THE INSANITY OF DRUG PROHIBITION

"Drug prohibition is an incredibly important policy in the United States, and it affects millions of lives every day. We lock up hundreds of thousands of people. We arrest approximately one-and-a-half million a year on drug-related charges. We spend tens of billions of dollars, and forego billions of dollars in tax revenue that could be collected if drugs were legal instead of being prohibited....

a very simple observation, which may seem trivial-prohibition doesn't eliminate the supply or demand for drugs. It seems really obvious, but it's important to emphasize, because policy makers, advocates of prohibition, sometimes act as though, gee, if we prohibit drugs, there won't be drugs. The problem will go away. That's patently untrue....

for the past 20 to 25 years in the United States, the attempts to enforce drug prohibition have escalated enormously. We're arresting way more people. We're incarcerating four or five times more people than we were 25 years ago. We're spending four times as much money for the Drug Czar's office and things like that. Yet drug prices have fallen by a factor of about 80 percent. If prohibition is an effective policy, if it's useful for raising the cost of supplying drugs, that's exactly the opposite of what one would expect to see. In fact, the decline in drug prices has been dramatic...

The prohibition itself creates violence, because the participants in a black market cannot resolve their disputes using lawyers, and arbitration systems, and judges. They have to resort to guns, or knives, and other forms of violence, because they don't have access to the non-violent legal dispute resolution system... If prohibition raises drug prices, then there is more incentive for people who use drugs, low-income persons who use drugs, to commit theft, robbery other income generating crime, to be able to afford their drug habits. A second reason prohibition might generate crime more generally, is that prohibition diverts the police from trying to deter standard crimes such as murder, robbery, rape, arson, etc., because they're off-the police are busy, preoccupied, trying to deter a drug crime". More here.

And as it says here: "We just passed the halfway point of 2004 and it is time for an update on the "war on drugs." Sad to say, it is still going strong. According to the website www.drugsense.org, we have spent more than $20 billion so far this year on this "war," putting us on a pace to surpass last's year's expenditure of $39 billion."

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