Here are the articles that Ryan sent out about his topic, the war on drugs.
The War on Drugs: An Economic Critique
It is necessary to be gracious as to intentions; one should believe them good, and apparently they are; but we do not have to be gracious at all to inconsistent logic or to absurd reasoning. Bad logicians have committed more involuntary crimes than bad men have done intentionally.
–Pierre S. du Pont
Even a cursory exploration of the history of drugs reveals their power on an individual and a societal level; a more thorough investigation indicates that this has been the case since the topic has been under surveillance. Mind-altering substances are a sometimes inconvenient reality that many cultures have had to reckon with to determine how best to minimize the negative impact of their use. Decidedly addictive, drugs have influenced the world economy since its genesis, and have had a significant impact on the lives of those who participate in drug use and abuse. Often, the impact is devastating. “That many drugs, licit and illicit, are dangerous is undisputable. So is the fact that many people do grave harm to themselves and their families by abusing drugs.” (Duke). The War on Drugs in the United States, a relatively recent phenomenon, is an attempt to ameliorate the extent of drug abuse by restricting the supply of drugs via standard methods of law enforcement. Unfortunately, the War on Drugs has been not only unsuccessful but has even exacerbated the problems caused by drug use, because criminalizing drug use, possession, and sales spurs economic incentives. Meaningfully restricting the supply of drugs has proven to be an impossible task for law enforcement to execute effectively, and the attempt to do so wastes valuable resources and creates large profits for criminal organizations that do much more harm than the drugs themselves.
Drugs have not always been illegal. At the turn of the century most drugs that are now illegal were available over the counter. Bayer’s first blockbuster drug (aspirin being their second) was a cough syrup. The active ingredient was diacetylmorphine, also known as heroin. In 1905 anyone could walk into their local pharmacy and purchase the cough syrup right off the shelf—and, for a reasonable price. With tuberculosis and pneumonia being the most common causes of death, heroin cough syrup was a tremendously successful over-the-counter medication.
Cocaine was also widely available at the time and deemed a miracle drug by many, among them Sigmund Freud (who used it daily). One did not need to go to a pharmacy to purchase this drug; it was present in a common soft drink known as Coca-Cola. Obviously the U.S. population was somewhat unfamiliar and perhaps overly relaxed in their approach to these powerful substances, and addictions began to become evident. In 1913 both heroin and cocaine were outlawed for over-the-counter use and in 1919 they were made illegal to prescribe for non-medical reasons. In 1924 heroin became illegal to manufacture or possess. (Courtwright)
Cannabis has a similar history. At one time marijuana, most often in the form of tincture, could be purchased over the counter for any reason. In 1937 the Marihuana Tax Act, which effectively made the possession of marijuana illegal, was passed, against the recommendation of the AMA, based on shoddy evidences such as the assertion that marijuana caused people to go insane and kill their own brothers. The following are excerpts of Henry Anslinger's (the first “Drug Czar” appointed to lead the war on drugs) testimony before a Senate hearing on marijuana in 1937:
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others."
"...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races."
"Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death."
"You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother."
"Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."
-(http://www.heartbone.com/no_thugs/hja.htm).
The media profited from selling propaganda articles and movies that depicted marijuana users becoming raging criminals after a few puffs on a joint. These few examples help to illustrate the panicked and hasty environment into which the War on Drugs was born.
The current prohibitionist policy on drugs in the United States resulted from the consensus effort to curb drugs’ deleterious effects on individuals and society. The solution, initially, seemed simple; if drugs are bad, make them illegal. In an earnest effort to minimize or eliminate the costs of drug abuse many other modern societies have followed this line of reasoning, hastily making the use, sale, and possession of many drugs illegal. While this logic initially seems feasible, a closer inspection reveals that it is irrational and, ultimately, has proved to be not merely ineffective but counterproductive to the intended outcome.
Drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and marijuana were not the first mind altering substances to be legally prohibited. In 1920 the U.S. government outlawed the consumption, possession, and sale of alcohol. The law was repealed in 1933 when the American population saw the catastrophic consequences of the ill informed decision. The 1920s saw the birth of organized crime on a tremendous scale and put the names of gangsters such as Al Capone forever in the history books. Steven Duke writes:
“We learned from our brief experiment with alcohol prohibition between 1920 and 1933 that the costs of trying to prevent the sale of alcohol far exceeded the benefits of reduced consumption (now generally considered to be no more than 25 to 35 percent by the end of Prohibition). The alcohol that was manufactured and consumed during Prohibition was often poisonous, since there was no regulation of the trade or of the product. More consumers of alcohol were blinded and died during Prohibition than before or after, even though per capita consumption decreased. Thus, it is doubtful that Prohibition even reduced the overall health costs of alcohol consumption. In any event, the collateral costs of alcohol prohibition dwarfed the damage from alcohol itself. Crime rates shot up, corruption was unprecedented, criminal gangs were nurtured and respect for law diminished.
Economist Milton Friedman also describes some of the impacts of Alcohol Prohibition:
How serious is it? I have a graph (Figure 3. 1). The series that goes all the way back to 1910 is the homicide rate. Its scale is on the left. It goes to 1987, which is as far as the data were readily available. From 1910 on, there is an almost explosive growth in the number of homicides. The first part of the explosion is during World War 1, and one phenomenon you observe over and over is that wars tend to lead to a rise in crime. What happened after the end of the war? The homicide rate kept on going up very rapidly and reached a peak in precisely the year in which prohibition was ended, 1933. It then fell drastically, and it stayed down throughout the forties and the fifties, except for a rise during World War II. Since 1933 was also the end of the great contraction, it can be argued that the Great Depression was also a stimulus to crime and to homicide. Throughout the prosperous 1920s, however, homicides per hundred thousand persons were very much higher than throughout the prosperous forties and fifties, let alone in the late thirties which were not so prosperous. I believe that no one who looks at the evidence can doubt that ending prohibition had a significant and prompt effect on the homicide rate.
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Homicides started to go up early in the 1960s and rose very rapidly after Nixon introduced his drug war. More recently, the rate has come down a little, but it is still at the same level as in 1933. I believe one can have great confidence that if drugs were decriminalized the homicide rate would fall sharply, most likely back to the level that it maintained throughout the fifties. That is no small matter: A reduction in the homicide rate from its average during the eighties to its average during the fifties would, with our current population, mean a saving in excess of 10,000 lives a year!
So what makes criminals like Al Capone thrive when substances such as drugs and alcohol are prohibited by law? The answer lies in the economic incentives created by prohibition. All goods have what economists call a degree of elasticity. A measurement of elasticity estimates how the demand for a commodity changes as the price increases or decreases. A good that is highly elastic is very price sensitive, meaning that a small increase in price causes a large decrease in consumption. A commodity like this might be a food such as filet mignon. If the price of filet mignon were to increase by 50%, the vast majority of people would either buy a cheaper cut of meat or simply go without. An example of an inelastic good could be a necessary medication, such as insulin for a diabetic. If the price of insulin were to increase by 50% those who purchase the insulin would not limit their consumption at all. Elasticity is quantified on a scale of 0 to infinity with 0 being perfectly inelastic and infinity being perfectly elastic. A score of 1 means that a good is unit elastic i.e. as the price increases by one unit, consumption decreases by one unit. Hard drugs like heroin consistently have an estimated elasticity ranging between .2 and .4 –almost perfectly inelastic, meaning a dealer can simply increase the price of heroin and the buyer will pay it by any conceivable means. What a product! Alcohol is not as inelastic as heroin with elasticity estimations ranging from .6 to .9.
