My last post was about violence related to drugs. When we make drugs illegal, we open the door for a black market. The best way to control a black market is through force and violence. A direct result of drug prohibition is violence related to black markets. We saw this in the United States with alcohol prohibition and in the 1970’s as the drug war in the United States escalated.
In Chasing the Scream Johann Hari writes, “By the mid 1980’s, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and right-wing icon Milton Friedman calculated that it [drug prohibition] caused an additional ten thousand murders a year in the United States. That’s the equivalent of more than three 9/11’s ever single year. Professor Miron [Jeffrey Miron, Harvard University] argues this is an underestimate. Take the drug trade away from criminals, he calculates, and it would reduce the homicide rate in the United States by between 25 and 75 percent.”
What Hari is doing in this quote is turning around the justification for a drug war and using it as a justification for ending the drug war. The typical argument that someone would make would be along the lines that drugs cause crime, so drugs should be illegal. Hari instead writes that drug prohibition causes crime, so drugs should be legalized.
The first option is instinctual and popular. Hari’s opinion is counter-intuitive, and would be a tough political sell. Nevertheless, I think Hari is correct.
I think it would be terrible to have huge numbers of people using recreational drugs during all their free time. I worry about the economic losses our country would face as people chose to do more drugs, harming their brains and bodies. These considerations make me fearful of finding legal ways to provide safe drugs to people.
However, that perspective doesn’t consider the costs that are in our current status quo. The current drug prohibition creates criminals and black market drug dealers. It gives gangs a profit source, and leads to young people choosing gangs over legal ways to make money, and in the process, still destroys the lives of huge numbers of people. Perhaps a legal system would reduce our deaths, and maybe even if drug use picks up, the overall number of people dying and losing opportunity to meaningfully contribute in this world would decrease. We wouldn’t have as much gang violence, wouldn’t arrest so many young black men, wouldn’t have so many people die from using unsafe drugs. Hari argues this trade-off will pay off, and I think he might be right.
Novel Learning 