Against The Supply Side. Congress: 0, Globalization: 27
The War on Drugs was designed to cut the drug flow into the nation, essentially to starve junkies of their drugs and force the nation to go cold turkey. Any rehab clinician can tell you what the success and relapse rates are for this manner of treatment, but Congress is the last group of people on earth who'd listen to people who know what they're talking about - Congress needs to listen to voters, and voters don't know shit.
The results were creatively backronymed onto the anti-drug campaign of my youth (D.A.R.E.) as "Drugs Are Really Expensive." When you artificially restrict supply like that, the results are predictable - grossly disproportionate demand causes price spikes and people can turn into millionaires by the drug trade if they've got the skills (and the require skills are extremely difficult to come by).
Even the modest penalties for simple possession aren't enough to contend with the rampant demand problem. If you really want people to stop doing drugs you have to do more than deny them their fix, you have to fundamentally heal the people and culture that craves self destruction. (This is, of course, assuming that drug use is automatically destructive at 100%, which it isn't, but this unnecessarily complicates things so we'll pretend it is.)
In fact every single strategy against the supply of a bad thing has uniformly failed. The counterinsurgency in Iraq being one of the more recent examples. Kill all the insurgents you want. Blow up all the illegal weapons caches you want. Crunch all you want, the situation in Iraq will make more. Army field manual 3-24, "Counterinsurgency" opens with some truly insightful things which are little talked about in our culture. "The best weapons...don't shoot." The book talks about changing the cultural environment in which the insurgency is happening. Make people feel safe, it says, and the insurgency will wither wherever it's taken root. Starved of the fear and chaos which feeds it, the insurgency will vanish away. End the demand, and the supply dries up. Stop americans from wanting drugs, and the drug trade will dry up.
It is for this reason that I conclude Poker is safe. this summary of Maine state laws shows a set of laws that are taken to criminalize the playing of online poker. Actually it very much does not. It is modeled on the same sort of strategy as characterzes the federal strategy in the UIGEA of 2006. It attacks the supply.
What these laws criminalize is the practice of operating a casino, card room, or online poker server within their jurisdictions. UIGEA also criminalizes the transfer of money to such a site - but the criminal liablity doesn't fall onto the person sending the money - it falls onto the bank or financial institution who accepts and processes the transaction!
As a poker player, I am under no threat of punishment or repraisal for my playing my favorite game. Uncle Sam is going to make it as hard for me to do this as he can, but there is no penalty whatsoever for playing these games. Note in the definition section of that website, as long as I'm a player and not receiving a rake, I'm not engaged in any unlawful activity.
The effect of this? A cornucopia of underground "back door" websites. For a modest 14% fee you can have your funds sent to an "e-wallet" which is not a gambling company, so your bank can do business with it. From there, the e-wallet company is not bound by UIGEA since it's a foreign company, and will happily send your money to any website you wish.
Congress can slam all the doors shut they want - the world will keep creating more so long as there is the demand.
Fighting supply is a losing bet, and congress is the biggest sucker of them all.
The results were creatively backronymed onto the anti-drug campaign of my youth (D.A.R.E.) as "Drugs Are Really Expensive." When you artificially restrict supply like that, the results are predictable - grossly disproportionate demand causes price spikes and people can turn into millionaires by the drug trade if they've got the skills (and the require skills are extremely difficult to come by).
Even the modest penalties for simple possession aren't enough to contend with the rampant demand problem. If you really want people to stop doing drugs you have to do more than deny them their fix, you have to fundamentally heal the people and culture that craves self destruction. (This is, of course, assuming that drug use is automatically destructive at 100%, which it isn't, but this unnecessarily complicates things so we'll pretend it is.)
In fact every single strategy against the supply of a bad thing has uniformly failed. The counterinsurgency in Iraq being one of the more recent examples. Kill all the insurgents you want. Blow up all the illegal weapons caches you want. Crunch all you want, the situation in Iraq will make more. Army field manual 3-24, "Counterinsurgency" opens with some truly insightful things which are little talked about in our culture. "The best weapons...don't shoot." The book talks about changing the cultural environment in which the insurgency is happening. Make people feel safe, it says, and the insurgency will wither wherever it's taken root. Starved of the fear and chaos which feeds it, the insurgency will vanish away. End the demand, and the supply dries up. Stop americans from wanting drugs, and the drug trade will dry up.
It is for this reason that I conclude Poker is safe. this summary of Maine state laws shows a set of laws that are taken to criminalize the playing of online poker. Actually it very much does not. It is modeled on the same sort of strategy as characterzes the federal strategy in the UIGEA of 2006. It attacks the supply.
What these laws criminalize is the practice of operating a casino, card room, or online poker server within their jurisdictions. UIGEA also criminalizes the transfer of money to such a site - but the criminal liablity doesn't fall onto the person sending the money - it falls onto the bank or financial institution who accepts and processes the transaction!
As a poker player, I am under no threat of punishment or repraisal for my playing my favorite game. Uncle Sam is going to make it as hard for me to do this as he can, but there is no penalty whatsoever for playing these games. Note in the definition section of that website, as long as I'm a player and not receiving a rake, I'm not engaged in any unlawful activity.
The effect of this? A cornucopia of underground "back door" websites. For a modest 14% fee you can have your funds sent to an "e-wallet" which is not a gambling company, so your bank can do business with it. From there, the e-wallet company is not bound by UIGEA since it's a foreign company, and will happily send your money to any website you wish.
Congress can slam all the doors shut they want - the world will keep creating more so long as there is the demand.
Fighting supply is a losing bet, and congress is the biggest sucker of them all.