A criminal network must have funding, just as nearly every other organization must, and the effectiveness of the organization is limited by its ability to raise capital. Prohibition effectively raised the price of alcohol by restricting supply and eliminated legal competition, thus the criminals had a monopoly on one of the most lucrative commodities ever created. This allowed organizations unconcerned with societal good to gain immense power. This increased power and unregulated profit was, inevitably, accompanied by competition. The competition for the market share of such desirable commodities created violent gang wars and corruption of entire geographical regions. The vast majority of those apprehended were simple street dealers, or maybe local managers. The masterminds that ran the organizations, and profited the most from them, remained out of the reach of law enforcement and business remained profitable because there was always a steady stream of dispensable laborers hoping to make a few dollars running booze.
Drugs fund criminal activity even more potently than alcohol did during Prohibition. Heroin is effective in very small doses and is difficult to detect. It can be sent by mail, carried across borders, and manufactured without much difficulty. More than five million pieces of mail travel through JFK airport on any given day making even marginally effective searches extremely costly and difficult. It is estimated that two trailer truck loads of cocaine would supply the entire United States for a year. Last year 30 million of those trucks crossed the border. If, on a rare occasion, a shipment is seized, even a large shipment, criminals make up the losses by simply raising prices and finding another ignorant drug mule to risk his/her life smuggling the next shipment. This means that cartels can now transport even less and make the same profit as they were before. Of course they will not smuggle less with prices higher; they will smuggle more. Many of these cartels become fabulously wealthy, so wealthy, in fact, that they are able to influence entire governments, fund militias, and support terrorist activities.
We encourage violent crime by creating the black market that depends on violence for enforcing contacts, protecting territory, and preventing arrest and conviction. By driving up the price and making outlaws of consumers, we create huge incentives for addicts to steal and rob to support their habits. We undermine law enforcement by corrupting it, and we also distract and dilute law enforcement resources by our prohibition-created crime. Instead of targeting sex offenders and wife beaters, we chase potheads. That distortion is magnified by the fact that police forces profit from drug forfeitures but gain nothing tangible from focusing on conventional crime. The more we clog our courts and prisons with drug cases, the less room--and the fewer resources--we have to process other criminal cases or to punish other criminals. Someone who gets caught selling a few ounces of cocaine is likely to do more time in prison than someone who rapes three women. In some states, a child rapist will do less time in prison than a first-offense drug distributor. This is insane. (Duke)
Data for U.S. government spending on drug seizures and law enforcement is readily accessible, easy to quantify, and falls in the range of 30-40 billion dollars per year. The government estimates that it seizes 5-15% of drugs crossing the border which would not restrict supply enough to create large price increases but one can see that the more ‘effective’ the war on drugs is, the more damaging the consequences. (drugwarfacts.org and many sites like it link to or cite yearly government publications on the previous figures). Luckily for the U.S. the war on drugs fails miserably at accomplishing its objectives of punishing dealers and restricting the supply of illegal drugs. Less solid statistics include the amount of domestically produced drugs seized, the costs of prohibition imposed via the judicial system, and the social opportunity costs of the war on drugs. Opportunity cost is perhaps the most difficult number to determine and research can only intelligently speculate at an actual estimate. Ann Harrison writes:
The costs of the war in Iraq can be measured daily in deaths, injuries and decreasing support for U.S. policies. But how do you measure the costs of America's other war -- the war on drugs?
Each year, the U.S. government spends more than $30 billion on the drug war and arrests more than 1.5 million people on drug-related charges. More than 318,000 people are now behind bars [more than 40% for mere possession of marijuana] in the U.S. for drug violations. This is more than the total number of people incarcerated for all crimes in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. (Harrison)
Knowing that current policy has serious costs does not stop politicians and ill informed voters from believing that anything but strict prison sentences and violent supply disruption will result in the spread of addiction to the point of total societal destruction. As Edward Koch explains, “a handful of this nation’s officials and a few others have raised the white flag of surrender and advocated legalization of drugs. Embracing such a defeatist attitude would be a serious error and would destroy the nation.”(Koch 495) While it is possible that the number of addicts would increase, valuable resources would be redirected and much more serious crimes such as rape and murder (only 68% of which are solved) would also be reduced as dangerous criminal networks lost their funding and addicts no longer committed crimes to fund their currently expensive habits.
