The D'Alliance: Personal Views on Drug Policy

How the World Would be Better Without the War on Drugs

Monday, May 11, 2009

Before we talk about all the harms that the drug war has created I think that it is important to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the fact that the 'war on drugs' has accomplished nothing. In order to do this we need to take a look at the goals surrounding the war on drugs. Broadly stated these goals are first to alleviate the social ills associated with drug use, and second to disrupt the supply and/or demand surrounding illicit drugs. The drug war has failed in both of these efforts and in many instances has made things worse.

Let me start off by stating what I will not argue about here. I am not going argue about the effects that drug abuse can have on an individual, his family and friends. It's not that I don't care about those issues, but frankly these points can actually further the argument for legalization. So for the sake of simplicity, let's just pretend that the propaganda about drugs is all true. So now that we all tentatively agree that drugs cause problems, let's see what the war on drugs does to combat these ill effects.

Let's paint the typical scenario according to the PR campaigns of the war on drugs, DARE, and Above the Influence. Life is a perfect Garden of Eden, and then out of left field someone, lets just call him Mr. Bill, discovers drugs. So Mr. Bill starts doing drugs and some of his friends want some too, and so he gets some drugs for them. Because they all did drugs, now Mr. Bill and his friends are all lazy, poor, out of shape, out of work, and mentally ill. Now their lives are ruined unless they get help. If the war on drugs actually addressed the social ills of drugs, it would spend money helping people like Mr. Bill get off drugs. Instead, the help offered by the drug war according to both DARE, and Above the Influence campaigns is incarceration.

The argument that, "the war on drugs gets people back on track," is a croc of shit. Incarcerating Mr. Bill essentially amounts to kicking him while he's down. Society is actually harmed by this conviction in several ways, because prison, criminal records, and court fees are just the beginning. Imagine if Mr. Bill had a kid, or a wife, or elderly parents to support. There are countless ways that things could be worse, and indeed things are just about to get really ugly for Mr. Bill. The strategy through which the criminal justice system deals with drug dealers and drug addicts in no way positively impacts social ills, but what about the second goal of disrupting supply or demand.

If the War on Drugs was working in anyway whatsoever we would see at least one of three things happen. We would see a reduction in supply (or production), a decrease in demand (or consumption), or an increase in price(or decrease in purity). To be clear, I am not saying that all three of these must be observed for the war to be considered working, but just one (and it must be statistically significant). This is not a lot to ask in return for the billions we spend each year, stigmatizing, investigating, incarcerating, and even killing the people we hold responsible for this black market. Just one aspect of any of those effects and I'll say, okay the drug war might be doing something.

Much to the dismay of prohibitionists, the most recent report by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime states that drug production has been up across the board from 1990 to the present. The report cites that opium and cocaine prices are down more than half of what they were in 1990. In addition, while no data was provided on cannabis or meth prices (probably because it's embarrassing), the report does cite that purity is up for cannabis and drug use has gone up or stayed the same across the board. So to recap, drug prices have either gone down or stayed the same, the supply has increased (production is up) and demand(use) has gone up or stayed the same.

From this data we can conclude that thus far, the 'War on Drugs' has had no effect on either the supply or demand of these narcotics. In addition, we can see from how law enforcement addresses drug addiction and dealers that no social ills of drug use have been alleviated. This necessarily leads us to the conclusion that the drug war has totally and completely failed.

Next time I'll explore the social costs of the "War on Drugs". Space permitting, I plan on writing about how the war fosters distrust of the justice department and law enforcement, as well as the erosion of civil rights.

One Love

All of my data was taken from the 2008 UNODC World Drug Report which you can take a look at here,
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/WDR.html