Sunday, March 25, 2012

The War on Drugs

Let me count the ways I loathe it....

As a society we elect a government in order to keep our streets paved and get our mail delivered, not to tell us what we can and cannot put into our bodies. As such I object to the prohibition of marijuana and other drugs on the standard libertarian “stay out of my business” grounds. But you don’t have to be an anarcho-capitalist to see the fundamental folly of prohibition, and the practical considerations are more compelling than any philosophical argument. 

First, if government officials want to spend our resources butting into our privacy, they at least need to get some bang for our buck. While we can’t even begin to estimate the resources being plowed into the fruitless enterprise of stopping people from consuming drugs, it’s easy to see that the impact has been negligible; the positive impact that is. What the war on drugs has done is inconvenienced importers and caused a spike in prices, driving money out of the domestic economy and pouring it into the pockets of the dealers. It’s also packed our prison system with non-violent drug offenders (over half of all inmates fall into this category). Since our $50 billion prison system is quietly becoming privatized, rich people are profiting from all these people doing time. More time means more money, which in turn means lobbyist jackals will descend on Washington to advocate for any legislation that throws and keeps people behind bars at $35k a year. Bravo. The war on drugs is flunking its cost-benefit analysis.

No matter what you think about drug use or drug users, if you can’t stop it, legalize it. Why? First, because then you could tax it.  Taxes on tobacco and alcohol yield tens of billions annually in local, state and federal revenues. Second, because then you could regulate it. Pharmaceutical companies can be held accountable for distributing dangerous drugs because the industry is by law transparent. Johnson & Johnson settled a Texas lawsuit out of court this year for $185 million. They had been accused of illegal marketing practices pertaining to an anti-psychotic drug that may not have been as safe as J & J said it was. But what happens when street dealers distribute heroin laced with fentanyl and people get killed, as they did in Pittsburgh and other cities in 2006? Nothing but funerals. Because black market drug dealers don’t register with the SEC and FDA. A corporate whistle-blower can produce research and accounting documents but a snitch on the streets can only offer a nickname and a burner cell number.  Pharmaceutical executives also don’t accidentally shoot children in a botched drive by. So there's that too.

The entire exercise would be somewhat excusable if we hadn’t experimented with the prohibition of alcohol less than a century ago and gotten a lucrative black market for our trouble, enriching a gangster class who put its money in a safe instead of paying taxes and investing in the stock market. The lesson we should have gleaned is that strict drug and alcohol laws are a lot like strict gun laws- the people we’re worried about will get them anyway. It’s the tax-paying, law-abiding old lady with glaucoma who goes without.

What is harder to quantify than potential tax revenues or the costs of enforcement are the innumerable negative consequences, financial and otherwise, felt by society due to the countless people contending with addiction. These are often the same people who place an additional financial burden on this country through our social programs. Drug addicts often struggle to hold a job and frequently develop health problems related to their use. Hello food stamps and hello Medicare. It’s well established that going to prison simply makes the cycle permanent. If we’re going to spend $35k on incarceration, why not direct that towards the kind of true rehabilitation that can get at least a portion of these people off the social safety nets and back into the work force? We have to be practical.

In summary, the American taxpayer spends huge sums on law enforcement and the incarceration of non-violent offenders, while at the same time missing the boat on tax revenues and ceding dominion over the marketplace to the dealers.  Those who choose to consume (they pay taxes too) cannot be protected from shady suppliers and have minimal options should they seek treatment.

I know that for many people it just feels like weed and other drugs should be illegal. And it feels like legalization would intensify what is already a gigantic problem. But that’s just the point- drug use has become a gigantic problem in spite of this massive assault by the federal government and its agencies. It isn’t working. If you can get past the stigma, the correct path for the government here is clear. Step one: legalize and levy a tax on recreational drugs. Step two: insert itself into production and distribution; ensure the (relative) safety of the supply and generate additional revenues. Step three: use those revenues to treat addiction and the mental health issues that so often contribute to elicit drug use in the first place.   

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