The obvious implication is that if currently illicit drugs were decriminalized and handled exactly the way alcohol is now handled, there is no reason to suppose that there would be a vast increase in the number of addicts. That is by no means a certainty, but every statement that I have seen asserting the contrary is based on pure conjecture and hypothesis. I have seen no hard evidence. The closest to it that I have come across is reference to the opium craze in China. Given the evidence we have-not only from alcohol prohibition but also from Holland, Alaska, and others-the burden of proof, it seems to me, is on those who maintain that there would be a completely unacceptable increase in the number of addicts.(Friedman)
I have personal experience with collateral damage caused by the drug war. While living in California I received a phone call from my roommate while visiting my family over the holidays. My roommate informed me that our house had been broken into and all valuables had been stolen. When we discussed the crime with the local police they informed us that crimes of this sort were common in the area due to the large population of methamphetamine users looking for income to support their habits. I remember thinking, “I wish there was a cheap place for these people to get their drugs because then they would just be addicts instead of drug fiending thieves!”
The War on Drugs is not the solution it was intended, and hoped, to be. Inadequately anticipated costs render the actual benefits of the War on Drugs questionable, and the benefits themselves are under scrutiny. As with those whose good intentions spurred alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, the good intentions of those seeking to remedy the problems associated with drug use in this country may now be left searching for a new solution. Although it has been established that drugs inflict costs on society, it is being increasingly established that the War on Drugs does little, if anything, to mitigate these costs. Opposing research that concludes prohibitionist policy is not as futile as has been asserted helps to keep the dialogue thriving as scholars and policy-makers strive together to create a legal climate that best protects the citizenry.
Stop Taxing Non-Addicts
by Milton Friedman
From Reason Magazine, October, 1988
Legalize all drugs. They could be sold through ordinary retail outlets-primarily, I would presume, drug stores. There should be no FDA or other controls on the drugs. (In fact, I'm in favor of abolishing the FDA for reasons I've set out elsewhere.) However, I believe there should be restrictions on sales to minors.
With respect to restrictions on advertising, I feel uneasy about either position. I shudder at the thought of a TV ad with a pretty woman saying, "My brand will give you a high such as you've never experienced." On the other hand, I have always been very hesitant about restrictions on freedom of adver tising for general free speech reasons. But whatever my own hesitations, I have very little doubt that legalization would be impossible without substantial restrictions on advertising.
It's almost impossible to have a confident view about how legalization would affect patterns of usage. Some elements of legalization would tend to reduce the number of addicts, and some would tend to increase it. As to which would be dominant, I have no idea.
Currently, for, example, it pays a pusher of drugs to make a capital investment in creating an addict. He gives somebody a couple of doses free to get him started, because once he creates an addict he has a captive market. Given that the drug is illegal. his customer is likely to stick so him. After legalization on the other hand, it won't pay anybody to create addicts. This undoubtedly would tend to reduce usage.
There's no doubt, however, that legalization would drastically reduce the market price. The actual cost of producing drugs, whether cocaine, marijuana, or whatnot, is very low. They sell for as much as they do now because of the costs of bribing the relevant officials, making it financially attractive for people to take a chance on getting killed or going to jail, etc. So reducing the costs of bringing drugs to market would result in lower prices, which would undoubtedly have some tendency to increase the quantity demanded. Then there are also different effects on supply, so it is almost impossible to say what the net result would be.
It may well be that there would be more addicts, and I would regret that result. I believe that drugs do an enormous amount of harm. But no law has ever been passed that had zero negative effects. Judging every law requires balancing negative and positive effects. In considering the case for legalization, it is important to make a sharp distinction between addicts who hurt themselves and a legal process (that is, prohibition) that leads to a much larger number of nonaddicts being hurt.
