Uncle Charley and the Drug War

"Great dinner, Elaine", Charley said contentedly as he pushed his chair back. "Could I have a little more coffee?"

I got up and got the coffee. Elaine brought her coffee in and sat down. "Charley," she said, "I've been reading about the drug war, and how expensive and unsuccessful it is."

"Yep", he said. "Prolly nobody ever thought it would work. It's just a gesture, I guess."
"Just a P C thing to do?"

"Would be my guess. We've tried all kinds of bans on stuff, and when has it worked? We banned liquor and created organized crime,and now we're back to selling liquor. England tried to stop opium back at the start of the last century, and that didn't work. We've been fighting drugs for the last 50 years, spent I don't know how much, and there's more drugs on the street than ever."

I leaned back in my chair. "Do you think we should just do what China did?"

"You mean just execute all the drug dealers and send the users off to a work camp or something? That might fly in China. They got a surplus of people anyhow. I don't see us putting up with that here."

"You always have some ideas, Charley," Elaine said. "What have you thought of this time?"

"Hmmm. Truth to tell, I have given it some thought. The problem is that drugs are a major money maker. Drug sales are among the biggest businesses in the U.S., and they don't pay taxes neither. All the "war on drugs" thing does is to cut back on the supply, then of course the prices go up, and it's business as usual. So it seems to me that the only thing that might stop drug sales is to make it unprofitable, like they did for heroin in England."

"How would we do that?" I asked.

"I have a thought, but I don't think you're gonna like it."

"OK, OK," Elaine said. "Spit it out. I'm out of coffee."

"Well, what if the gummint took over the drug business? Starting with something like cocaine and crack. We'd use that budget set up for the useless War On Drugs and spend the money on buying cocaine from the source. Pay 'em their regular price and everything. Then we'd give it away to everyone old enough to vote who wants it. What's gonna happen is that we'll drive the cartels and the gangs out of business. Can't get much lower price than free. Then there's nobody to push the drugs or get people hooked on them, and eventually the market would drop. Might take years, but you'd be able to see a steady decline in sales when you have to pick your drugs up from a gummint drug store. Why would you pay a lot of bucks on a street corner and risk being poisoned, when you can get 'em from the gummint cheap and clean and in the daylight?"

"What an idea," I said. "Some people will think it's immoral."

"What's going on now is immoral. The gummint ain't trying to build up a market for drugs. It would be tryin' to destroy the drug market by making it unprofitable. And think of all that money going to pay off cops and entire gummints in Latin America. Those people might end up with a gummint that ain't corrupt."

"Right now the US is a major source of income for some of the poorest countries," I commented.
"In Afghanistan the major cash crop is the opium poppy, and if we stopped sending them money they'd be in trouble".

"That's always the problem with countries with just one cash crop. They're always on the edge of disaster," Charley said. "Right now our citizens are sending money to the poor people of Colombia or wherever, and with the Uncle Charley Plan they'd keep on getting their money, so we wouldn't be hurting them. Just the gangs and the cartels, and you can bet they wouldn't like it. So if my little plan was proposed, it'd be right interesting to see which congressmen would agree with the cartels. And you know that some of them are taking dirty money. When there's that much dirty money out there, it's impossible to stop corruption and bribery. So the only way to get things cleaner is to make drugs unprofitable."

"I like it, Charley," my wife said. "I never thought I'd say that about one of your hair-brained ideas, but this one has some possibility. But what are you going to do about all those federal employees in the drug war, like the DEA?"

"Good question," Charley grinned. "We can have them manage the Gummint Uncle Charley Drug Stores! They would have to take a cut in pay, but at least they wouldn't be having gun battles with gangs. Now, I haven't figured out what to do about home-grown drugs, but where there's too much profit there's gonna be graft and corruption and violence. So any solution has got to involve taking away the profit margin."

"Give up profit?" I laughed. "Why, that's almost... un-American!"

"The more you feed the animal, the bigger it gets," Charley said.

"And that's the truth." Elaine added.