I just picked up a copy of “Our Secret Plan: What Will Our Grandchildren Think of Us?” from DQ’s address to the Minnesota Social Investment Forum on June 7, 1993. My question is about the drug trade and the three-year plan.

The part of the address I don’t understand is: “But all the hundreds of thousands of low-level links would have been forced to seek other forms of occupation. Similarly, in three years, the growers around the world who currently supply our appetite for drugs would have been forced into other activities.”

Wouldn’t these people still be growing and producing drugs, only legally? If not, what about small farmer vs. corporate business?

As soon as now-illegal drugs were legalized, they’d begin flowing into the marketplace from established, legal, drug companies like Eli Lilly. These companies would have to import raw materials from abroad until U.S. crops matured, but after that the normal laws of supply and demand would kick in.

We don’t currently import wheat or corn, so why would we import the raw materials needed to produce cocaine and heroin? The demand for foreign crops would diminish greatly even if it didn’t altogether disappear. The issue of “small farmer vs. corporate business” would be no different for these crops than it is for soy beans or oranges.

In any case, all the underworld links that now exist between raw materials and street-product would vanish overnight, just as bootleggers did when Prohibition was repealed.

ID: 665
posted:
updated: 02 Nov 2003