Commentary: Legalize drugs to stop violenceby Dr Jeffrey A. Miron
Personally, I have not thought about the issue enough to have a strong opinion either way. However, I do think the arguments for legalization are substantative enough to at least be seriously considered. This is particularly true in light of articles like this one published yesterday in the New York Times about the current problems in Mexico.
I found out about the article from Greg Mankiw's blog, which I enjoy reading. Greg Mankiw is also a professor at Harvard.
3 comments:
A few questions about this:
1) Violence during prohibition was famous. How does it compare with the quiet domestic violence that results from the consumption of alcohol?
2) Racial profiling is mentioned. People who are not white tend to be poor. People who are poor tend to use illegal drugs. Therefore, racial profiling is used. The problem maybe that poor people tend to use drugs. With a powerful addiction like cocaine and little money to purchase it, is it unlikely that some poor people will continue to do whatever it takes to get the money needed to purchase drugs? (Some crime associated with drug use has nothing to do with cartels--it is perpetrated by addicts attempting to gather the necessary cash.)
3) Going back to the first one, I think all the social evils that come from alcohol in its legal state ought to be quantified and weighed against the evils that come from prohibition. Perhaps that has been done. But I have never seen it.
What do you tell all the women who are beaten or raped by their drunken boyfriend or husband?
4) How do you deal with date rape drugs? They are not used to do nice things to people. Do you say, "X amount of roofies being used responsibly in our society is okay." How do you enforce that? How does the woman show that she didn't have sex with the guy and then take the drug to cover it up?
The 'legalize drugs' lobby seems simplistic and irresponsible to me, even if it is good economics.
A few responses to your questions, Dave:
First, I have to say that your phraseology is a little misleading and betrays some of your ignorance on the subject. Concerning a quantitative comparison between evils of alcohol and evils of prohibition you said: "Perhaps that has been done. But I have never seen it.” Most people reading your comment would understand you to mean that there should be some reason why you should have seen it. They could easily conclude that you are fairly informed about the lack of such analysis. Perhaps you have looked into it and have found such research is severely lacking or cannot be easily found.
You haven’t seen the research because you haven’t looked. People have been studying prohibition for 75 years. If you want the data you're talking about, all you have to do is Google it. I did so—here’s the first link I clicked on. It’s a concise essay containing some pretty pertinent data. It is not written by anyone credible; however, it is heavily laced with quotes from well established economists. It was easy to check out her sources. She pulled her data from much more thorough articles published by economists who have spent significant time studying the data. A couple of those can be found here and here.
From these articles, it is clear that prohibition did not cause a permanent decrease in alcohol consumption. In fact, people turned to harder liquor and quantities of consumption went up. This answers your first question, and actually makes your question rather irrelevant. Yes there is “quiet domestic violence” that occurs as a result of the consumption of alcohol; however, this violence is not even remotely squelched by prohibition. This violence happens whether you have prohibition or not. If anything, prohibition caused an increase in this kind of violence, as people were consuming as much or more of harder liquors.
Setting the “quiet domestic violence” aside and turning to a larger picture, overall crime went up significantly. The number of federal convicts increased by 561%. It is true that some of this crime was for prohibition violation: possession of alcohol, drunkenness, etc. These sorts of increases are expected because without prohibition they are legal and wouldn’t even be looked at. Aside from these, though, more serious crimes also went up significantly: on average the homicide rate went up by 78% in large cities and crimes such as assault and battery went up by 13% to name a couple. This increase happened during the decade of prohibition and then dropped again after it was repealed. I’ve only barely touched the data available: there are plenty more statistics in the articles I’ve cited. Much of this crime increase was a result of the organization and methodology that was introduced into crime with the introduction of the black market for alcohol. So in response to question number 3, when you weigh the “social evils from [legal] alcohol” against the “evils that come from prohibition,” people who have studied the matter have consistently come to the conclusion that prohibition was an utter failure not because it simply failed to stop alcohol consumption but because of the significant evils and crime that it also introduced as a side effect. And they have a lot of data to support their case.
I think in light of this data, question 2 is also answered. Yes, there will be people that continue to use drugs and do whatever it takes to get them. They’re going to do this whether it’s legal or not. Economically, legalizing drugs would bring the price of the drugs down (as it did after prohibition) so addicts would not have to gather as much necessary cash. If they’re using crime to get the cash, this would reduce the crime rate because they would need less cash to get the drugs. Setting that aside and assuming that costs don’t decrease, addicts that are committing crimes to get drugs are going to do so regardless of the legality of the drugs they’re using. They need money to purchase the drugs whether the actual purchase is legal or not. So this issue is either irrelevant to the legalization decision or it stands in favor of legalization.
I don’t see how question 3½ is relevant to this discussion. What do you tell women beaten or raped by their drunken boyfriend or husband? I don’t know, but it’s probably the same thing you told them when it happened during prohibition.
Your questions in 4 are addressing a whole slew of issues at once. Date rape drugs are bad. You seem to be implying that people in favor of drug legalization are saying they are just fine and that we should have some quota that is permissible. That’s not the case. We’re not talking about a quota of any kind, and we’re certainly not saying that date rape drugs (or any other drugs for that matter) are okay. Furthermore, if a woman wants to cover up having sex by using a drug, what difference does it make if the drug was legal or illegal? Even though they are currently illegal people still have access to them if they want to use them.
I admit that I am not yet convinced that drug legalization is necessarily the way to go, but I don’t think the arguments you pose are good enough to cast significant doubt on legalization. I don’t know of any good arguments myself. Perhaps there is one. “But I have never seen it.” And I have looked. In contrast, the arguments for drug legalization do seem quite sound when looking at the data.
However, I do think that all of this discussion is really only very theoretical. Even if legalization were the better option, I don’t think that legalization is viable. The vast majority of the population would be too closed minded to even consider it, no matter how motivating the argument. Therefore, few politicians would choose to endorse it because doing so would be political suicide. Thus, I don’t think that it is really an option, whether it’s a good option or not.
I just read about a study that was published in Forbes Magazine (January 1998) that said that more people are killed each year by Tylenol than by cocaine.
I still have yet to see an argument against drug legalization that is convincing.
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