Legalizing drugs would reduce enormously the number of victims of drug use who are not addicts: people who are mugged, people who are corrupted, the reduction of law and order because of the corruption of law enforcement, and the allocation of a very large fraction of law enforcement resources to this one particular activity. There are millions of people who are not addicts who are being harmed by the present system-not to mention the harm to the domestic pobtical systems of countries such as Colombia and Peru.
The costs of drug prohibition for nonaddicts, such as the increased risk of getting mugged, are the equivalent of taxes: they are government-imposed costs. We're imposing right now these very heavy costs on nonaddicts in the mistaken belief that we are thereby helping addicts. That's not sensible.
It would not be sensible after legalization, either. So although addicts should then be treated the way every other citizen is treated-getting the medical treatment provided any other individual-they should not be given special treatment compared to victims of other medical problems. I do not believe it is appropriate to impose special taxes on nonaddicts in order to provide benefits to addicts.
It would be very desirable after legalization for private, voluntary organizations to form for the purpose of treating addicts. I do not believe this is an appropriate function of government any more than I believe health insurance is an appropriate function of government. On the other hand, if government has a welfare system or a negative income tax, that should be available to addicts as well as anybody else. We should not impose on addicts any greater stigma than we attach to other victims. Equal treatment and equal opportunity ought to be the hallmark.
As I wrote in my Newsweek column on drugs 16 years ago, I believe that adults -by this I mean people whom we regard as responsible, and as a practical matter this means people who are neither insane nor below a certain age should be responsible for their own lives. I'm a Libertarian-a limited government libertarian, not an anarchist libertarian. People's freedom to make their own decisions is my fundamental objective.
Milton Friedman, who received the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics, is the author of numerous books, including, with his wife, Rose, Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose. These remarks are adapted from a telephone interview.
The War We Are Losing
by Milton Friedman
From: Searching for Alternatives: Drug-Control Policy in the United States, pp. 53-67. Edited and with an Introduction by Melvyn B. Krauss and Edward P. Lazear. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1991.
After everything that has been said on all sides of this issue, there is little new that is left to be said. I was going to say that one thing on which everybody has agreed is a need for more money for research-especially for the research we ourselves do--but I like to be contrary so I will express a disagreement with that. If on any subject whatsoever we waited until all the research we wanted to do was done, we would never do anything. If we are going to act, we have to act on the basis of the evidence that there is. I do not agree with those like my good friend, Ed Meese, who say that you need a detailed and well-reasoned alternative before you do anything about the present system, that the burden of proof is upon those who want to change the system. If the system is making a mess, it is a good thing to do something to change it even though you may not have a fully detailed alternative.
One thing that needs to be kept in mind is that we are fundamentally all on the same side. We all have the same objectives. We all recognize that drugs are currently doing a great deal of harm. What divides us is our judgment about the best means to minimize the harm done by drugs. We must not let ourselves get diverted from trying to reach reasonable, sensible conclusions by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with us. There is a famous statement, which I have used many times, made by Pierre S. du Pont almost precisely two centuries ago (September 25, 1790) to the National Assembly in revolutionary France in which he said, "Gentlemen, it is a disagreeable custom to which one is too easily led by the harshness of the discussions, to assume evil intentions. It is necessary to be gracious as to intentions; one should believe them good, and apparently they are; but we do not have to be gracious at all to inconsistent logic or to absurd reasoning. Bad logicians have committed more involuntary crimes than bad men have done intentionally.'
I am obviously not going to add any arguments to the large number already presented. I want to use my limited time simply to try to bring a little order out of the discussion and to add a little evidence.
