Links - Drugs and Prohibition

Often times trying harder is the road to ruin.

Tarnell Brown recently had a great series at EconLog examining the many destructive aspects of the War on Drugs™. I’ll link to each post along with some commentary. Please do read each one of Brown’s pieces. They are concise and rewarding.

At What Cost: The Social Costs of Drug Prohibition

My take: The principal-agent problem in many facets is alive and well in the drug prohibition racket.

Blurring Posse Comitatus: The Increased Militarization of Police

My take: The war on drugs has exacted a horrible toll on the nature and role of policing in America. The moral panic has allowed us to accept tactics and behavior that no free society should tolerate. Through mission creep and cultural decay, police have separated themselves from the communities they serve to protect. This is unfair to those who honorably seek to serve as police as well as those they serve.

Civil Asset Forfeiture: The War on Drugs™ as a Law Enforcement Revenue Center

My take: To say that civil asset forfeiture creates a destructive conflict of interest is to make a severe understatement. Yet that big problem is secondary in principle to the truly un-American nature that is at its core.

How Drug Prohibition Increases the Rate of Crime

My take: Prohibition ALWAYS creates more crime. This is beyond the tautological fact that prohibition creates a class of crime by its very existence. The knock-on effects are more violence, less free (transparent, open, informative, accountable) markets, worse versions of the very thing being prohibited (the iron law of prohibition), and crowding out of scarce resources away from other desirable and productive activities. Every cop and prosecutor who is pursuing a drug offense is NOT pursuing a property or violent crime. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

Racial Bias in Drug Enforcement

My take: The war on drugs drives racial strife indirectly and, though at times unintentionally and at times intentionally, exerts long-term harms on vulnerable communities.

Conclusions and Consequences Abroad

My take: The reason I call the foundational support for the war on drugs a “moral panic” is because it is driven by irrational fears and misguided logic. Not all drugs are the same. There is no clear distinction between healthy and unhealthy for any behavior or consumption applicable broadly to all people at all times. Anything can be abused. What we today label as illicit drugs is arbitrary. Many of these substances are or can be dangerous. In many cases quite dangerous. The lunacy of the war on drugs is the idea that by brute force we can “cure” ourselves of the potential harms without creating worse harms—both directly in the form of worse drugs and drug use and indirectly in the form of very costly policies. Let go the foolish conceit that we can outlaw the dangers of drugs by simply outlawing drugs.