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Word: legalism (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
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Usage:

Indeed, say most proponents of legalization, the antinarcotics laws create an evil worse than the drugs themselves: violent crime. Laws to stop the supply do not prevent anyone who really wants cocaine or heroin from getting ( it. But they do permit the sellers to charge sky-high prices as a kind of risk premium. The high prices, in turn, produce enormous profits that irresistibly lure vicious gangs, who are taking over large areas of cities. The gangs employ armies of pushers who spread the very plague the drug laws are supposed to combat. Says Milton Friedman, guru of free-market...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Thinking the Unthinkable | 5/30/1988 | See Source »

...great promise of legalization, say its advocates, is that it would rip this cancer out of the cities. If drugs were legal, the Government could regulate their sale and set a low price. Addicts could get a fix without stealing, and a lack of profit would dismantle the booming criminal industry that now supplies them. Drug gangs would disappear as bootleggers did after the repeal of Prohibition; with them would go the current, pervasive corruption of police officers, lawyers, judges and politicians bribed by drug money. Drug dealing would no longer seem to be the only...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Thinking the Unthinkable | 5/30/1988 | See Source »

...many see benefits from legalization that go beyond easing the crime problem. Princeton Professor Ethan Nadelmann estimates that federal, state and local governments are spending around $8 billion a year on direct drug- enforcement activities and billions more for such indirect costs as care and feeding of imprisoned drug dealers (people convicted of drug-related crimes constitute more than one-third of all federal prisoners). Legalization not only would save these enormous expenditures but also could bring in billions more in new revenues if governments chose to tax the sale of newly legal drugs (as they surely would). Nadelmann...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Thinking the Unthinkable | 5/30/1988 | See Source »

...manner similar to the sale of alcohol. The substances could be sold only by licensed dealers, who would be taxed and heavily regulated; for example, they would be forbidden to sell to anyone under 21 years old. But there are many variations. Some supporters would permit the legal sale of marijuana only; Washington Mayor Marion Barry might add cocaine but is dead set against legalizing PCP (angel dust). Economist Friedman would permit the sale of every imaginable brand of upper and downer at the local drugstore. Dershowitz would go so far as to distribute heroin free from mobile vans...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Thinking the Unthinkable | 5/30/1988 | See Source »

...good many people would stop short of full-scale legalization and opt for a rather vague concept known as decriminalization. It is generally taken to mean reducing or eliminating criminal penalties for the use and perhaps sale of drugs, while retaining some form of legal disapproval. Such a halfway solution might accelerate the problems that would come from legalization without solving most of those that arise from the current tough drug laws. Author Claude Brown (Manchild in the Promised Land), himself a reformed drug dealer, suggests decriminalizing the sale of drugs by hospitals and clinics in order to "deglamorize ((narcotics...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Thinking the Unthinkable | 5/30/1988 | See Source »

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