End Disastrous War on Drugs-Why All Drugs Should be Legalized
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Perhaps one of America’s greatest blunders, right alongside prohibition, is the disastrous, wrong-headed War on Drugs. The Drug Policy Alliance estimates that the United States spends an outrageous $51 billion annually on this feckless endeavor. In June 2011, a self-appointed Global Commission on Drug Policy released a critical report on the War on Drugs, declaring:
“The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.”
From TheWeeklyWonk:
We’ve come a long way since Reefer Madness. Over the past two decades, 16 states have de-criminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, and 22 have legalized it for medical purposes. In November 2012, Colorado and Washington went further, legalizing marijuana under state law for recreational purposes. Public attitudes toward marijuana have also changed; in an November 2013 Gallup Poll, 58 percent of Americans supported marijuana legalization.
Yet amidst these cultural and political shifts, American attitudes and U.S. policy toward other drugs have remained static. No state has decriminalized, medicalized, or legalized cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine. And a recent poll suggests only about 10 percent of Americans favor legalization of cocaine or heroin. Many who advocate marijuana legalization draw a sharp distinction between marijuana and “hard drugs.”
That’s understandable: Different drugs do carry different risks, and the potential for serious harm from marijuana is less than for cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine. Marijuana, for example, appears incapable of causing a lethal overdose, but cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine can kill if taken in excess or under the wrong circumstances.
But if the goal is to minimize harm — to people here and abroad — the right policy is to legalize all drugs, not just marijuana.
In fact, many legal goods cause serious harm, including death. In recent years, about 40 people per year have died from skiing or snowboarding accidents; almost 800 from bicycle accidents; several thousand from drowning in swimming pools; more than 20,000 per year from pharmaceuticals; more than 30,000 annually from auto accidents; and at least 38,000 from excessive alcohol use.
Few people want to ban these goods, mainly because while harmful when misused, they provide substantial benefit to most people in most circumstances.
The same condition holds for hard drugs. Media accounts focus on users who experience bad outcomes, since these are dramatic or newsworthy. Yet millions risk arrest, elevated prices, impurities, and the vagaries of black markets to purchase these goods, suggesting people do derive benefits from use.
That means even if prohibition could eliminate drug use, at no cost, it would probably do more harm than good. Numerous moderate and responsible drug users would be worse off, while only a few abusive users would be better off.
And prohibition does, in fact, have huge costs, regardless of how harmful drugs might be.
First, a few Economics 101 basics: Prohibiting a good does not eliminate the market for that good. Prohibition may shrink the market, by raising costs and therefore price, but even under strongly enforced prohibitions, a substantial black market emerges in which production and use continue. And black markets generate numerous unwanted side effects.
Black markets increase violence because buyers and sellers can’t resolve disputes with courts, lawyers, or arbitration, so they turn to guns instead. Black markets generate corruption, too, since participants have a greater incentive to bribe police, prosecutors, judges, and prison guards. They also inhibit quality control, which causes more accidental poisonings and overdoses.
What’s more, prohibition creates health risks that wouldn’t exist in a legal market. Because prohibition raises heroin prices, users have a greater incentive to inject because this offers a bigger bang for the buck. Plus, prohibition generates restrictions on the sale of clean needles (because this might “send the wrong message”). Many users therefore share contaminated needles, which transmit HIV, Hepatitis C, and other blood-borne diseases. In 2010, 8 percent of new HIV cases in the United States were attributed to IV drug use.
Prohibition enforcement also encourages infringements on civil liberties, such as no-knock warrants (which have killed dozens of innocent bystanders) and racial profiling (which generates much higher arrest rates for blacks than whites despite similar drug use rates). It also costs a lot to enforce prohibition, and it means we can’t collect taxes on drugs; my estimates suggest U.S. governments could improve their budgets by at least $85 billion annually by legalizing — and taxing — all drugs. U.S. insistence that source countries outlaw drugs means increased violence and corruption there as well (think Columbia, Mexico, or Afghanistan).
The bottom line: Even if hard drugs carry greater health risks than marijuana, rationally, we can’t ban them without comparing the harm from prohibition against the harms from drugs themselves. In a society that legalizes drugs, users face only the negatives of use. Under prohibition, they also risk arrest, fines, loss of professional licenses, and more. So prohibition unambiguously harms those who use despite prohibition.
It’s also critical to analyze whether prohibition actually reduces drug use; if the effects are small, then prohibition is virtually all cost and no benefit.
On that question, available evidence is far from ideal, but none of it suggests that prohibition has a substantial impact on drug use. States and countries that decriminalize or medicalize see little or no increase in drug use. And differences in enforcement across time or place bear little correlation with uses. This evidence does not bear directly on what would occur under full legalization, since that might allow advertising and more efficient, large-scale production. But data on cirrhosis from repeal of U.S. Alcohol Prohibition suggest only a modest increase in alcohol consumption.
