Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News :: Re: What points do you disagree with?

[quote name="Mysterio"]Cocaine is available by prescription in Europe and Australia. Cocaine analogues bupropion and methylphenidate are generic and widely available in North America. Methamphetamine is marketed as Desoxyn. There are a host of opiates more potent than heroin on the market. None of these have produced an end times scenario because they are prohibitively priced and aggressively gated, though the opiates are problematic. I don't think you really understand cocaine production. Coca is a jungle shrub, it is hardy and will grow anywhere hot with enough humidity. When processed with gas and HCl, you get cocaine, a nonperishable that's trivial to transport across long distances. $15/lb is perfectly reasonable for a plant product that takes no infrastructure, skills or capital to grow, process, and distribute. Right now cocaine costs $75 a gram and is extremely difficult to get reliably. "Legal" cocaine would be 7c-$7 a gram and ubiquitous. I think this would be catastrophic, but I have no idea if the externalities would exceed the costs of prohibition. As for the rest, it's a question of economics. The jobs just aren't there. The people who make decisions were OK with giving the bottom segment of the primary/secondary sectors to noncitizens. The rest of the population is OK with not giving any institutional assistance to the post-industrial poor citizens who used to do that work. These post industrial poor are locked in cyclical poverty that is only tangentially related to race and much more about family and cultural and geographic dynamics that are perpetrated by dilapidated institutions. People of all races thrive in the US. African immigrants do exceptionally well in this country. Skin colour is a red herring. [/quote]