The Economics of Prohibition

Foreign wars come and go, but the Drug War is a constant of U.S. domestic policy. For nearly eight decades the government has attempted to prevent American citizens from using one or more illicit substances. By the 1980s the government’s efforts had become truly draconian: more than one million drug arrests annually; minimum drug sentences that exceed the average punishment for murderers and rapists; increasing numbers of wiretaps; property confiscations and home evictions based on mere suspicion of drug use; ever more warrantless searches as part of the constantly expanding “drug exception” to the Fourth Amendment; growing involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, and National Guard; citywide curfews; and proposals for everything from shooting down unidentified planes at the border to declaring martial law.

Yet these efforts have yielded few positive results. The U.S. now has more than one million people in prison, yielding the highest rate of imprisonment in the industrial world. Young blacks are more likely to die in gun battles in the criminal underground, funded by drug prohibition, than they were while serving in the army in Vietnam. Drug users seeking to pay the inflated prices of illegal substances commit thousands of property crimes in cities and their suburbs. Children, who receive lesser criminal punishments, are increasingly recruited into the drug trade, where many become users.

Moreover, the law appears to have stopped few people from trying illicit substances. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 74.4 million people over the age of 12 have tried drugs, despite decades of drug prohibition. Nearly 27 million use illegal substances at least once a year. Rates of drug use are now falling, but the declines started before the periodic escalations of the drug war during the 1980s.

Given this record, it is time to fundamentally reevaluate America’s drug policy. To do so risks attack from publicity-minded drug czars and vote-seeking politicians. But not to do so acquiesces to a policy that is needlessly imprisoning, maiming, and killing tens of thousands of people for voluntarily using and selling substances that are demonstrably less harmful—particularly in the number of deaths they cause—than the legal drugs alcohol and tobacco, the latter of which is subsidized by the federal government.

Courageously picking up the gauntlet tossed down by the drug war lobby is Mark Thornton. In a debate more often marked by emotion than facts, Professor Thornton looks at how illegal drug markets, for alcohol as well as today’s disfavored substances, really work. Particularly important is his conclusion that such problems as crime and corruption are natural outgrowths of drug prohibition, not drug use. As a result, the deaths of innocent bystanders in drug dealers’ gun battles, for example, create an argument for drug legalization, not stricter enforcement.

Many readers may nevertheless disagree with Professor Thornton’s conclusions. But they will still have an obligation to respond to his evidence that the costs of prohibition are huge and obvious, while the benefits are few and dubious. The burden of proving Professor Thornton wrong, and thereby justifying continuation of the drug war, now rests on those who oppose drug legalization.