To the extent prohibition does reduce use drug use, the effect is likely smaller for hard drugs than for marijuana. That’s because the demands for cocaine and heroin appear less responsive to price. From this perspective, the case is even stronger for legalizing cocaine or heroin than marijuana; for hard drugs, prohibition mainly raises the price, which increases the resources devoted to the black market while having minimal impact on use.
But perhaps the best reason to legalize hard drugs is that people who wish to consume them have the same liberty to determine their own well-being as those who consume alcohol, or marijuana, or anything else. In a free society, the presumption must always be that individuals, not government, get to decide what is in their own best interest.
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us wordy people are of that mindset. you can’t know how hard it is for me to stop right now.
The rational arguments against the WOD are unassailable in my opinion, but since when do rational arguments prevail? Fear, loathing, lies and faith drive our votes and actions, not our brains. We won’t look at examples in other countries, we won’t look at history and we won’t look at what’s going on.
Not only is this goddamn “war” a tool for racists, for Fascists and for stifling dissent, but it’s a business that employs a lot of people and generates a great deal of revenue. The private prison lobby is scared to death and law enforcement in general would lose all kinds of revenue and all kinds of power and that’s what this is all about – not morality, safety or health, but power and money.
Bingo! Right on the mark. Especially about the money.
Yeas ago I saw Robert (Baretta) Blake on the tonight show when it was still Johnny Carson. I don’t know if it was original with Blake but he said, “If you wonder why something is the way it is, find out who is making money from it being that way.”
That may have been the most profound sociological statement I have ever hear.
i think mr blake may have been paraphrasing deep throat of watergate fame…..”follow the money.”
That’s possible, I’m not sure of the time frame. It might have been before Watergate.
That would be a rather complex paraphrase, I think 😉
I participated, albeit unwillingly, in the WOD, and was sickened by the insanity of it. Fortunately, I requested and received a transfer from the narcotics division.
i remember my first joint, it was eye opening. i remember the next day…i remember thinking and even verbalizing (to safe listeners), “making this stuff illegal is a big, big mistake.”
funny…what it took a few hours for a fourteen year old kid to conclude is still being litigated a half century later by the greatest minds of a great society.
criminalization of marijuana has no upside and a whole world of downside. as for the “hard drugs”….the explosion of use, i think, is directly related to the criminalization of marijuana, i’m a little more ambivalent about….but you make a powerful argument.
The so called war has led people to look far alternatives that would skirt the law which, in turn, have led to the development of untold numbers of questionable black market products that are unsafe at any price. The facts that must be realized that a certain portion of people are going to seek substances to get high, to seek alternative means of pain relief, or to just choose more organic means to seek an alternative state of mind. All the laws are doing are that there will be black marketeers reaping profits, violence as a norm, lives lost to the violence, and lives ruined by the imprisonment of millions of otherwise innocent people.
Bravo my old friend. Well said and I agree with every word.
I have proposed exactly this for a long time. When I speak or write about it, I get the same objections.
“We’d have people driving and operating machinery under the influence.”
I answer, “We have that now and there are already laws against it.”
“We’d have people dying in the streets from drug overdoses.”
Again, “We have that now. Mostly do to to uneven quality control and lack of education about drug use dangers.”
“Children would find ways to get drugs.”
“You think they don’t now? How naive.”
“People would be robbing to pay for drugs.”
Same answer as above. Although I doubt as many would if drugs were legal and obtainable at consistent prices. As for marijuana, I have never heard of anyone stealing to pay for their next joint.
“People would be rampaging on drug-fueled rages.”
“Do you mean like on alcohol?” When the last time you heard of anyone high on pot starting a bar fight. For that matter, how about anyone on Heroin? Doing those violent things are already illegal aren’t they?
If even 1/10 of the money spent on enforcement were spent on rehabilitation and education, it would do more for the drug problem that all the current efforts combined.
As prohibition did, the drug laws have made criminals wealthy and the poor, who are often drug users, criminals. Locking them into prisons doesn’t solve the problem nor doe sit make them into good citizens, either.
Finally, a lot of the attraction of drugs is that they ARE illegal. People like the idea of thumbing their collective noses at “the establishment.”
Hear hear! There are so many more important things on which our country needs to spend! It’s not as if once cocaine is legalized everyone would go out and try it! We would still have media representations of the physical disadvantages, and as with alcohol and cigarettes (both of which, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone, are legal) people may try, but then give, and certainly not abuse. Oh look, that’s what this anyway! Except that we currently have the added possibility of people being killed and/or arrested and acquiring a criminal record! Legalize, tax, and then we’ll have set of possible circumstances that don’t include having the federal government pay for incarceration for EVERY more decision made by every user!
It’s funny, if the Libertarian party had not become so right wing, it would be a lot easier to say I have some libertarian ideas. I do believe that each individual is responsible for his/her own mistakes! I agreed that the country would have much better economic resources and would be in a much better moral situation if we got rid of prohibition on all of it!
This so called “war” has punished millions for what is now legal all over the country. It does need to stop. Write your congressman now.