Counting the Costs of the Drug War
The costs of the war in Iraq can be measured daily in
deaths, injuries and decreasing support for U.S.
policies. But how do you measure the costs of
America’s other war – the war on drugs?
Each year, the U.S. government spends more than $30
billion on the drug war and arrests more than 1.5
million people on drug-related charges. More than
318,000 people are now behind bars in the U.S. for
drug violations. This is more than the total number of
people incarcerated for all crimes in the United
Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined.
At a May 6 forum sponsored by the Independent
Institute, an Oakland, California, think tank,
analysts tried to quantify the real costs of drug war.
Have these efforts actually deterred drug abuse or
reduced crime? Boston University economist Jeffrey A.
Miron, who spoke at the forum, applied an economic
analysis to determine whether drug prohibition is a
more effective public policy than legalization – which
would tax and regulate drugs. Miron, author of the new
book Drug War Crimes, says the true costs of
prohibition should be measured not just by the
billions of dollars spent for enforcement of drug
laws, but the overall impact on drug consumption,
crime, public health and unseen moral consequences.
One of the major goals of prohibition is to increase
the cost of drugs and thereby reduce demand and drug
consumption. But Miron says this approach has failed.
He points out that the price of drugs has actually
fallen by 80% in the past 25 years. Despite millions
of drug arrests, Miron says prohibition has had a
relatively small effect on both the supply and
consumption of drugs. He says the government’s claims
of a fifty percent drop in consumption due to
prohibition are exaggerated. “Prohibition reduces
access of drugs to some people, but there is no
evidence that suggests a large effect,” says Miron.
Miron also disputes claims by the federal Office of
National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) that drug use
makes people violent and contributes to crime. He says
prohibition increases violence because people involved
in the drug trade have no recourse to the legal system
to settle their disputes and are more likely to settle
it themselves with force. “There is no evidence that
merely consuming drugs makes you go out and do
criminal things,” says Miron.
Throughout history, Miron says periods of escalating
violence have been sparked by attempts to prohibit
certain commodities such as drugs, alcohol, gambling
or prostitution. In instances where prohibition does
increase the cost of drugs, he says drug users are
more likely to steal or rob to pay for drugs. Police
efforts to curtail violence are often diverted to
enforcing drug laws.
Miron also notes that the drug trade enriches only the
sellers, who are exempt from paying taxes on their
products or minimum wages to workers. Drug sellers are
not required to engage in quality control, which leads
to more overdoses and accidental poisonings, says
Miron. And he notes that there are other social
consequences that make prohibition more costly than
the legalization. “Because prohibition is a victimless
crime, there is strong incentive for police to impede
civil liberties and do racial profiling,” he says.
Miron adds that resistance to needle exchange programs
under prohibition also increases the spread of HIV.
The effects of drug use on third parties such as
unborn children or those involved in drug-related
traffic accidents are exaggerated, says Miron, and not
significantly different from the negative effects of
alcohol or forgoing sleep for late-night TV. As for
those who think that drugs are inherently immoral,
Miron argues that the concurrent violence, damage to
civil liberties and decreased respect for law which
follows prohibition have a larger negative moral
impact on people who are innocent bystanders to the
drug war. According to Miron, the paternalistic
attitude that people need to be protected from
themselves opens a Pandora’s box of government
intervention.
“There is no reason to think that the benefits of
reducing myopic drug use balances the costs that
prohibition places on society,” says Miron. “The best
policy is to legalize drugs and do it sooner rather
than later.”
The Drug War Crimes forum also looked at the impact of
prohibition on police forces. Joseph McNamara, former
police chief of San Jose and now a research fellow at
the Hoover Institution, says police have been greatly
influenced by federal escalation of the drug war. He
says financially strapped local police departments now
receive significant funding and much of their training
from federal officials who encourage them to continue
to make drug arrests. “It is a jihad, it is a holy war
you have to fight,” says McNamara.
McNamara says local police are also encouraged by city
officials to seize the assets of suspected drug
criminals to fund their departments. “In San Jose when
I was given zero dollars in the budget they said ‘you
guys seized four million dollars last year, I expect
you to do better this year,”‘ says McNamara.
