by Carl Milsted, Jr.
Last month I announced that I was switching over to the Republican Party in order to support Ron Paul. I recommended that other peace and freedom lovers do likewise, that we could in theory create a new alignment, with hippies and conservatives working together toward common goals.
Well, the reaction among certain members of the Republican Party was anything but pretty, especially when the subject of letting the hippies have their favorite herb came up. Some people would rather eviscerate the Constitution, create a police state, fight a war in residential neighborhoods, subsidize terrorism abroad, and ignore basic Christian tenets of mercy in order to continue a drug war that does not work.
My primal inclination is to send such people to Guantanamo to join their Taliban brethren, but this suffers from two difficulties: 1. I am outgunned, and 2. My religion forbids such rough justice. So instead, I’ll attempt to sympathize with these goons, feel their pain as it were….
Hmmmm, maybe these people think that if we ended the drug war, everyone would be high all the time, or, at least, addiction would skyrocket.
What a bizarre fantasy!
But I guess it is conceivable if one is ignorant of the history of drug use in this country back when all drugs were legal, as well as being unaware of the economics of recreational drug use and the logistical difficulties of enforcing drug prohibition. (Note to self: try to remember that most people don’t read economics books for fun.)
Very well, an economics lesson is in order.
Observation 1: We have many more drug users than we have jail cells – especially users of soft drugs such as marijuana. Consequently, a policy of going after users is doomed to fail. Either enforcement must be selective (read: go after poor blacks and political enemies) or the focus must be on dealers.
Theorem 1: If you just go after dealers, all you do is drive up prices. Whether this actually reduces drug abuse depends on the price sensitivity of the users.
Observation 2: Drug overuse is prominent among groups with low incomes: college students and residents of subsidized housing. These are precisely the people who would be dissuaded from drug use if street price was the deciding factor.
Theorem 2: An end to the drug war would do very little to change drug use by those with higher incomes; if the poor are little affected by drug prices, then the middle and upper classes are even less affected.
All this may be counterintuitive to many. One generally thinks that a major drop in market prices would result in a large increase in consumption of any product. But recreational drug use is different for a reason: the biggest cost of recreational drug use is not the street price; it is the internal cost of doing the drugs.
Most drinkers limit their alcohol consumption not because of liquor taxes, but because of hangovers, health effects, and time lost while drunk. This pattern holds even more strongly for the harder drugs.
Anyone willing to mess up their lives with crack or meth is going to be little daunted by a higher street price. The only way a drug war could dissuade such users would be to arrest them and force them into rehab.
And here is a bit of irony: the government would have the resources to pursue such a policy if it were to legalize the soft drugs such as marijuana and focus solely on the truly dangerous – and thus unpopular – drugs.
Whether it should do so is another question, one which I’ll address in a future column.
Carl Milsted is a senior editor for The Free Liberal.