Drugs, criminality and taxes

I have never taken any illegal drugs. Not because of any moral superiority, they just weren’t a part of the society in which I lived during the years in which I might have been most influenced to take them. However, it took little to tempt me to succumb to beer and fags, despite dire warnings! If a drugs culture had existed in rural Wales when I was a youngster, I have no doubt, whatsoever, that I would have been part of it. I haven't done drugs through luck, no other reason - just luck.

Many of those who pontificate about anti-drugs policies are in exactly the same situation as I am. There but for the Grace of God / luck of the draw go I.

It is clearly evident that the taking of illegal recreational drugs is now a part of the cultural norm for many in the Western world. Too many people, from all walks of life, take drugs for the trade to be abolished by any sort of war on drugs or just say no policy.

So many of the deaths of children and young people by gunfire and knifing incidents in recent years have been caused by the unregulated drugs trade. The lifeblood of the gangs that terrorise urban areas is the drugs trade and their control over and desire to protect their control of that trade.

The idea that people won't report crime to the police for fear of recriminations from the gangs is too simplistic. Many otherwise "respectable" people don't report crimes because they are part of the problem they worry about the police snooping into their own illegal practices:

Will the police smell the pot in my living room?
Will they see the residue of lines on my coffee table?
Will helping them find the murderer cut off my supply chain?
Will the criminal that I shop grass on his minion and his minion grass on his minion's minion and start a lead down to the fact that I am one of the minion's minion's minion's customers for illegal drugs?

The only way that the drugs trade can be controlled is by governments taking control of it, by legalising those drugs that are now illegal, specifying quality controls and licensing outlets.

Before I am lambasted in the comments section - I am luck enough to be able abhor the idea too, but all other ways have failed and failed miserably!

The only way left to tackle drugs crime is to take criminality out of the drugs trade by taking the criminals out of the trade and replacing them with qualified, licensed and taxed legal traders.