People tend to discuss the issue of drugs on two levels. One level was well described by one of the speakers as Plato versus John Stuart Mill: The philosophical disagreement between Plato's view that it is right for some of us ("philosopher kings") to tell others of us what they must do because it is good for them, and the doctrine of John Stuart Mill that the role of government is simply to prevent people from doing harm to others and that it is not right for government to try to force people to do anything simply for their own good. The philosopher-king perspective and the libertarian perspective, if you will. No doubt there is a wide disagreement on that level, and as many of you know my own sympathies are on the side of John Stuart Mill. That consideration is not decisive in this issue, however, as it is not in many. Nonetheless, it does affect people's attitudes and the way in which they look at things. I think that it is worth recognizing.
Why is it not decisive? Because even the libertarians justify interference to prevent harm to others. In my opinion, the most basic distinction that needs to be kept in mind in this discussion is between innocent victims and self-chosen victims. That has come out again and again in many discussions. As everyone recognizes, self-chosen victims may and do harm others as well. Even if there were no laws against drugs whatsoever, if they were completely legal, there would still be innocent victims. The most obvious, of course, are the crack babies. I don't know how many there are-that is for you medical people to decide-but insofar as there are any they are obviously innocent victims of their mothers. So legalizing drugs would not eliminate all innocent victims. Even a strict libertarian might argue for prohibiting certain drugs, or putting strict limits on them, on the ground that interference with individual behavior is more than offset by the prevention of harm to innocent victims.
That brings the real issue to the second level-the level of expediency. We now have a system to control drugs. Is it working? Is it doing more good or more harm? If it is doing more harm, let's stop doing that harm and let's not wait until we have a fully worked-out, detailed plan for exactly what we are going to put in its place. Let's eliminate those features of it that are clearly and obviously doing the most harm. Again, everybody agrees on this level that the present methods are doing a great deal of harm. Dr. Clarke movingly and effectively presents one of the most important components of that harm (in Chapter 25).
The attempt to enforce the prohibition of the use of drugs is destroying our poorer neighborhoods in city after city, creating a climate that is destructive to the people who live there. This phenomenon is perhaps the greatest disgrace in the United States at the moment. I say "perhaps" because an alternative is what we are doing to other countries-a subject discussed in Chapter 20. Can anybody tell me that the United States of America is justified in destroying Colombia because the United States cannot enforce its own laws? If we enforced our laws, there would be no, problem.
I don't mean to say we could not enforce our laws. In principle, there is no doubt that we could completely eliminate drugs if we were willing to use the methods that Saudi Arabia is willing to use: If we were willing to cut off the hands of a drug offender; if we were willing to impose capital punishment on drug dealers. We are not, and all of us without exception are proud of the fact that we are not willing to use those methods. Those are cures that are clearly worse than the disease. Given that we cannot enforce our own laws, I believe that there is no way to justify behavior by the United States that leads to the destruction of other countries.
We are destroying the poorer neighborhoods in central cities, but at least we are doing that to ourselves. I don't justify it-don't misunderstand me-but I see even less justification for destroying other people's countries. I have asked this question of many people who are in favor of our present policies. I have never had what I regard as a halfway satisfactory answer.
In discussing the issue of drugs, I, like many others, have cited the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s as an obvious example of the evil effects of prohibition, as does Dr. Morgan (Chapter 24). In response, I have received a good deal of correspondence. Those who object to my conclusions tend to make two arguments in response, and the little bit of data that I would like to add is in response to these arguments.
Everyone recognizes that the prohibition of drugs makes drugs into a profitable illegal activity and creates a class of criminals. However, the proponents of prohibition answer, if you legalized or decriminalized drugs, or in any other way changed the situation, these people would still be criminals; they would just go on to other crimes. Look, they say, what happened after prohibition. You had Al Capone and the gangs, and after prohibition ended they just shifted over to other sectors. Unquestionably, there is some truth in that. The building-up of a criminal class is going to leave a hangover, and the hangover is going to mean more criminality.
