Noble ideas are wonderful, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they work.
Obligatory Disclaimer: Is there a drug problem in America that is undermining a portion of the country's social and economic fabric? Yes. Should we attempt to overcome this problem? Yes.
Should government be given more power, weapons, and money to continue waging a War on Drugs?
Hell no!
For starters, America is not a drugged-out society. According to government statistics, only about 7.1% of all age groups engage in illicit drug use (within the past 30 days). Death from illegal drug use is also a relatively small problem. For example, there has never been a recorded case of a person dying from using marijuana. In fact, Legal Drugs Kill Far More Than Illegal:
The Florida report analyzed 168,900 deaths statewide. Cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines caused 989 deaths, it found, while legal opioids — strong painkillers in brand-name drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin — caused 2,328.
Drugs with benzodiazepine, mainly depressants like Valium and Xanax, led to 743 deaths. Alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug, appearing in the bodies of 4,179 of the dead and judged the cause of death of 466 — fewer than cocaine (843) but more than methamphetamine (25) and marijuana (0).
The study also found that while the number of people who died with heroin in their bodies increased 14 percent in 2007, to 110, deaths related to the opioid oxycodone increased 36 percent, to 1,253.
Of course we're not going to outlaw all drugs, are we? After all, the legal drugs listed above do indeed provide benefits that outweigh their negative consequences. We're not here to talk about legal drugs though, I just wanted to give the problem some perspective.
Now, let's take a look at the War on Drugs itself ...
The following is Megan McArdle's response to the video of a violent SWAT raid you can watch here: The Moral Case Against the War on Drugs Pt 2.
My anger is mixed with a sort of bleak despair that this sort of thing could happen in America, and worse, that so few people care. You shoot two dogs in front of a seven year old--who could have been killed by a stray round, and at the very least will carry this hideous recollection to the grave. And why? For misdemeanor pot possession?
No, say the police; they executed the warrant too late. Had they come earlier, undoubtedly they would have found . . . dealer sized amounts of pot.
This response is nonsensical. It's like hearing that they came too late to catch the family bootlegging cable. Sure it's illegal, and maybe it's even wrong.
But frankly I don't care if the owner of the pot was a drug dealer. For that matter, I do not care if he had a mountain of marijuana in his back yard in which he liked to roll around naked. It still wouldn't constitute a good reason for armed men to burst through his door [and] light up the family pets in front of the kid.
This is our nation's drug enforcement in a nutshell. We started out by banning the things. And people kept taking them. So we made the punishments more draconian. But people kept selling them. So we pushed the markets deep into black market territory, and got the predictable violence ... Somewhere along the way, we got so focused on enforcing the law that we lost sight of the purpose of the law, which is to make life in America better.
I don't know how anyone can watch that video, and think to themselves, "Yes, this is definitely worth it to rid the world of the scourge of excess pizza consumption and dopey, giggly conversations about cartoons." Short of multiple homicide, I'm having trouble coming up with anything that justifies that kind of police action. And you know, I doubt the police could either. But they weren't busy trying to figure out if they were maximizing the welfare of their larger society. They were, in that most terrifying of phrases, just doing their jobs.
Admittedly, Megan McArdle is not someone with whom I agree with very often, but in this case, I believe she hits the nail on the head!
We're destroying the welfare of society at large, because enforcement has become a higher priority than our "inherited rules of civilized conduct." We've removed all internal restraints on government authority.
Throughout its history drug prohibition has been an immoral, violent, and costly failure. It simply does not accomplish its stated purpose of preventing people from using illicit drugs while at same time it vastly increases the harm caused by the use of those drugs. Now the Associated Press is finally acknowledging these already well known facts in a scathing indictment of the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs.
Moreover, this is precisely the point made in the preface to Fatal Distraction: The War on Drugs in the Age of Islamic Terror four years ago. One of the main story lines of the book “deals the many reasons why drug prohibition and the war on drugs fail because of their own internal contradictions and the immense harm they cause.” The book goes on to contend that “the war on drugs is based on many cherished myths. Such cherished myths die hard. Destructive cherished myths die even harder.” (page 14)
Like all government programs, the War on Drugs has not met any of its stated goals.
US War On Drugs Has Met None Of Its Goals
After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.
Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.
"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."
Nevertheless, [the Obama] administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.
In 1970, hippies were smoking pot and dropping acid. Soldiers were coming home from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a new war he thought he could win.
"This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people," Nixon said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The following year, he said: "Public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive."
His first drug-fighting budget was $100 million. Now it's $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon's amount even when adjusted for inflation.
Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:
_ $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico – and the violence along with it.
_ $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.
_ $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.
_ $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.
_ $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.
At the same time, drug abuse is costing the nation in other ways. The Justice Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse – "an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction" – cost the United States $215 billion a year.
Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for more spending on police and soldiers is more homicides.
"Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use," Miron said, "but it's costing the public a fortune."
So why do we continue hitting our heads against the wall with a costly and violent program that doesn't work?
Because the government has to "do something." Right? And just like everything else the government does, it doubles-down on failure rather than attempting to right the ship.
Another reason we support the war is ... we've lost faith in our communities, churches and other civil organizations. More specifically, we've lost faith in God. We don't want the responsibility of dealing with the drug problem ourselves. It's much easier to feel like we're "doing something," in demanding the government do it for us.
The War on Drugs is not only burning valuable American treasure, but invaluable lives. It has corrupted our legal system, buried our "inherited rules of civilized conduct," and worse, driven drugs underground making them more difficult to regulate.
As Milton Friedman famously noted in An Open Letter to Bill Bennett (1990):
You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are tearing asunder our social fabric, ruining the lives of many young people, and imposing heavy costs on some of the most disadvantaged among us.
Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.
Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
I append excerpts from a column that I wrote in 1972 on "Prohibition and Drugs." The major problem then was heroin from Marseilles; today, it is cocaine from Latin America. Today, also, the problem is far more serious than it was 17 years ago: more addicts, more innocent victims; more drug pushers, more law enforcement officials; more money spent to enforce prohibition, more money spent to circumvent prohibition.
Had drugs been decriminalized 17 years ago, "crack" would never have been invented (it was invented because the high cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to provide a cheaper version) and there would today be far fewer addicts. The lives of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent victims would have been saved, and not only in the U.S. The ghettos of our major cities would not be drug-and-crime-infested no-man's lands. Fewer people would be in jails, and fewer jails would have been built.
The War on Drugs has not only failed, but has harmed society. It's time to stop supporting its "myth" out of emotion, and start thinking about it instead.
