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Originally Posted by highthief
Imply? I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of thousands of people held hostage on land that would be put to better use as farmland, forced to grow coca and poppies, and made into slaves just so someone in the US, Canada or the Netherlands can get a cheap high. Nothing implied about it.
It's funny. The same people who wouldn't buy a shirt that says "made in Burma" on it for fear it was made in a sweatshop are happy to drop hundreds on coke, heroin or other drugs grown by people who live in worse conditions than many sweatshops, because they feel entitled to use drugs.
I don't blame some dumbass kid who doesn't know any better, some guy on the Rez or Hood whose life is so limited and screwed up that he would neither know nor care about such moral questions. I do think that educated people - effectively, the majority of people posting on boards like this - would know and care a bit, rather than relying on "but dude, if it was legal it'd all be cool" instead of thinking about the vast criminal activity and cycles of poverty this sustains.
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You merely implied it in your post. Had you posted this in the first place, it wouldn't have been an implication. Sorry, but I just don't buy the vicarious responsibility for crime argument. If I buy a car from a guy who takes some of the money to buy a gun to kill his wife, am I responsible for that then? There's no way to say what the money will be used for, and likewise there's no way to say what money someone uses to buy drugs will be used for, and you can hardly say in every case or even most cases that it will be used for immoral purposes.
Furthermore there are e.g. plenty of "poor farmers", if not the vast majority of those in the trade, who benefit more from growing coca or opium than from growing whatever other legal crop; why is it that opium production has skyrocketed in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban? Well, I'll guarantee you it's not because Afghan farmers as a whole are being held hostage by anyone; if anything it was
with the Taliban that they were held hostage. It's not like if all drug growing stopped today that suddenly there would be no more starving people in the world and everything would be peachy. Drug production is simply the market winning, and no market so large can be sustained only by coersion of the people involved.