“[T]he violence associated with drugs, both by users to support their habit and by gangs supplying the drugs, is a product of prohibition.”

The theory was the picture of simplicity. Any problems from drugs, drug dealing, and drug use could be put to rest with one core strategy: launch America’s second great adventure with Prohibition and “make America drug-free.”

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Accordingly, America adopted the landmark U.S. Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 that organized drug policy around one utopian strategy: “It is the declared policy of the United States to create a Drug-Free America by 1995.”

 

Both major political parties gave overwhelming support to the Drug-Free America strategy, and scant pushback was heard from any quarters but one. Informed economists warned that this Drug Prohibition would not only fail in its declared policy to create a drug-free America but (1) worsen the drug problem itself and (2) create an ocean of other serious harms, including runaway violent crime. 

 

Led by Dr. Milton Friedman, these alarmed economists insisted this new Prohibition would spawn the same kinds of lethal outcomes as Alcohol Prohibition, though likely worse. Their dire warnings can be summarized in four propositions.

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• Prohibition would drive drugs into a criminal underground and be the opposite of drug control. Drugs would be worse, drug trade would be more violent, and all control would rest with cartels and gangs that would grow wealthier and more murderous in the competition to succeed in the illegal drug trade.
   

• Prohibition would increase overdose deaths as the drugs manufactured in this unregulated criminal underground became more potent, toxic, contaminated, and unknowable.
   

• Prohibition would come at extraordinary costs in violence, crime, erosion of constitutional liberties, and ceding of power and obscene profits to cartels.
   

• Prohibition would block effective control measures, such as the ones America was able to use in successfully reclaiming control over alcohol only after Alcohol Prohibition was abandoned in 1933.

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In short, these knowledgeable and alarmed economists warned Drug Prohibition would produce exactly the opposite effects of what the politicians were claiming.

 

Well, what does the half-century of excruciating evidence show?