Should Weed Be Legal?

[RichardGv]

I did intend to write something original, yet unfortunately I have read a much persuasive article about legalization of drugs beforehand, so I'm just going to quote it instead. It's an interview with Milton Friedman, the famed American economist, about drugs.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/misc/friedm1.htm

Here's a summary of his points, in my understanding: (Well, it's not really brief at all, but much shorter than the original version so it saves your time.)

• Prohibition of drugs actually raises the amount of the addicted:
  
  Under prohibition of alcohol, deaths from alcohol poisoning, from poisoning by things that were mixed in with the bootleg alcohol, went up sharply. Similarly, under drug prohibition, deaths from overdose, from adulterations, from adulterated substances have gone up.
  
  During the Prohibition of alcohol, Friedman recalled, "Alcohol was readily available. Bootlegging was common. Any idea that alcohol prohibition was keeping people from drinking was absurd. Anybody with two eyes could see that this was a bad deal...".
  
  
• Some years ago, Alaska legalized marijuana. Consumption of marijuana among high school students in Alaska went DOWN. The Dutch, in Holland, do not prosecute soft drugs, like marijuana, and they would prefer not to prosecute hard drugs, but they feel impelled by the international obligations they've entered into, and consumption of marijuana by young people has gone down. And, equally more interesting, the average age of the users of hard drugs has gone up, which means they're not getting any more new recruits.[/i]
  
  
• Prohibition of drugs encourages the invention of more additive forms of drugs:
  
  ...if you legalized, you destroy the black market, the price of drugs would go down drastically. ... The effect of criminalization, of making drugs criminal, is to drive people from mild drugs to strong drugs. ... Marijuana is a very heavy, bulky substance and, therefore, it's relatively easy to interdict. The warriors on drugs have been more successful interdicting marijuana than, let's say, cocaine. So, marijuana prices have gone up, they've become harder to get. There's been an incentive to grow more potent marijuana and people have been driven from marijuana to heroin, or cocaine, or crack.
  
  Crack cocaine, the most additive form of cocaine, is created because: "The preferred method of taking cocaine, which I understand was by sniffing it, snorting it, became very expensive and they were desperate to find a way of packaging cocaine..."
  
  
• In fact, the most addictive drug everybody acknowledges is tobacco.
  
  
• The government should never interfere one's decision if it does not hurt anybody else:
  
  The person who decides to take drugs for himself is not an innocent victim. He has chosen himself to be a victim. And I must say I have very much less sympathy for him. I do not think it is moral to impose such heavy costs on other people to protect people from their own choices.
  
  The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill Said in the middle of the 19th century in "On Liberty." The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Govern- ment, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it's in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they'll do you harm, why isn't it all right to say you must not eat too much because you'll do harm? Why isn't it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you're likely to die? Why isn't it all right to say, "Oh, skiing, that's no good, that's a very dangerous sport, you'll hurt yourself"? Where do you draw the line?
  
  
  
• The government converts normal people to criminals and destroy their lives by prohibiting drugs:
  
  I have estimated statistically that the prohibition of drugs produces, on the average, ten thousand homicides a year. It's a moral problem that the government is going around killing ten thousand people. It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users.
  
  Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.
  
  
• The amount of crack babies is smaller than those defect babies caused by alcohol, and prohibition of drugs prevents them from being properly treated:
  
  ...it isn't that crack babies are necessarily addicted, but they tend to come in at low birth weight, they tend to come in mentally impaired, and so on. But you know that the number who do that from alcohol is much greater. So, the same problem arises there. That's what bothers me.
  
  Now suppose you legalized. Under current circumstances, a mother who is a crack addict and is carrying a baby is afraid to go the prenatal treatment because she turned herself into a criminal, she's subject to being thrown in jail. Under legalized drugs, that inhibition would be off. And, you know, even crack addicts, mothers, have a feeling of responsibility to their children.
  
  And I have no doubt that under those circumstances, it would be possible to have a much more effective system of prenatal care, a much more effective system of trying to persuade people who are on drugs not to have children or to go off drugs while they have children.
  
