016 literally incoherent is undisputed among any weed smoker today.
>The relevant thing that link actually says is that more survey respondents admitted to cannabis use after legalization, the obvious problem being that before legalization they would be admitting to a crime, which will suppress response rates.
Sure, except Canada had legal medicinal weed since 2001 and everyone was aware that police attitudes towards it were very lax. There were even technically-illegal weed stores that the Canadian government took years to shut down. The number of people that lied to a pollster because they thought that the government would get them was almost certainly minimal. The fact that the trend is pretty smooth before/after the boundary confirms this.
It isn't true, at least not as a hard and fast rule. Post-legalization changes in demand differ greatly per country. It completely depends on contemporary cultural factors of the country in question.
Your claim is far too open ended to interpret clearly.
A change in demand post-legalization can absolutely be highly variable across different countries/cultures, but unless you can demonstrate a country that legalized cannabis and saw a decline in demand, then your as of yet unsubstantiated claim does not refute mine.
No, all I need to demonstrate is a country that saw no significant increase, not necessarily a decline.
From everything I know, the US states as well as the Netherlands that all decriminalized it in the 70s didn't see local use increase in significant numbers.
Neither did it in Belgium who did the same in 2003.
And before you go "decriminalization is not the same as legalization", in the "Making drugs illegal does not eliminate demand, but it absolutely curbs it." is clearly about drugs that have not been decriminalized at all.
which were written in an era when most of the gambling in the US was illegal and run by organized crime, Las Vegas was small, Atlantic City new, and New Hampshire the first state to get a lottery. Like prostitution, gambling needs a rather sophisticated criminal network, a parallel system of law-and-order, to be a workable, safe and reasonably fair business. Scarne started out his career, as a magician and card mechanic, as a sort of consultant who could keep games fair.
Blacks in New York City, for instance, ran illegal street craps and ran a lottery
quite similar to the "Pick 3" games you see in many states -- the latter got taken over by the Italian mafia.
Gambling has a broad cross-cultural appeal and some people are going to do it no matter how you try to shut it down. In the US we went from having a few centers to widespread "riverboat" and tribal gambling to widespread casinos now to mobile gambling on sports and sometimes the equivalent of video slots.
Of course there is the matter of degree. It's not going to wreck your life to drop $1 on the lottery a week and probably gives you more than $1 worth of fun. If you're addicted though it may be no fun at all. I can totally see where Nate Silver is coming from but I can also see the degenerate who drops 20 bets on a single game on the weekend as well as the person who thinks he is Nate Silver and he isn't. I think the Superbowl is a fair competition by player who are playing their hardest, but it breaks my heart as a sports fan when teams are not playing to win and that's why I can't stand watching the NBA despite loving going to second-tier college basketball games in person.
And for drugs? I remember all the Lester Grinspoon talk about how prohibition is worse than the drugs themselves and that might have been true before 2000 but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me -- but Marshall McLuhan said we are driving by looking in the rear view mirror and of course some people are going to be repeating things that were true in the last century.
> but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me
Fentanyl is a response to prohibition. If you have to smuggle something it's a lot easier to move 10 kg of fentanyl and cut it with something near the point of sale than to move 10,000 kg of codeine from the point of manufacture.
But then you have street dealers cutting it with who knows what in who knows what amount. They may use a 1000:1 ratio of unspecified hopefully-inert powder to fentanyl but don't mix it evenly so some customers get a 10000:1 ratio and others get 100:1 and become addicted or overdose. Or a dealer has one supplier who was already cutting it 50:1 so they were used to only cutting it another 20:1 so their customers don't complain, but then they start wanting larger quantities and find a new supplier without realizing they just bypassed the one who was pre-cutting it and are now getting uncut fentanyl.
None of that happens if anyone can buy codeine at Walmart. Or for that matter if they can buy fentanyl and know exactly how much they're getting.
> but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me
Do you literally mean you are seeing people die around you? From doing drugs? What is your general location / occupation / lifestyle? I'm a 20+ year coder in the valley, and the closest I've come is hearing about some friends of my spouse (who is a teacher) who indulge in cannabis, and one couple who do adderall recreationally.
You must not leave the house. Emergency services responding to ODs is commonplace in SF. It happened at least once per week outside my office. Walgreens (while they were still open) ran audio ads in the store encouraging you to buy narcan.
Again, what do you think it is? I don't see anything it could be besides what was written. You could call it endocrine imbalance or disrupted hormone household if you wanted to be less precise and skirt around the actual biological problem, but it still doesn't change anything.
I don't know what it is, thats why I asked. Is the assertion that you're trying to make that drugs and gambling being addictive is a result of hormone imbalance in the addicts, rather than the addictive nature of those things?
The argument you are presenting is recycled from debates about newly banning things that have been legal for forever, but doesn’t make any sense at all as a response to people bemoaning disasters caused by an activity being newly legalized.
I think the laws are written assuming everyone is rational but it's pretty clear from neuroscience than dopaminergic/VTA pathway abnormalities addictions make one anything but rational; and they haven't been updated to reflect the science.
If gambling is legal but using violence against debtors is illegal then the legal casinos out-compete the illegal ones but cut you off when the banks won't extend you any more credit instead of giving you a loan with a lien against your kneecaps, and the money goes to companies that aren't using it to fund the expansion of protection rackets etc.
If gambling is illegal then the profits go to organized crime and they don't follow any of the other laws either.
