November 17, 2005
Legalizing drugs
North Carolina should consider decriminalizing illegal drugs as it tries to stem the need for additional prisons, a former state Supreme Court chief justice said Monday.
Burley Mitchell, the state’s top judge from 1995 to 1999, said the war on drugs in North Carolina and nationwide has been “a total failure” that has filled up prisons. The money saved if police no longer made arrests and courts no longer handed out sentences could be used to treat drug addicts, he said.
“What if we decriminalized drugs? Then you’d knock out all of the profits of every dealer and more to the point, the big producers,” Mitchell said at a Raleigh luncheon crowd interested in prison reform. Drug demand also would go down due to lower supplies, and drug-related crimes such as robbery and murder also would fall, he said.
What goes for North Carolina goes for the entire U.S. As I’ve written before*, the war on drugs has been one of the most costly social-policy failures in this country’s history. On one estimate, the U.S. spends more than $40 billion of taxpayer’s money a year fighting illegal drugs. And about one in four of America’s prison population is locked up because of a drug-related offense, usually non-violent.
Moreover, there’s little connection between the severity of a drugs policy and prevalence of use. Illegal drugs continue to get easier and cheaper to obtain—for example, a gram of cocaine cost about $38 wholesale in the U.S. in 2003, down from $48 in 2000 and $100 in 1986. The illegal-drugs business continues unabated, with global sales that are about the same as the global tobacco industry. The industry fuels corrupt regimes, terrorists, civil wars, gangs… the list is endless. And the fallout from all this disproportionately impacts the poor—in rich countries and poor countries alike.
As Mitchell notes, legalizing drugs would cut profits, crime and exploitation. It would empty America’s jails of people who by most measures should never have been locked up in the first place. True, it would probably result in an increase—at least initially—in drug use. But as The Economist pointed out some years ago in an excellent and still-relevant (paid-subscription) editorial:
Precisely because the drugs market is illegal, it cannot be regulated. Laws cannot discriminate between availability to children and adults. Governments cannot insist on minimum quality standards for cocaine; or warn asthma sufferers to avoid ecstasy; or demand that distributors take responsibility for the way their products are sold. With alcohol and tobacco, such restrictions are possible; with drugs, not. This increases the dangers to users, and especially to young or incompetent users. Illegality also puts a premium on selling strength: if each purchase is risky, then it makes sense to buy drugs in concentrated form. In the same way, Prohibition in the United States in the 1920s led to a fall in beer consumption but a rise in the drinking of hard liquor.
… To legalise will not be easy. Drug-taking entails risks, and societies are increasingly risk-averse. But the role of government should be to prevent the most chaotic drug-users from harming others—by robbing or by driving while drugged, for instance—and to regulate drug markets to ensure minimum quality and safe distribution. The first task is hard if law enforcers are preoccupied with stopping all drug use; the second, impossible as long as drugs are illegal. A legal market is the best guarantee that drug-taking will be no more dangerous than drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco. And, just as countries rightly tolerate those two vices, so they should tolerate those who sell and take drugs.
Couldn’t have put it better.
* This blog entry draws heavily on earlier posts.
Posted by Stephen at 6:56 PM in Drugs | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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