Can we all just be honest and just agree that prohibitions do in fact make access to the prohibited thing harder and reduce the prevalence of it. This is true whether your topic of choice is drugs, guns, abortions, alcohol, some form of sex, vpn access or whatever you want to talk about.
Sometimes the prohibition can make obtaining illegal things more difficult and risky, and many of us are too lazy or risk avoidant to push through that. Sometimes accessing a prohibited things requires social contacts not everyone has access to. Sometimes people will just straight up respect the law and not obtain the illegal thing even if it is easy or avoid providing it. Prohibitions can be very effective in reducing the incidence of some thing, especially if enforcement is draconian
Prohibitions can have negative effects, obviously especially for those who like the thing that is being prohibited, but it just seems dishonest to try to pretend like prohibitions don't change behavior whenever that happens to suit some political preference
When I was 17 years old, I was able to access hard drugs like amphetamines and opiates more easily than alcohol.
I could buy whatever substances I wanted, no questions asked, just by knowing the right places to look.
To buy alcohol, I needed to have an older friend or family member buy it for me.
At least for me, and my situation, prohibition completely and utterly failed at making access to illegal drugs difficult. If they would have been regulated I most likely would not have managed to access stimulants until I was of legal age, or only had small amounts like I did with alcohol.
well, drug use is on the rise in many places with prohibition. so maybe that general statement needs some serious qualifiers, no?
prohibition as a concept works, and prohibition when implemented has an effect, but that effect might be small compared to society's overall demand changes.
yes, of course, draconian measures have significant effects, usually the side-effects are bigger though
Muslims have been very successfull in prohibiton of all kinds of drugs and alcohol since 15 centuries. Compare this with the failed American Prohibition. There are more factors at play than what the law says. What do you believe will happen if you drink alcohol in secret, away from the eyes of the State? Muslims believe this will have consequences in afterlife. Atheists don't. Many Christians believe they'll be saved and forgiven by God as long as they are Christian.
> A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality.
I live in Turkey, probably the most heavily and forcefully secularized muslim country in the world. (Ataturk killed half a million people for his secular reforms, Islamic alphabet got abolished, European dress code literally became law, religious clothing got prohibited, religion schools closed, scholars executed & prosecuted and Islamic prayer call was banned for 18 years).
It's free to drink here, but drugs are banned. Only a very small minority drinks alcohol in my region, I have no relatives I know of that ever drank. Drugs/weed/marijuana are horrible things no one ever wants in my entire social circle, I don't think I have ever seen a user of such substances in my entire life IRL. Western and some coastal cities drink more and there's more drug activity too (they're less religious too).
From here, it’s hilarious to see Westerners thinking prohibition is impossible and preaching against it.
Dogmatic indoctrination is the worst draconian measure.
If you need to put the fear of eternal torture into people's mind through a whole clerical power structure to have the desired effect I don't even know what are we talking about.
Science dogmatically accepts some basic human intuitions and bases itself upon them while rejecting others. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNlEtBZxML8 for more info on this. Modern education is indoctrination only with a different set of beliefs. The torture is not eternal in the case of sinning in Islam. Yes, Islam puts the fear of eternal torture into some non-muslims minds for their betterment, for them to be muslim and thus be saved from it. Yet ask millions in the west converting to Islam every single year, they'll tell you they converted because Islam makes actual sense (compatible with human intutitions) while modernity didn't. Islam works with a single person as well as millions, and there's no clerical power structure as per in Christianity. Islam is the single thing ever worked in mass-scale prevention of drugs and alcohol because it's true. Not even Christianity (which Muslims believe has malformed and become too clerical) was able to achieve it, even though alcohol was seen as a sin in many Christian times and places.
Sometimes the prohibition can make obtaining illegal things more difficult and risky, and many of us are too lazy or risk avoidant to push through that. Sometimes accessing a prohibited things requires social contacts not everyone has access to. Sometimes people will just straight up respect the law and not obtain the illegal thing even if it is easy or avoid providing it. Prohibitions can be very effective in reducing the incidence of some thing, especially if enforcement is draconian
Prohibitions can have negative effects, obviously especially for those who like the thing that is being prohibited, but it just seems dishonest to try to pretend like prohibitions don't change behavior whenever that happens to suit some political preference