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Municipalize Drug Law

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This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
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Municipalize Drug Law

Robin Hanson
Oct 8, 2011
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Municipalize Drug Law

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia isn’t a supporter of legalizing drugs. But he does believe that passing federal laws against them has done harm to the U.S. government. “It was a great mistake to put routine drug offenses into the federal courts,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday. … Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained as far back as 1989 that the war on drugs was overwhelming the federal judiciary. (more; HT John Fast)

There’s no way the US will legalize drugs anytime soon, but if drug laws were up to cities or counties, a few places would legalize them, and then everyone else could see if that works out ok. And then maybe more places would legalize. Those of you who saw The Wire may recall that its successful experiment in local drug legalization was shut down by threats from feds.

Back in ’09 I suggested a similar solution on medicine. There’s no way we’ll substantially privatize medicine anytime soon, but if cities were in charge then places that let spending get out of control would decline relative to others that controlled costs more effectively. Losers would learn from winners, to all our benefit.

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Municipalize Drug Law

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Municipalize Drug Law

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15

That's funny, right now you are paying for all the legal overhead caused by the war on drugs.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15

Support the Health Care Compact. http://healthcarecompact.or... -- It will give power over legislating health care to individual states.

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