Commercial Vices The commercial vices are gambling, prostitution, and drugs. The appeals o
Commercial Vices
The commercial vices are gambling, prostitution, and drugs. The appeals of the commercial vices are so strong and widespread that attempts to prohibit them in western democracies have always failed. Even in totalitarian regimes with unrestricted police and draconian punishments, such as Islamic countries, there is only partial success.
The evils of these vices are threefold: Those who practice them suffer, the criminals who sell them prosper, and the enforcement organizations are expensive, unsuccessful, and often corrupt bureaucracies.
Two commercial vices have been accepted as unstoppable but their evils have been minimized by legalization and regulation. These are the particular drug, alcohol, and gambling.
The United States attempted to prohibit alcohol and failed. The Mafia made its accumulated capital by bootlegging alcohol. The gangsters of the twenties and thirties were in the alcohol business just as the drug peddlers of today are in the drug business. Both settled trade disputes with gunfire. When alcohol prohibition was repealed and sale by licensed dealers was instituted, the Mafia went out of the liquor business and the revenue agents assigned to stop the illegal business went out of business too. The quality of regulated liquor became assured and taxes, not high enough to motivate bootlegging, became a source of public revenue. Consumption of legal alcohol became only slightly greater than the consumption of illegal alcohol had been.
If we follow the alcohol example with all other drugs, the same benefits will obtain. Much more than that, the temptation of "forbidden fruit" will disappear. The jailing of petty drug pushers will stop, together with their training as future serious criminals in the crime schools which are our jails. If we transfer the huge sums wasted on fruitless interdiction efforts and on punishment to serious education and rehabilitation programs, the drug problem will retreat to the trivial level it was fifty years ago.
Gambling is another example of "If you can't lick’em, join’em." At one time all but private gambling at home was illegal. So the Mafia ran the numbers rackets and the secret games and the bookmaking where "law abiding" citizens did their unstoppable gambling. Now governments run lotteries and license and supervise casinos so the gangsters are largely out, cheating is minimal, and governments earn revenue instead of paying police. Here, again, an education program would cost little and do much good.
Prostitution is an even more emotional problem. Addiction to sex is genetic and permanent and deprivation has many penalties. Here, again, legalization and regulation will immediately eliminate the pimps and gangsters and reduce the police force. With periodic medical examination and licensing of the practitioners, and perhaps of the customers, there will be a radical reduction in the spread of venereal diseases, including AIDS. For those already diseased there can be a matching of buyer and seller by coding their license cards.
A valid objection to legalization (or de-criminalization) of vices is that this very action will encourage their practice by seeming to be an official endorsement. This objection can be finessed by what was done with "Blue Laws" which tried to impose unacceptable "virtues" but which could not be repealed. They were not repealed but merely stopped being enforced.
The enforcement budgets can then be converted to treatment and education to discourage and diminish practice of the vices. Laws providing regulation and licensing can still be passed. Logically they are inconsistent with laws forbidding, but so what？ They can be enforced anyway.
Legalization and regulation of commercial vices would bring all of the following benefits EXCEPT that ______.
A．the police force could be reduced
B．illegal dealers would be forced out of business
C．there would be, no more drug dealers
D．the practices might become a source of revenue
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