Drugs

If all drugs were legal, addicts would no longer pay black-market prices to criminals for drugs of questionable and dangerous origin. They would get drugs produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies and pay market prices. They would no longer die from buying toxic drugs, and they would no longer have to mug innocent people to support their habits Understandably, many Americans fear that with no drug laws, we would have hundreds of thousands of addicts, crack babies, children trying drugs, and other evils. But that"s what we have now. The prohibition of drugs is the worst solution for preventing abuse. Firstly, it brings about a black market that is corrupt and costs human lives. Secondly, it constrains people who wouldn't abuse drugs. Thirdly, prohibiting drugs is expensive. If it legalized drugs, the United States could save $85 billion to $90 billion per year. Roughly half that is spent on the current drugs policy and half that is lost in taxes that the state could have levied on legal drugs. Prohibition leads to violence. By making a black market inevitable, you generate violence because the conflicts between the parties involved in the drug trade can't be solved by legal means within the judicial system. They are forced into a twilight world in which they have to shoot each other instead of hiring lawyers and taking the matter to court. There are studies that show the level of violence is reduced when the state leaves the drug trade alone, the reason being that the drug dealers have fewer disputes. The latest evidence from Mexico confirms that. Of course there has been drug-related violence there for a long time. But the violence didn't escalate and increase sharply in scale until the president, Felipe Calder"n, declared the big war on drugs in 2006. We have calculated that the murder rate in the US could fall by around 25 percent if drugs were legal. If all drugs were legal, addicts would no longer pay black-market prices to criminals for drugs of questionable and dangerous origin. They would get drugs produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies and pay market prices. They would no longer die from buying toxic drugs, and they would no longer have to mug innocent people to support their habits. If all drugs were legal, addicts could seek help by going to doctors no longer afraid of being prosecuted for their medical problems. If all drugs were legal, criminal drug dealers would no longer be on our streets. They couldn"t compete with the low, free-market prices for drugs sold at pharmacies. If all drugs were legal, criminal drug dealers would no longer prey upon our children " any more than distilleries and breweries try to infiltrate schools to hook kids on alcohol. Consumption of the more harmless drugs would probably increase. And there would be a larger number of people who occasionally take a drug. But when single malt whiskey became legal again after the prohibition of alcohol in the US ended, the whole country didn't become addicted to single malt. If all drugs were legal, our prisons would be emptied of hundreds of thousands of non-violent people who have never done harm to anyone else. No longer would over-crowded prisons cause truly violent criminals to be free on early release and plea bargains to terrorize the rest of us. If all drugs were legal, law-enforcement resources would be available to fight violent crime, instead of being used to chase people who may harm themselves but are no threat to us. If all drugs were legal, much of the street violence would end " as it did when Alcohol Prohibition ended " because gangs of thugs would no longer be fighting over drug territories. If all drugs were legal, police corruption would diminish, because criminals could no longer use black-market drug money to gain immunity by subverting weak policemen. If all drugs were legal, the government could no longer use the Drug War as an excuse to tear up the Bill of Rights and pry into your bank account, strip-search you at an airport, tear your car apart, monitor your e-mail, or seize your property without even charging you with a crime. Why do I think America would be like this if all drugs were legal? Because that"s the way it was before the drug laws were passed. Yes, there were people whose lives were destroyed by drugs then " just as some people today destroy their lives with drugs, alcohol, financial mistakes, or various character weaknesses " but far fewer people lost their lives to drugs when they were legal. And America"s streets were peaceful. Has America changed since then? Of course it has. But cause-and-effect relationships don"t change. Force still begets force. Government programs still lead to unintended and destructive consequences. Re-legalizing drugs would put a stop to those destructive consequences " end the criminal black market, end the violence, end the incentive to hook children, and end the production of toxic drugs that kill people. We have to quit being afraid of the unknown, and instead recognize what we do know " that the Drug War is doing enormous harm to society. If we care about our children, if we care about our cities, if we care about our country, we have to end the insane War on Drugs.