How serious is it? I have a graph (Figure 3. 1). The series that goes all the way back to 1910 is the homicide rate. Its scale is on the left. It goes to 1987, which is as far as the data were readily available. From 1910 on, there is an almost explosive growth in the number of homicides. The first part of the explosion is during World War 1, and one phenomenon you observe over and over is that wars tend to lead to a rise in crime. What happened after the end of the war? The homicide rate kept on going up very rapidly and reached a peak in precisely the year in which prohibition was ended, 1933. It then fell drastically, and it stayed down throughout the forties and the fifties, except for a rise during World War II. Since 1933 was also the end of the great contraction, it can be argued that the Great Depression was also a stimulus to crime and to homicide. Throughout the prosperous 1920s, however, homicides per hundred thousand persons were very much higher than throughout the prosperous forties and fifties, let alone in the late thirties which were not so prosperous. I believe that no one who looks at the evidence can doubt that ending prohibition had a significant and prompt effect on the homicide rate.
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Homicides started to go up early in the 1960s and rose very rapidly after Nixon introduced his drug war. More recently, the rate has come down a little, but it is still at the same level as in 1933. I believe one can have great confidence that if drugs were decriminalized the homicide rate would fall sharply, most likely back to the level that it maintained throughout the fifties. That is no small matter: A reduction in the homicide rate from its average during the eighties to its average during the fifties would, with our current population, mean a saving in excess of 10,000 lives a year!
As another bit of evidence I have plotted the number of prisoners (per 10,000 population) received into all prisons-federal, state, and local-year by year. Those data, at least in the sources readily available to me, only went back to 1926. From then on, the number of prisoners received went up very sharply until 1931. It then went down, then rose again to 1940, went down sharply during the war, rose thereafter to a peak in 1961 and came down sharply to 1969. From 1970 on, the number of prisoners received rose dramatically, to a level in 1987 more than twice as high as in 1931. The increase in the number of prisoners received coincides with the beginning of Nixon's drug war, and received an additional boost when the Reagan drug war started.
To say the least, those are disheartening figures. Most discussions of innocent victims, including those I have heard here, leave out what I regard as one of the most important classes of innocent victims, those of us who are not protected by the police because the police are too busy trying to do something about drugs and are being corrupted by the drug industry. The destruction of the atmosphere of law enforcement, of the whole climate of law obedience, adds greatly to the list of innocent victims. Personally, I find it hard to see how anyone can deny the enormous importance of the innocent victims who have been produced by making possession of specified drugs and dealing in them a crime. Few persons do deny the importance of such innocent victims. Those who nonetheless defend drug prohibition reply that decriminalizing drugs may well reduce the number of such innocent victims, but the price society pays for that gain will be a large increase in the number of addicts. Again they go back to alcohol and its prohibition for evidence. They claim that the end of alcohol prohibition was followed by a tremendous increase in the fraction of the population consuming alcohol and in the number of alcoholics.
The next two charts from my trusty computer are designed to answer that claim. The first (Figure 3.2) shows the fraction of total consumption expenditures spent on alcoholic beverages. It is available only for legal alcoholic beverages; that is why it starts in 1933. Unfortunately, all estimates of alcohol consumption during the prohibition era are necessarily highly indirect and uncertain, so I have chosen to stick only to the figures for legal beverages. Dr. Morgan refers to some data on consumption during prohibition, and it is clear that consumption did not disappear. Incidentally, among the innocent victims of prohibition are the addicts themselves, because of the factors that Dr. Morgan brings out. In an illegal market, there is bound to be adulteration and impure substances, which shows up in people dying. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that the greatest beneficiaries from the decriminalization of drugs would be the present addicts. They are made to become criminals. They can't ask for help without admitting that they are criminals. The argument in favor of the present method, thus, has to be that if drugs were decriminalized, you would have a vast increase in the number of addicts.
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What does our experience after alcohol prohibition tell us? In the first three years, as legal beverages were being substituted for illegal beverages, it is not surprising that the reported percentage of all consumption expenditures spent on alcoholic beverages went up sharply. It peaked in 1937, then went down to 1940, then rose during the war until 1945. Thereafter it went down gradually but persistently.
