Your child scrapes his knee doing something he shouldn’t be doing on his bike. How do you respond? Nobody I know believes that the appropriate response is to punish the child. But this is exactly what paternalists do with drug prohibition. Drugs are dangerous and bad, therefore, lets make them more dangerous and bad by having men with guns come after you. Parents reserve punishment for activities that don’t punish themselves. So even from a “government know what’s best” standpoint, drug prohibition is completely backward.
The reason drug prohibitionists punish drug offenses, oftentimes severely, is because they believe it will discourage drug use. That’s fine, but minimally they have to recognize the tradeoff between that making drugs more dangerous. The death sentence will discourage drug use too, just ask Singapore, but it is hard to ignore the fact that you’re also killing people. In light of this clear-cut tradeoff, why do drug prohibitionists believe that drugs aren’t dangerous enough? It is easy to imagine that without drug prohibition everyone would become druggies, but that picture doesn’t get past the edges of their skulls. The actual evidence is that drug prohibition at most discourages a modest amount of drug use. They have to make the case for why drug users irrationally ignore the costs of the drugs themselves, but the evidence is that they irrationally ignore the prohibitory costs of drugs.
Consider a few options: A) drugs are too dangerous B) drugs aren’t dangerous enough C) drugs are just dangerous enough. The reasonable answer is A. After all, that’s the starting argument of most drug prohibitionists – talk about how bad or dangerous drugs are as if that implies we ought to make them more dangerous. It doesn’t imply that. If drugs are too dangerous, how does making it a crime help? In what world are drugs more dangerous? The world where drugs ruin your life or the world where drugs ruin your life and you’re a criminal for doing them?
Here’s the weirdest thing – drug prohibitionists want a greater added danger to more dangerous drugs. It seems if marijuana is not dangerous enough, then they would want to make it significantly more dangerous to put it in the same league as cocaine, meanwhile cocaine users should be left alone. If there is some sort of danger / discouragement sweet spot, where the costs of added danger outweigh the benefits of discouraged use, harsher penalties for harsher drugs is the wrong way of getting it. Rather, we should want harsher penalties for milder drugs.
Contrary to the make bad things worse way of thinking, we should want to reduce the harm that drugs do, even though it will likely encourage their use. If we could make sure heroine users are using clean needles we should. If we can reduce the nausea, vomiting, and itching, heroine causes, we should. If we can reduce the possibility of fatal overdose, we should. And we should want to make drug treatment more available, even though it effectively lowers the price of drug use, and we should expect more people to do drugs as a result.
What I’m ignoring: economists have a different, more rational argument for some kind of drug policy. They give externality arguments. To the extent that the cost of drugs are internalized, no public policy is required. Most of the harm of drugs is internalized, so these externality arguments (however good they are), imply a much less harsh drug policy than the popular rational which tries to price the internal costs of drugs with public policy.
