Fail.
You comparison is completely invalid. You do realize that you can't just grow a new crop of oil every few months, right? So not only is it the single most important commodity (after water and food) on earth, but it is also finite and concentrated in a few areas. Sounds like a recipe for war.
Doesn't matter. The limitation on the supply has nothing to do with it.
In fact, thank you for giving me a second weapon to beat you over the head with: food. You
can grow yourself a crop of new food every few months, and guess what--wars are fought over food all the time. Food and oil are both legal, yet wars are fought over them all the time. Drugs will be no different; people want lots of them, and they're more profitable than either oil or food (and will remain so even if legalized), and so the answer remains no. Legalizing will not reduce drug-related violence.
Now, if you start selling them in pharmacies instead of street corners, that takes the gangbangers out of the equation, which certainly helps reduce violence.
Of course. It will reduce violence
by gangbangers. It will not reduce
violence by other people. Such as governments. Which are much better-armed than gangbangers......
Today's oil wars are not being fought by oil smugglers. They're being fought by governments. Which is worse right now? Wars being fought over cocaine, or wars being fought over oil? Obviously the second one. So what's your end goal here, bud? To reduce violence? To reduce the number of times governments steamroll entire nations to keep the oil/cocaine profits coming in? If you're looking to reduce the amount of violence in the world, legalizing things is not the way to do it. All the legal things wars are fought over (such as food and oil) serve as counterexamples.
Now i know you love to argue semantics, so let me state for the record: Dawgphood never implied that legalizing something removes all violence from it.
Yes he did. He said it right here:
The "why" factor is fairly obvious at this point, and more people are coming to realize the harms of prohibition everyday. So if you're saying that I can't draw that conclusion, but the DEA can draw other conclusions, I believe your bias is clearly showing itself.
Dawgphood said it very plainly: he thinks the illegal status of drugs is responsible for the violence currently happening in Mexico. If I got that wrong,
HE is welcome to correct me;
YOU are not.