I’ve always said that there’s nothing to be gained from prohibition. We learned it in the 1930’s with alcohol and we see it now with drugs. When there is a demand, there will always be a supply. When you make the demand illegal, then the criminals jump in to provide the supply.
When this black market emerges, the criminal penalties and scarcity of product create obscene profits for the criminals. Soon, the black market becomes a major funding source for other criminal enterprises. You saw that with Al Capone and the gangs of the 30’s and the Crips and the gangs of today.
Of course, the only way gangs can solve their disputes is through violence, since their entire business runs outside the law. Innocent people get caught up in the crossfire, entire neighborhoods are devastated, and law enforcement personnel are corrupted.
So, our biggest gang problem these days are terrorists. It turns out that many of these terrorists are now using the latest form of prohibition to fund their evil ways.
Cigarette smuggling.
Really. Yes, I know that cigarettes are legal, so why am I crying about prohibition? Because of the so-called “sin taxes” that are placed on cigarettes. In places like New York, the taxes on a pack of cigarettes run up to $3.00. By making the price of a pack so prohibitively expensive, it is a sort of prohibition.
Meanwhile, the tax on a pack of cigarettes in a tobacco-friendly state like Virginia is only $0.025 per pack. So, guys load up a truck of a few thousand cartons of smokes in Virgina, drive it up to New York, sell it at huge profit for themselves, but less than the cost of a legal pack to the consumer. Everyone wins — the smoker gets a cheap pack of cigs and the dealer gets a huge profit.
Best of all, since cigarettes are legal, there’s not as much disincentive for the smugglers to ply their trade.
You can’t force people to make healthy or wise choices. By raising the cigarette taxes, most politicians have the best of intentions — promote a healthy lifestyle. But cigarettes are a drug and people are addicted. Terrorists are now taking advantage of people’s addiction to nicotine and politician’s addiction to feel-good short-sighted policy to fund more violence and destruction.
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