This is an old revision of this page, as edited by GTBacchus (talk | contribs) at 01:13, 8 January 2006 (fixing defunct talk page redirect, also pasting in unsourced paragraph from article). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 01:13, 8 January 2006 by GTBacchus (talk | contribs) (fixing defunct talk page redirect, also pasting in unsourced paragraph from article)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)This page was just a redirect to Talk:Prohibition (drugs). That was confusing. -GTBacchus 01:13, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Unsourced paragraph
This paragraph pretty much reads like original research; it uses material from sources like , but then draws independent conclusions. It's also fairly POV:
- One important way of analyzing a policy of drug prohibition is to test whether the decrease in the social costs of drug abuse outweighs the cost of prohibition itself. US Government Agencies do not always make helpful contributions to this analysis. For example, the ONDCP estimated that the cost of drug abuse in 2000 was over $160 billion (1.6% of GDP); but they included losses in productivity due to incarceration, crime, drug-related illness, and other reasons accounting for over two-thirds of that amount. Were the drugs in question to be legalized and taxed, many of those costs would disappear, and a legal trade in these substances would develop, as happened at the end of the Prohibition era. Costs to society would depend largely on any change in the popularity of these drugs, the proportion of abusers, and whether there would be a change in the criminal behavior of drug users. The ONDCP analysis also failed to take into account the effect of the reduced revenue that would accrue to organized crime in a regulated, de-criminalized drug economy.