McNamara says police are under pressure from citizen
groups who worry about the impact of open outdoor drug
markets on children in the neighborhood. He emphasized
that these concerns cannot be dismissed. But he says
current drug policies have vastly increased police
corruption, and created a culture of “gangster cops.”
Protected by a code of silence and supported by an
attitude from top officials that police should not be
impeded in their duties, McNamara says prohibition
gives rise to a range of police abuses. McNamara says
this has been illustrated in series of police
corruption scandals including one at his former
employer, the New York City Police Department.
Investigators there, he said, found that narcotics
officers had been robbing drug dealers and stealing
their drugs. Confronted by the reality that the
country is still flooded with drugs, he says police
sometimes develop the attitude that “it’s hopeless we
can’t do anything about it, why shouldn’t we all
benefit.”
Despite the impact on prohibition on the stability of
social institutions, the US government rarely looks at
the unintended consequences of the drug war, says
Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy
Alliance (DPA). “The absence of critical analysis on
the part of the administration and Congress is worse
now than ever,” says Nadelmann who once worked for the
US State Department analyzing the laundering of drug
money.
Nadelmann says the DPA has been building a political
movement to shift public opinion concerning drug
prohibition. “We want to end prohibition as we know it
and reduce the harms of drugs,” says Nadelmann.
“Nobody should be punished in any way for what we put
in our bodies, that should be a fundamental human
right and is sound public policy.”
According to Nadelmann, one of the greatest concerns
about drug legalization is “loss of control.” He says
that the government’s prohibition policies have
resulted in greater overall loss of control and
regulation and taxation of drugs is the answer to this
concern. Since the majority of drug arrests take place
for marijuana, he says the dismantling of prohibition
has started there. He says the DPA has taken the
initiative to the states and helped support the
passage of state medical marijuana laws and asset
forfeiture reform. DPA also helped pass California’s
Prop. 36 which significantly reduced the number of
people sent to jail for drug crimes by offering
treatment as an alternative.
Nadelmann noted that countries with more permissive
drug laws have not seen an increase in drug use. When
an audience at the panel asked about age limits on
drug access, Miron says there was support for age
limits such as that which exist for alcohol and
cigarettes. But he noted that children would still get
access, as they do now to both drugs and alcohol, and
it is important that these concerns be addressed by
families.
Nadelmann says the marijuana reform movement mirrors
the gay rights movement in that it is pushed forward
by those who put a human face on the issue by coming
out of the closet as marijuana smokers. He says this
had helped shift public opinion in which 41% of those
polled support the idea that marijuana should be taxed
and regulated with numbers approaching 50% in Nevada
and Alaska.
As an increasing number of states take steps toward
regulating medical cannabis, Nadelmann says the next
question will be “what is medical?” He notes that some
people use cannabis to generate the same effect as
Viagra, to treat depression, or to relax at the end of
the day as one would with a cocktail.
According to Nadelmann, the next evolutionary step in
the repeal of drug prohibition is the Oakland Cannabis
Initiative, a ballot initiative in Oakland, Calif.
which would make marijuana enforcement the lowest
police enforcement priority and support a statewide
effort to tax and regulate the drug. Supporters of the
initiative are still gathering signatures to place it
on the November ballot.
Another challenge for those who wish to overturn drug
prohibition is to end policies that encourage the
hatred of those who consume or distribute drugs.
McNamara notes that under prohibition, these people
are not only imprisoned, but they have property
confiscated, driver’s licenses taken away and are cut
off from access to educational funding. These
measures, says McNamara, violate the right of
Americans to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. He reminded the audience at the Drug War
Crimes forum that the first laws supporting drug
prohibition were put in place in 1914 by
“fundamentalist groups who inserted their concept of
sin into the penal code.”
“It is not up to the government to tell us what rights
they will dole out to us,” said McNamara as the
audience cheered. “We were born with those rights.”
Ann Harrison is a freelance reporter working in the
Bay Area.
