How many successful casual users of crack do you know?
I don't know because they are probably not telling anyone about it, have secure suppliers, and pay off the police if needed. How many US state governors like to hire Prostitutes? Had I asked this a year ago, you would have answered "zero". People who are doing illegal stuff tend to keep that stuff secret.
I used to use drugs when I was younger. I don't anymore, but if I still did, would I tell you? Hell no.
I did drugs, got over it, went onto better things and got my degree, and now I was hired a week ago by a local telcom firm that I will be starting at in a week. The only difference between me and someone in jail is that I never got caught by the police. Am I a bad person?
I meet and talk with a lot of young people in my travels, and one of the interesting things that they've told me is that they have a harder time obtaining cigarettes or alcohol than pot or meth. Alcohol/tobacco are legal and regulated, therefore there is no black market for alcohol/tobacco.
Agreed, when I was in high school the hardest drug to get at school was tobacco. Alcohol was easier to get, but most people sold it off school grounds and the people who sold it didn't sell to just anybody, normally exclusively to their group of friends/family. After I turned 21 I made some money suppling underage friends. (Friends in the 18-20 age range might I add.) Pot, LSD and such, if you had the money, you could get it at school. I never did anything harder than Ritalin, (poor man's cocaine) but I did know who had the "hard stuff". All this in my North Dakota city.
Pot, that I just stopped smoking it, don't remember why, but I just walked away from it with no withdrawal whatsoever. The Ritalin, that I stopped after I realized how it was affecting me at college and that I really wasn't enjoying it very much anymore. Had I been a little more moderate in my usage and had I been smarter and not bought the pre-crushed pills, that had been cut with who knows what, I probably would have not gotten as low as I did. But I stopped that relatively easily as well.
The hardest drug I have quit was caffeine. My caffeine headaches were one step below a migraine and I had no energy whatsoever. Could not quit cold turkey, had to wean myself off of it. Now I consume it in moderation.
If the government called a cease fire and started regulating and selling drugs overnight there would still be a black market for under priced and unregulated drugs so that is not the answer.
There is no money to be made selling Cigs to underage people. There IS money in smuggling truckloads of Cigs from low-tax areas to high-tax areas and selling to legal users.
For alcohol, as I said before, the people who bought for underage people only bought for their close group of friends/family. I got maybe $10-20 for each "order" I filled for my friends. I turned away several people I didn't know who asked me to take an order for them. Not a big money maker there.
The markup for illegal drugs, as mentioned in another post, is about 17,000%. Heroin, when it was legal, cost about the same as Asprin. Same with Cocaine. So that Heroin addict with a $200 a day habit could, if heroin was legal, satisfy their habit with a few dollars of regulated, pharmaceutical heroin.
The Dealers would be out of business because their adulterated and expensive product would be no match for a pharmaceutical grade product at a low price. People don't overdose on drugs because they want to, they do because the potency of the drug is constantly changing from dealers and suppliers cutting the drugs with who knows what.
