NOT MY PROBLEM :

Cocaine, Marijuana, and Heroin (Robert MacCoun and Peter Reuter, 6.3.02, American Prospect)

What would actually happen if drugs were legalized in America? For the last decade advocates of such a course, though politically weak, have dominated the intellectual debate for the simple reason that their criticism of existing policy holds a great deal of truth. The most conspicuous harms associated with drugs nowadays--violent crime, public disorder, government corruption, and diseases related to injection with dirty needles--are caused in large part by the country's prohibition policies.

But it's quite a leap from this critique to the conclusion that the best way to eliminate harms is to eliminate prohibition; the story is far more complicated. A decade of study presented in our book, Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places has convinced us that legalization of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin would lead to large reductions in drug-related crime and mortality, but also to large increases in drug use and addiction. Poor urban minority communities, which have been devastated by drug violence and drug imprisonments, might benefit substantially, but the larger body of middle-class Americans would likely be moderately worse off. It's impossible to persuasively quantify any of these effects, but in the face of this certainty (about the directions of change) and uncertainty (about magnitudes), it's much less clear than legalization advocates generally acknowledge just what American drug policy should be.

It was mystifying a couple years ago when people referred to the movies Traffic and Requiem for a Dream as being critical of the war on drugs. Each showed peoples' lives being destroyed by drugs. Was that really supposed to show us that they should be more accessible? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2002 7:25 AM