Jackal,
Can you provide any hard information regarding the claim that the government of Singapore is systematically working with Burmese drug cartels to distribute Heroin world-wide? I mean aside from the oft-repeated claim that their banks are laundering money, because for that matter almost every financial center in the world is moving some dirty money around.
Please understand, I'm willing to believe your claim, but I'd like something more concrete than repeated assertions.
Sandy, Lazs -
Obviously making the distribution of something that people desire illegal creates a black market and drives up the cost. This is true for instance of nuclear material, child porn, exotic animal parts, human organs, slaves, illegal immigrant labor and so on. But I would say that the answer to the problem of trading in these items (which in some cases is rampant) and the impossibility of suppressing it is not to simply legalize the trade of these items to suppress the cost. True the cost would go down as would much of the crime associated with it, but the trade in the item itself would increase dramatically creating exponentially more of what you didn't want in the first place.
So for instance, Laz, you mentioned abortion. No one has ever attempted to argue that the legalization of abortion reduced the overall number of abortions. Exactly the opposite has occurred, to the point where 1 in 3 pregnancies in the United States ends in abortion. We have literally gone from thousands a year, to millions. If the practice was immoral to begin with, legalizing it did nothing to help that situation.
Unlike Canabis, narcotics are not things that most people can use recreationally, one is rarely an occasional social crack smoker, and to use heroin and crack is generally to enter into a cycle that ends in poverty, depression, degradation, crime, violence, and ultimately death. Therefore, pragmatic arguments "we can't beat this, so we need to stop fighting it" don't really apply. If its wrong its wrong. We'll never stamp out murder or pedophilia either, but legalizing something immoral is never the right answer. Personally, I am committed by my confession of faith to oppose narcotics as something that inherently tends towards the unlawful destruction of the life of others, but then again I also don't believe that people have the right to kill their offspring or themselves.
