Legalize it!

Legalizing drugs probably isn't a great solution to America's or the world's problems. But, given all of the issues with the "war on drugs," I have to agree with the Economist in saying that legalization is the least bad alternative.

We spend tons of money trying to stop drugs from getting into our country; spend tons incarcerating our citizens for drug related offenses; enable gangsters and thugs to cut out a nice little slice of unregulated global trade; fail to treat addictions thoroughly due to a lack of funds; push producer countries into fighting a war on drugs in their countries, which leads to political instability -- all of this, and we still have drugs. The fact is that, like it or not, drugs are here and are going to stay. Quoting at length from the above linked leader:

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

I think it is time that we step back and realize how illiberal our drug policy is, and reflect on how we can better tailor a drug regime towards reasonable safety and distance ourselves from the unrealizable goal of irradication. (Speaking of illiberal policies, I just posted on the growing anti-immigrant sentiment in Congress, this specifically related to the H-1B visa program).