You guys convinced me! If you legalize it nobody will want to grow it illegally in the woods, just like what happened after Prohibition was repealed! Here is the proof!
As others have noted, we don't have to eliminate 100% of illegal growing/manufacture to render it effectively irrelevent on a national scale. We can STILL send law enforcement out to bust anybody doing something illegal, especially if they get large enough to be noticed. Being able to get large enough for real economy of scale is one of the benefits of being legal, after all.
For the vast majority of people, legal liquer is sufficiently easier, safer, and higher quality that moonshine is a limited market. The vast majority of alcohol produced is legal. Tobacco smuggling is mostly in the form of tax evasion tricks, shipping it from low tax areas to high tax areas.
The correct method for controlling illegal producers of a legal substance is a combination of law enforcement and keeping the taxes and fees low enough that it's actually more economical to be legal.
Take heroin. Using modern commercial production practices, pure medical grade heroin can be produced at around the same cost as
aspirin. You have the advantage of being able to use large, efficient machines for the processing. Pure chemicals bought cheaply in bulk rather than using makeshift impure chemicals in the form of consumer products. Professionally balanced chemical reactions, etc... You then dilute it(if necesssary) with medically safe materials, package it up in standard medical packaging, mark it with contents/purity/date/lot number/etc... and send it to the drug store to be sold.
You're a heroin addict. Which are you going to buy by preference: The stuff certified by the FDA to be the safest heroin on the market of X strength, or the stuff being sold in a baggie by some dude on the street that isn't really sure whether his stuff is 10% dope or 90% dope?
Some of you might want to re read that thread on bootlegging. I would say that 500 tons of sugar is probably a bit more than somebody needs for personal consumption. That figure is down from around 2500 tons per year in the 1980s. Again, do you really think home brewers are buying all that sugar and stockpiling booze in their basement? Why is it that anywhere from 50 t0 60 years after Prohibition was repealed are there still moonshiners? According to the article it is because the moonshine is about 1/2 the cost of legally distilled booze.
Well, for one, the 500 tons is for a substantial number of people in the county, and the country's population has grown since the 1980s. 1/5th the production would indeed be what I'd consider a 'steep decline'.
The company listed, while called the 'primary supplier' of the area's moonshiners, probably doesn't just deal with moonshiners - it could also service places like bakeries that can use a lot of sugar legally. So who knows how much of the 500 tons was used for legal purposes? How much was used for minorly illegal purposes(production of liquer for personal/family consumption)? How much was produced to be sold?
I find it hard to believe that large scale growers are going to be forced out of business by commercial competition if they can offer their product at a cheaper rate. I also find it hard to believe that some people here think that groups like the Mexican Mafia or any other cartel growing dope here in the US is going to give up that income without a fight. It was also pretty ironic that a thread about moonshiners still being in business got posted on APS while this thread was still active but I guess some of you didn't see the humor in that.
1. We're saying they
can't offer it as safe and easy to get as the store bought stuff while still keeping it cheaper, at least as long as they don't go crazy with the taxes.
2. Who are they going to fight? The local drug store, supermarket? Are they blowing up the semi-legal 'medical dispensories'? Are they going to attempt to burn down the farmer who plants a couple hundred acres of the stuff?
3. Evidence is that moonshining is dying, that there really isn't the violence involved in it anymore, is this a bad thing?