I am old enough to be a veteran of that period myself. I remember a few months after prohibition had been repealed going to a Swedish restaurant in New York City with a Swedish friend of mine, a fellow graduate student at Columbia. It was a restaurant in which he had been able to buy Aquavit all during prohibition and he tried to get Aquavit for us. I had never tasted the stuff, and he thought that I ought to have that experience. They said, oh no, they couldn't serve it now because they hadn't received their license yet. He talked Swedish to them and finally was able to persuade them to take us back into the kitchen and give us a little taste of Aquavit. Anyone who believes that during prohibition there was any difficulty in getting alcohol in most of the United States should look at the evidence. I wasn't very old and was not much of a drinker but there was no difficulty in finding speakeasies.
To return to the chart, the skeptic may reply, and correctly, that it is a percentage. Total consumption is going up. Perhaps the smaller percentage of a larger total conceals a very large increase in the amount of alcohol consumed.
Figure 3.3 shows the expenditure on alcoholic beverages expressed in constant 1982 prices between the same dates. As you will see, absolute expenditures, like the percentage spent, went up to 1937 and then fell briefly. During the war, expenditures went up sharply, peaking this time in 1946. Expenditures then fell and remained fairly constant during the forties and fifties and then, beginning in 1961, there was a sharp increase in expenditures on alcoholic beverages. For our purposes, however, the important lesson from the chart is that the legalization of alcohol clearly did not stimulate alcoholism. The legalization of alcohol was followed by a plateau in the consumption of alcohol. The kinds of things that many people have talked about as occurring during the sixties produced the sharp increase in expenditures on alcoholic beverages from 1961 to 1980. Since then expenditures have been falling in absolute terms and not only as a percentage of total consumption.
The obvious implication is that if currently illicit drugs were decriminalized and handled exactly the way alcohol is now handled, there is no reason to suppose that there would be a vast increase in the number of addicts. That is by no means a certainty, but every statement that I have seen asserting the contrary is based on pure conjecture and hypothesis. I have seen no hard evidence. The closest to it that I have come across is reference to the opium craze in China. Given the evidence we have-not only from alcohol prohibition but also from Holland, Alaska, and others-the burden of proof, it seems to me, is on those who maintain that there would be a completely unacceptable increase in the number of addicts.
One thing we really do know for certain is that what we are now doing is not working. There is a wider measure of agreement on that proposition than appears on the surface. It is natural for people to exaggerate their differences. It is hard to impress people without overstating one's case. I suspect, for example, that on the issue of marijuana that Dr. Grinspoon addresses so movingly (Chapter 21), few people believe that dealing in marijuana ought to be a capital offense. I suspect that almost everybody would agree that there is no case whatsoever for treating marijuana the way we do.
It seems to me that we ought to recognize the harm that we are now doing, and not let the tyranny of the status quo prevent us from making some changes that can stop the killing in the slums, and ghettos of our cities. We can stop destroying the possibility of a decent family life among the underprivileged in this country. I do not agree with many people who would agree with me on that point about the role that government ought to play in the treatment of addiction. I do not agree either with those who say that the tragedy of the slums is really a social problem, that the underprivileged do not have enough jobs and therefore government has to provide them with jobs. I want to tell those people that government performance is no better in creating jobs and solving other social problems than it is in drug prohibition. just as a very large fraction of our crime is, in my opinion, caused by government measures, a very large fraction of our poverty is caused by government measures. If those of you who have studied the drug situation were to study as carefully the effects of government measures in the areas of welfare, social services, housing, and so on, you would not have any difficulty in recognizing that there is at least a little bit of sense in what I am saying. That is a different subject, however, and we ought to separate those subjects. Let's not draw ideological lines on this issue because, although there is no doubt an ideological element, the expediential considerations are so strong and so overwhelming that it seems to me they really dominate the situation.
