Libertarian economist Milton Friedman was a noted critic of America’s Drug War, pointing out all of the reasons why prohibition doesn’t work. One such reason: When a substance is illegal, the price will rise to accommodate the risk; the higher price and promise of greater profit encourages more lawbreakers.
Too bad Friedman didn’t live long enough to see his argument confirmed.
In a recent Washington Post story about drugs and Mexico, I came across the following interesting tidbit:
Farmers in the storied “Golden Triangle” region of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, which has produced the country’s most notorious gangsters and biggest marijuana harvests, say they are no longer planting the crop. Its wholesale price has collapsed in the past five years, from $100 per kilogram to less than $25.
“It’s not worth it anymore,” said Rodrigo Silla, 50, a lifelong cannabis farmer who said he couldn’t remember the last time his family and others in their tiny hamlet gave up growing mota. “I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.”
“The pursuit of a militarized and enforcement-led global ‘war on drugs’ strategy has produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage,” says the 82-page report. “These include mass incarceration in the US, highly repressive policies in Asia, vast corruption and political destabilization in Afghanistan and West Africa, immense violence in Latin America, an HIV epidemic in Russia, an acute global shortage of pain medication and the propagation of systematic human rights abuses around the world.”
I guess the drug war has a few negative consequences….
When you insist on criminalizing behavior that ought to be treated as the public health issue it is, you shouldn’t be surprised when those sanctions do horrendous collateral damage.
Alcohol prohibition didn’t work; neither does drug prohibition. There are better ways to address the problem.
A 2012 research paper by the Mexican Competitiveness Institute in Mexico called ‘If Our Neighbours Legalise’, said that the legalisation of marijuana in Colorado, Washington and California would depress cartel profits by as much as 30 per cent. A 2010 Rand Corp study of what would happen if just California legalised suggests a more modest fall-out. Using consumption in the US as the most useful measure, its authors posit that marijuana accounts for perhaps 25 per cent of the cartels’ revenues. The cartels would survive losing that, but still. “That’s enough to hurt, enough to cause massive unemployment in the illicit drugs sector,” says [fellow at the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center David] Shirk. Less money for cartels means weaker cartels and less capacity to corrupt the judiciary and the police in Mexico with crumpled bills in brown envelopes. Crimes like extortion and kidnappings are also more easily tackled. …
Mr Shirk puts it this way. If you ask enforcement folk how large a dent their interdiction efforts – seizures, arrests, helicopter raids and so on – actually have on cartel earnings, they will say between 5 and 10 per cent. But just a few states embracing legal cannabis may end up robbing them of two to five times that amount.
In other words, when you reduce demand for an illegal product–in this case, by offering a legal alternative–you reduce illegal behavior associated with the marketing of that product.
Since cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, regulating its sale and taxing it–rather than criminalizing its use– would appear to be a win-win.
Several years ago, my eldest granddaughter–then 13– interrupted a lively dinner discussion by our extended family, saying “Stop it! Just stop it! All this family talks about is politics and I’m sick of it!” I apologized and said we’d talk about anything she wanted. What did she want to discuss? “School uniforms. I don’t think we should have to wear uniforms.”
Not long after 9-11, when our daughter was still on IPS’ School Board, she and my lawyer son disagreed about encouraging schoolchildren to recite the Pledge. He cited Barnette v. Board of School Commissioners of West Virginia; her Christmas gift to him that year was The Story of Our Flag.
And so it goes–at least in our family.
Most recently, my two younger sons have been arguing about Edward Snowden. On Facebook, my (very liberal and idealistic) middle son approvingly posted the New York Times editorial arguing that Snowden should get clemency; his brother (the lawyer) shot back with Fred Kaplan’s article for Salon, Why Snowden Won’t (and Shouldn’t) Get Clemency. That led to a spirited exchange, to put it mildly.
Each one called and tried to get me to weigh in on his side.
In other families, I am told, children call their mothers (when they do) to ask for money, or to report on life events, or even to ask advice. Mine call to talk politics and argue policy.
For what it’s worth, I agree with my lawyer son on this one. As Kaplan–like me, a foe of NSA domestic spying– notes in his article, had Snowden only disclosed information about domestic surveillance, leniency might be appropriate. But he did much more than that. He disclosed information having nothing to do with domestic spying, or even spying on our allies. He disclosed information about intelligence gathering practices that are not “illegal, immoral or improper”–information useful to the Taliban and Iran, among others.
Kaplan quotes Snowden telling the South China Morning Post that he took his job with the express intention of gaining access to NSA information–rebutting the assumption that what he learned on the job so distressed him that he decided to broadcast what he’d found. He only stayed on the job for three months– just long enough to get what he’d come for. (He also lied to some 25 co-workers, telling them he needed their logons and passwords as part of his system administrator duties. Predictably, those co-workers were subsequently fired.)
There were also his glowing remarks about the “commitment to human rights” shown by Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, his praise of Hong Kong’s devotion to freedom of speech, and his expressed intent to share the pilfered documents with “every country where the NSA had operated.”
Someone who really wanted to shine a light on government misconduct–to engage in the time-honored tactic of civil disobedience–would not have taken refuge in countries whose interests are inimical to ours. He would have stayed in the U.S., made his case, and accepted the consequences of his actions.
Had Snowden limited his disclosures to the NSA’s clearly unlawful domestic activities, had he remained in the U.S. to argue that his actions were in service of the Constitution and Rule of Law, he would be a whistleblower entitled to our consideration.
Bradley Manning was a whistleblower. Snowden is not, and the fact that his disclosures will end up doing some collateral good really doesn’t change that.
My lawyer son’s analogy is apt: if someone goes on a shooting spree and kills two innocent people and one murderous son-of-a-bitch, the fact that he rid the town of the SOB doesn’t excuse the murder of the other two.
I hate taking sides when my kids have an argument, but sometimes, it’s unavoidable. At least they aren’t arguing about who Mom loves best…
Before the passage of the law, Uruguay’s president made an important point; admitting that legalization was an experiment, he stressed the importance of finding an alternative to the deadly and unsuccessful war on drugs. “We are asking the world to help us with this experience, which will allow the adoption of a social and political experiment to face a serious problem–drug trafficking,” he said. “The effects of drug trafficking are worse than those of the drugs themselves.”
Yes. That is an “inconvenient truth” that everyone from Milton Friedman to the lowliest academic researcher has documented. Drug abuse (which, interestingly, is nowhere defined in the law, which simply prohibits the use of scheduled substances) is a public health problem, and criminalizing it doesn’t help anyone. It does, however, incentivize the drug trade, erode civil liberties, disproportionately affect the black community and make hypocrites of us all.
If pot were legal, regulated and taxed, we could control children’s access (it is harder in most communities for teens to get alcohol than pot) and generate income.
In Uruguay, the government will actually sell marijuana rather than taxing it. Andrew Sullivan reports that
Under the new law, Uruguayans registered with the government will be allowed to buy up to 40 grams (1.4 ounces) of marijuana from government-licensed pharmacies. Private companies roped in to help produce enough weed to meet local demand will have to sell their crop to the government for distribution. The government will rake in some extra cash in the process. The black market for marijuana is worth some $40 million. The government won’t earn as much; it plans to sell the drug for about $1 a gram, roughly 30 percent less than the black market price. But it can count on a lot of customers: Uruguay has a relatively high percentage of pot smokers for the region – third only to Argentina and Chile.
If Uruguay’s experiment works, there will be increasing pressure to end a “War” that has been one of the costliest failures of public policy in the history of the country. And that’s really saying something, because we have a habit of legislating stupid and costly failures.
