Monday, June 04, 2007

The Price Of Safety

Over at The Astute Bloggers Avi Green is discussing the planned attack on JFK Airport in New York that was foiled by an informant who was recruited by the police with the offer of a lienient sentence on a drug crime.

Reliapundit has this to say in the comments:

if drugs were made legal as m simon wants then we'd lose this valuable stream of info.

seems to me we need the death penalty to have something to bargain down against; (without it there less leverage to get co-conspirators in some crimes to turn state's evidence), and we need a drug war to get criminals to turn into canaries.
To which I replied:
Of course. How could I be so stupid.

We need to support a program that does not accomplish what it is supposed to accomplish, persecutes the traumatized, is responsible for 1/2 the murders in the country, kills a few innocents every year in botched police raids, and is responsible for as much as much as 85% of the non-drug crime in order to prevent terrorist attacks. Because the FBI is otherwise incompetent to ferret out terrorists.

You know, I bet if we made guns illegal we could get a lot more informants on the street and really empower the secret police.

Tyranny will keep you safe from terrorism. But, is it a good idea?
Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

2 comments:

Reliapundit said...

NAMBLA pedofiles often argue that the act isn't harmful or TRAUMATIC to the child - the CRIMINALIZATION is.

seesm like th=e same argument you make for drugs

jdgalt said...

There's an easy way to know for sure whether it's the "crime" or the law that causes side effects: look at places where the "crime" is legal. (In the case of drugs, the place to look is (a) before 1912, when most of them were legal, and (b) the Prohibition era, when many of today's "drug caused" problems, including gang violence, existed around alcoholic beverages because they were illegal.)

Any good university library has the evidence you'll need -- as well as a good explanation of the real motives, past and present, behind our drug laws. Hint: they're not about safety and never were.

As for the connection to terrorism, there's a much better one that I'm surprised bkmarcus didn't mention: as long as drugs are illegal, they're a huge potential source of money for terrorists, as well as for anyone else willing to risk his life fighting the US and its allies.