The New Prohibition

While waiting for Nathan to come over I stumbled upon this blog. Very interesting stuff. In particular, this interview with Economics Nobel Laureate Prof. Gary Becker caught my eye. The whole thing is a worthwhile read, however this is most remarkable:

What’s your proposal exactly?

I think you have to legalize drugs. That will eliminate most of these costs, the incarceration costs, the judiciary costs, the police costs. You’ll be able to reallocate the police to better activities, reduce the effects on neighborhoods, and so on. Critics would say you’ll get a big increase in drug consumption. We estimate the effects, it may be pretty large, but you can always handle that in the way we attack cigarette consumption and alcohol consumption: namely, it’s legalized and we impose a tax and we can then concentrate on reducing the amount of underground activities, which is much easier to do than reducing all activities.

I've been of this view since I have use of reason. There are at least two Nobel Prize winners supporting it, Milton Friedman spoke out against the war on drugs when it first started back in the Nixon days and continued to propose that drugs should be legal. He has written extensively about it and you can get small samples of his views here and in this article.

It seems rather obvious to me that most of the problems involved in drug production would largely be done away with by simply legalizing the drugs. The one possible caveat, that the drugs being legally available would increase consumption is a weak argument: people who want to do a drug will want to whether it is legal or illegal just the same. Furthermore, availability is hardly affected by the illegality. Just like with alcohol prohibition, the illegality simply serves as a mean to increase profitability at great social cost. Finally, I'll say that this social cost is largely paid outside US borders despite being a result of US domestic and foreign policy.