The dubious policies of overcriminalization and drug prohibition are two frequent topics on this blog, so this excellent Ethan Nadelmann essay on the utter failure of America’s 40-year War on Drugs caught my eye. The entire piece is worth reading, but his final point is particularly illuminating:

Legalization has to be on the table. Not because it is necessarily the best solution. Not because it is the obvious alternative to the evident failures of drug prohibition. But for three important reasons:

First, because it is the best way to reduce dramatically the crime, violence, corruption and other extraordinary costs and harmful consequences of prohibition;

Second, because there are as many options — indeed more — for legally regulating drugs as there are options for prohibiting them; and

Third, because putting legalization on the table involves asking fundamental questions about why drug prohibitions first emerged, and whether they were or are truly essential to protect human societies from their own vulnerabilities. Insisting that legalization be on the table — in legislative hearings, public forums and internal government discussions — is not the same as advocating that all drugs be treated the same as alcohol and tobacco. It is, rather, a demand that prohibitionist precepts and policies be treated not as gospel but as political choices that merit critical assessment, including objective comparison with non-prohibitionist approaches.

My question is whether the elaborate law enforcement infrastructure that has been constructed to deal with drug prohibition policy become such a powerful political force that it effectively prevents Congress from changing this disastrous policy for the better good of the majority?

This recent WaPo article highlights one of the senseless incongruities of the U.S.’s dubious policy of drug prohibition:

Twice, the patient, a man in his mid-30s, said he lost his prescriptions for Valium and Percocet. Once, he said he was in a car accident that scattered his pills on the road. Another time, he said the medicine he was first prescribed was no good, so he “returned the pills.” Another time, his wife called and said their house had been “searched by authorities” and the medicine had gone missing.

Each time, no matter the story, Peter S. Trent or Hampton J. Jackson Jr., doctors at the same orthopedic practice in Oxon Hill, refilled the prescription, according to the Maryland Board of Physicians. Over the course of 21/2 years, the doctors gave the patient 275 prescriptions, mostly for Percocet, a powerful, highly addictive painkiller.

Sometimes they wrote the patient more than one prescription for the drug on the same day. In a single month, they wrote him 11 prescriptions for Percocet, totaling 734 pills.

On one hand, maybe the patients had a “legitimate” need for large amounts of narcotics, but most doctors wouldn’t write prescriptions for the drugs because they fear prosecution if they did so.

On the other hand, the patients may be addicts without a “legitimate” need for the drugs, but they seek to obtain the narcotics through prescription because it is safer and probably cheaper than buying them illegally.

Current U.S. drug policy mandates that the patients who have a “legitimate” need for the narcotics can buy them legally, but the addicts cannot.

What valid public policy purpose is served by that distinction? Such a distinction only leads to arbitrary and capricious enforcement of criminal laws that terrorizes citizens who desperately need treatment regardless of the cause of that need.

Irrespective of whether a patient has a “legitimate” need for narcotics or is simply an addict, the patient should be able to obtain the drugs legally through prescription. Such a policy would allow the patient to obtain a known product at a reasonable price without risking expensive incarceration. A reduction of the mass incarceration problem and the expensive and brutal black market for drugs would be two fringe benefits of such a change in policy.

The federal government already funds methadone clinics for heroin addicts. Why not extend such a policy to narcotic maintenance?

A truly civil society would find a way.

Gary Becker makes a good point about a frequent topic on this blog – the enormous cost of the government’s drug prohibition policy:

[The Miron and Waldock study does] a good job of estimating the amount directly spent by the United States in fighting the war on drugs. They calculate about $41 billion is spent on this fight by state and local governments, and by the federal government, through policing efforts, the cost of court personnel and buildings used to try and convict drug offenders, and the cost of the guards and other resources used to imprison those convicting of drug offenses.  .  .  .  These estimated direct costs of the war are significant, yet they are regrettably only a small fraction of the total social costs due to the war on drugs. [ .  .  .]

Perhaps, however, the worse results of the American war on drugs are found in its effects on other countries, especially Mexico, Colombia, and other Latin American countries. Mexico is also engaged in a war on drugs, but it is a war almost entirely fought against drugs shipped from Mexico into the United States. The overwhelming majority of drugs that are either produced in Mexico, or that enter Mexico from other countries, are destined for shipment across the border to the United States. The two main drugs shipped from Mexico are marijuana and cocaine, the same two drugs that Miron and Waldock show constitute the vast majority of drugs used by American consumers.

Mexico is engaged in a real war, with advanced military equipment used by the drug gangs; often the gangs have better weapons than the army does. The casualties have been huge: an estimated 30,000 + persons have been killed in recent years as a result of the drug violence, far greater than the combined deaths of American and allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of these deaths are of drug cartel members, but a considerable number also are of soldiers and policemen, journalists, and innocent bystanders.

After the drug lords discovered that they are very good at violence and intimidation, they expanded geographically and into other activities. They have spread out from concentration in enclaves near the border or in the West of Mexico into many other areas, including major cities like Monterrey. Some towns have become uninhabitable, as former residents fled from the violence, some entering illegally into the US. Drug lords have taken control in many places of prostitution, gambling, extraction of monies from businesses for “protection” services, and indirectly also various local governments. [.  .  .]

No one has estimated the social cost of American drug policy on Mexico, Colombia, and other countries, but it has to be immense. Perhaps these countries should just allow drugs to be shipped to the US, and put the full burden of stopping these shipments on American enforcement agencies. The American government would protest, but such a result would provide a clearer picture to the American people of the full cost of current policy, including the major costs imposed on other countries. One can hope that then we will get a serious rethinking of the American war on drugs, and some real political movement toward decriminalization and legalization of various drugs.