{"id":1240,"date":"2011-12-02T15:50:34","date_gmt":"2011-12-02T20:50:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/fighting-gangs-by-legalizing-pot.html"},"modified":"2011-12-02T15:50:34","modified_gmt":"2011-12-02T20:50:34","slug":"fighting-gangs-by-legalizing-pot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/fighting-gangs-by-legalizing-pot.html","title":{"rendered":"Fighting gangs by legalizing pot"},"content":{"rendered":"Just like alcohol prohibition produced gansters such as Al Capone,\ndrug prohibition doesn’t prevent crime: it causes it.\nLegalize, tax, and regulate, end that crime,\nreduce drug use,\nand fund government services.\nWhile massively reducing the prison population and removing any excuse for private prisons.\nSweden is pioneering the way.\n

\nRichard Orange wrote for GlobalPost yesterday,\n\nA win-win on drugs? Fighting gangs by legalizing pot<\/a>,\n

\n\n<\/a>\nCopenhagen’s city municipality voted in recent weeks, 39 votes to 9,\nto empower its social affairs committee to draw up a detailed plan to\nlegalize cannabis.\n

\nIf that plan is approved by Denmark’s new left-of-centre parliament\nnext year, the city could become the first to legalize marijuana,\nrather than simply tolerate it, as police do in the Netherlands.\n

\n“We are thinking of perhaps 30 to 40 public sales houses, where the\npeople aren’t interested in selling you more, they’re interested\nin you,” Mikkel Warming, the mayor in charge of social affairs\nat Copenhagen City Council told GlobalPost. “Who is it better for\nyoungsters to buy marijuana from? A drug pusher, who wants them to use\nmore, who wants them to buy hard drugs, or a civil servant?”\n<\/blockquote>\nNot just drug toleration. Legalization:\n\n\n

\n“People who use marijuana are paying money to criminals, mostly to\ngang members, and it’s a market that every year, is worth up to two\nbillion Danish kroner ($350 million). That’s enough to fight for,\nwhich is why we’ve had a war between the gangs in Copenhagen,” he said.\n

\nThat’s why he doesn’t want to institute a system where smoking\nmarijuana is tolerated in cannabis cafes, but officially illegal,\nand therefore profitable for criminals to grow and import.\n<\/blockquote>\nThere’s more in the article.\n

\nAnd with drugs no longer illegal, we’d have a lot fewer prisoners,\nnot just fewer drug users, but fewer people in for drug-related\ncrimes of all kinds.\n\n<\/a>\nThat would be sad for private prison companies such as CCA,\nwhich admits in its 2010 report to the SEC that legalization\nor even sentence reform would adversely affect its profits.\n

\n\nWe don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.<\/a>\nSpend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just like alcohol prohibition produced gansters such as Al Capone, drug prohibition doesn’t prevent crime: it causes it. Legalize, tax, and regulate, end that crime, reduce drug use, and fund government services. While massively reducing the prison population and removing any excuse for private prisons. Sweden is pioneering the way. Richard Orange wrote for GlobalPost […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,1113,14,2,41,19,72,20,178],"tags":[3121,8744,8817,3341,77,8705,8701,8730,2650,7,79,2651,2712,3340,60,8749],"class_list":["post-1240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-cca","category-economy","category-government","category-health-care","category-history","category-incarceration","category-law","category-vlcia","tag-al-capone","tag-alec","tag-cca","tag-copenhagen","tag-drugs","tag-education","tag-georgia","tag-incarceration","tag-legalize","tag-lowndes-county","tag-prohibition","tag-regulate","tag-rehabilitation","tag-sweden","tag-tax","tag-vlcia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-k0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}