The statistic in question is simply for those that are incarcerated for those offences. It is not for offences related to the drugs trade, but merely for the ‘crimes’ of taking, trafficking, or manufacturing controlled substances. Thus, if one murders another person as part of a gang war, or steals to pay for drugs, those are classified under different activity groups, not within the 12,567 offneces cited above. The actually immoral acts have already been deducted.

Indeed, by decriminalising drugs, those immoral acts will be reduced. By criminalising drugs, it encourages violence and theft, forces drug dealers to associate in (as you correctly describe) murderous organisesd crime syndicates. If one wants to see the potential effect, one only needs to ask how many times a GlaxoSmithKline employee has been murdered by a rival from AstraZeneca (or, before AZ’s lawyers get on my case, vice versa). The answer’s none, and that’s because their business is legal, not necessarily because it’s moral.

By criminalising a moral act, one forces people to act immorally. Drug dealers lose the deterrent to obey the just laws, and see no reason NOT to murder; drug users are forced to pay an exhorbitant premium on a substance little harder to manufacture than paracetemol, and have to steal to pay the bills; without legal recourse, the drug user is exposed to sub-standard produce, cut with rat poison. If one is concerned by the murder, theft, and deceit associated with the drugs trade, the best way to stamp them out, and restore order to the streets, is to legalise the drugs now.

I agree that drug-taking doesn’t harm others and shouldn’t be punished, but I imagine that some of those drug offences involve dealing and trafficking, not just using, and dealers and traffickers certainly do harm others, since they are involved in large and murderous organised crime syndicates.

That’s not to say you’re wrong, just that you need a more precise statistic to back up your argument.

Actually, the High-jacked Godwin’s Law states, completely unsupported by any argument of itself, that comparison to fascism is false. Ergo, it reinforces the belief, falsely-held by many in society, that fascism is defeated, never to return. That is a lie, perpetrated and perpetuated by the state and its apologists (who make up the vast majority of society), to mask the parallels between fascism and unchecked statism. That is a fallacy, and not the determinant of others’.

However, if you are quite unhappy with comparison to that evil, let me restate the other comaprison to evil that I made: to the Taliban. The term ‘Taliban tendency’, used to describe the Cornerstone Group and thousands of Conservatives that buy into its pernicious brand of statism, was coined not by a man behind a keyboard on an Internet message board, but by Alan Duncan, Shadow Secretary of State for Trade, Industry, and Energy.