Everything in life is a balancing act. How much gain verses how much pain. Positives weighed against negatives. If a person needs a job badly enough, that person will put up with long commutes, backstabbing coworkers, an incompetent bullying boss and low pay. But if the cons keep piling up with no increase in pros, eventually this person will quit. The same thing holds true with an entire country. Countries are just slower on the uptake as a whole than most individuals. And if ever there were a policy that illustrated negatives out-wieghing positives more starkly than the War on Drugs, you would have to go back more than a generation to find it.
According to the FBI: “Law enforcement made more arrests for drug abuse violations (an estimated 1.8 million arrests, or 13.0 percent of the total number of arrests) than for any other offense in 2007.” And the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that states had 253,300 people incarcerated in 2005 for drug offences but only 19,000 in 1980. There is also a study by Jeffrey A. Miron, Department of Economics, Harvard University, which states:
This report examines the budgetary implications of legalizing drugs.
• The report estimates that legalizing drugs would save roughly $44.1 billion per year in
government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. $30.3 billion of this savings
would accrue to state and local governments, while $13.8 billion would accrue to the
federal government. Approximately $12.9 billion of the savings would results from
legalization of marijuana, $19.3 billion from legalization of cocaine and heroin, and
$11.6 from legalization of other drugs.
• The report also estimates that drug legalization would yield tax revenue of $32.7 billion
annually, assuming legal drugs are taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and
tobacco. Approximately $6.7 of this revenue would result from legalization of
marijuana, $22.5 billion from legalization of cocaine and heroin, and $3.5 from
legalization of other drugs.
• Whether drug legalization is a desirable policy depends on many factors other than the
budgetary impacts discussed here. Rational debate about drug policy should nevertheless
consider these budgetary effects.
• The estimates provided here are not definitive estimates of the budgetary implications of
a legalized regime for currently illegal drugs. The analysis employs assumptions that
plausibly err on the conservative side, but substantial uncertainty remains about the
magnitude of the budgetary impacts.
Now, with all those arrests and all those incarcerations, statistically we have about the same percentage of people using as we did in 1980. So, this approach has obliviously not worked, to say the least. And if the policy has not worked, then the positives are nil, (at least for society as a whole, not individuals who profit from prohibition).
With no positives, weighed against the negatives of just the financial costs, it should be enough to end the War on Drugs; especially when a person considers it is oxymoronic to call a country free, and then dictate what an adult does to themselves in the privacy of his or her home. But the negatives extend far beyond wasted tax dollars. Each person incarcerated not only loses his or her freedom, but also is often sexually or physically abused, can no longer get a suitable job after release, (which sometimes leads to real crime) and many times does drugs in prison. The family of the incarcerated person is also affected in major ways that cannot always be measured, like the effect of not having a parent around during formative years of the children. And how many thousands of lives have been lost due gang wars in American cities? And now the thousands killed in Mexico due to this drug war is shocking the world. How many have to die before people say ‘enough?’
The reactionaries have dominated this debate in congress and the media long enough. It’s time to honestly weigh the pros and cons in the War on Drugs.
Links added on edit:
http://leap.cc/dia/miron-economic-report.pdfhttp://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/corrtyptab.htmhttp://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm
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