  
• Prohibition of drugs creates enormous amount of victims:
  
  There are an enormous number of innocent victims now. You've got the people whose purses are stolen, who are bashed over the head by people trying to get enough money for their next fix. You've got the people killed in the random drug wars. You've got the corruption of the legal establishment. You've got the innocent victims who are taxpayers who have to pay for more and more prisons, and more and more prisoners, and more and more police. You've got the rest of us who don't get decent law enforcement because all the law enforcement officials are busy trying to do the impossible.
  
  And, last, but not least, you've got the people of Colombia and Peru and so on. What business do we have destroying and leading to the killing of thousands of people in Colombia because we cannot enforce our own laws? If we could enforce our laws against drugs, there would be no market for these drugs. You wouldn't have Colombia in the state it's in.
  
  ...
  
  The violence (surrounding the drug trade) is due to prohibition and nothing else. How much violence is there surrounding the alcohol trade. There's some, only because we prohibit the sale of alcohol to children, which we should do, and there's some because we impose very high taxes on alcohol and, as a result, there's some incentive for bootlegging. But there's no other violence around it.
  
  
  
• Of course, we're wasting money on it. Ten, twenty, thirty billion dollars a year, but that's trivial. We're wasting that much money in many other ways, such as buying crops that ought never to be produced.
  
  
• Prohibition of drugs causes monopolies in the industry, thus effectively protecting the big drug traders:
  
  What do I mean by that? In an ordinary free market--let's take potatoes, beef, anything you want--there are thousands of importers and exporters. Anybody can go into the business. But it's very hard for a small person to go into the drug importing business because our interdiction efforts essentially make it enormously costly. So, the only people who can survive in that business are these large Medellin cartel kind of people who have enough money so they can have fleets of airplanes, so they can have sophisticated methods, and so on.
  
  In addition to which, by keeping goods out and by arresting, let's say, local marijuana growers, the government keeps the price of these products high. What more could a monopolist want? He's got a government who makes it very hard for all his competitors and who keeps the price of his products high. It's absolutely heaven.
  
  
• It makes the teens more likely to engage in drug trading:
  
  When we say to a young man in the ghetto, "Look, you get a reasonable job at McDonald's or anyplace else, you'll make five, six, seven dollars an hour. But on the other hand, here's this opportunity to peddle drugs in the street." Why does the juvenile have the opportunity? Because the law is easier on juveniles than it is on adults.
  
  
• It limits people's freedom eventually:
  
  Nothing scares me about the notion of drugs being legal. ... What scares me is the notion of continuing on the path we're on now, which will destroy our free society, making it an uncivilized place. There's only one way you can really enforce the drug laws currently. The only way to do that is to adopt the policies of Saudi Arabia, Singapore, which some other countries adopt, in which a drug addict is subject to capital punishment or, at the very least, having his hand chopped off. If we were willing to have penalties like that--but would that be a society you'd want to live in?
  
  
• The opposition towards legalization of drugs is driven by fake fear:
  
  Friedman: ...there are so many vested interests that have been built up behind the present drug war. Who are the people who are listened to about drugs? The people who have the obligation to enforce drug laws. They think they're doing the right thing. They're good human beings. Everybody thinks what he's doing is worth doing. Nobody is doing it for evil motives. But it's the same thing all over the government.
  
  Paige: Wouldn't you agree that fear is one of the strongest supports for the existing drug laws? Fear that, without them, the bottom would fall out.
  
  Friedman: Yes, but it's a fake fear and it's a fear that is promoted. Listen to what the former drug czar, Mr. Bennet, said. First of all, he stated that consumption of alcohol after Prohibition has gone up three or fourfold or something. He was wrong, just factually wrong. He's made all sorts of scare talk about how many new addicts there would be. He's never provided a single bit of evidence, never provided any examples of any other place or anything. But why? Because he's got a job to do.
  

And it is estimated that "Ending prohibition enforcement would save $7.7 billion in combined state and federal spending ... while taxation would yield up to $6.2 billion a year."

Well, and some extra articles about legalization of drugs from Friedman, that I have no yet read:
http://www.druglibrary.org/special/fried...iedman.htm