{"id":130776,"date":"2012-05-03T10:32:09","date_gmt":"2012-05-03T14:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=130776"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:04:15","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:04:15","slug":"end-drug-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/05\/03\/end-drug-war\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Time To End The Drug War"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> Let’s Be Blunt: It’s Time to End the Drug War<\/a> by Art Carden in Forbes.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> April 20 is the counter-culture \u201choliday\u201d on which lots and lots of people come together to advocate marijuana legalization (or just get high). Should drugs\u2014especially marijuana\u2014be legal? The answer is \u201cyes.\u201d Immediately. Without hesitation. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200 seized in a civil asset forfeiture. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure. It\u2019s high time to end prohibition. Even if you aren\u2019t willing to go whole-hog and legalize all drugs, at the very least we should legalize marijuana.<\/p>\n

For the sake of the argument, let\u2019s go ahead and assume that everything you\u2019ve heard about the dangers of drugs is completely true. That probably means that using drugs is a terrible idea. It doesn\u2019t mean, however, that the drug war is a good idea.<\/p>\n

Prohibition is a textbook example of a policy with negative unintended consequences. Literally: it\u2019s an example in the textbook I use in my introductory economics classes (Cowen and Tabarrok, Modern Principles of Economics if you\u2019re curious) and in the most popular introductory economics textbook in the world (by N. Gregory Mankiw).The demand curve for drugs is extremely inelastic, meaning that people don\u2019t change their drug consumption very much in response to changes in prices. Therefore, vigorous enforcement means higher prices and higher revenues for drug dealers. In fact, I\u2019ll defer to Cowen and Tabarrok\u2014page 60 of the first edition, if you\u2019re still curious\u2014for a discussion of the basic economic logic:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“The more effective prohibition is at raising costs, the greater are drug industry revenues. So, more effective prohibition means that drug sellers have more money to buy guns, pay bribes, fund the dealers, and even research and develop new technologies in drug delivery (like crack cocaine). It\u2019s hard to beat an enemy that gets stronger the more you strike against him or her.”<\/p>\n

People associate the drug trade with crime and violence; indeed, the newspapers occasionally feature stories about drug kingpins doing horrifying things to underlings and competitors. These aren\u2019t caused by the drugs themselves but from the fact that they are illegal (which means the market is underground) and addictive (which means demanders aren\u2019t very price sensitive).<\/p>\n

Those same newspapers will also occasionally feature articles about how this or that major dealer has been taken down or about how this or that quantity of drugs was taken off the streets. Apparently we\u2019re to take from this the idea that we\u2019re going to \u201cwin\u201d the war on drugs. Apparently. It\u2019s alleged that this is only a step toward getting \u201cMister Big,\u201d but even if the government gets \u201cMister Big,\u201d it\u2019s not going to matter. Apple didn\u2019t disappear after Steve Jobs died. Getting \u201cMr. Big\u201d won\u2019t win the drug war. As I pointed out almost a year ago, economist and drug policy expert Jeffrey Miron estimates that we would have a lot less violence without a war on drugs.<\/p>\n

At the recent Association of Private Enterprise Education conference, David Henderson from the Naval Postgraduate School pointed out the myriad ways in which government promises to make us safer in fact imperil our safety and security. The drug war is an obvious example: in the name of making us safer and protecting us from drugs, we are actually put in greater danger. Without meaning to, the drug warriors have turned American cities into war zones and eroded the very freedoms we hold dear.<\/p>\n

Freedom of contract has been abridged in the name of keeping us \u201csafe\u201d from drugs. Private property is less secure because it can be seized if it is implicated in a drug crime (this also flushes the doctrine of \u201cinnocent until proven guilty\u201d out the window). The drug war has been used as a pretext for clamping down on immigration. Not surprisingly, the drug war has turned some of our neighborhoods into war zones. We are warehousing productive young people in prisons at an alarming rate all in the name of a war that cannot be won.<\/p>\n

Albert Einstein is reported to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By this definition, the drug war is insane. We are no safer, and we are certainly less free because of concerted efforts to wage war on drugs. It\u2019s time to stop the insanity and end prohibition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Let’s Be Blunt: It’s Time to End the Drug War by Art Carden in Forbes. The Text: April 20 is the counter-culture \u201choliday\u201d on which lots and lots of people come together to advocate marijuana legalization (or just get high). Should drugs\u2014especially marijuana\u2014be legal? The answer is \u201cyes.\u201d Immediately. Without hesitation. Do not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nIt's Time To End The Drug War<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We are no safer, and we are certainly less free because of concerted efforts to wage war on drugs. 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