Quote:
Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
You don't think that decreasing the punishment for smuggling would make it easier for the barons to traffic larger quantities and make more money? I understand you saying the sentences in themselves aren't stopping trafficking, but we would need to implement lax sentences for mules in order to compare the quantity trafficked under those conditions with the current conditions before we could rule that the sentences have no impact on trafficking.
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In theory it would but in practice I doubt it. The same amount would flow through to meet the demand in say Europe but even more would be seized by officials to get more money from the barons. To drastically change the supply and demand of the drug, a much larger amount of new users would be needed. Most of these new users would probably be the users of cheaper drugs, that would be attracted to use cocaine as its price would've gone down, due to more of it in the market place. On the flip side of the coin, greater cocaine use would see the usage of other drugs decrease, thus affecting their trade in turn. It then raises the question, is it better to have more cocaine users and less users of other drugs or vice versa, again that's a different debate.
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