The timing of the article in the Observer, London, is probably prompted by the new leader of the Liberal Democrats in Britain, Charles Kennedy, has come out in favour of a royal commission on illicit drugs.
Is this just an argument about liberalism? or about the social management of social production? Do red-blooded socialists on this list think that cannabis consumption should be legal but it should be produced only by a state owned national monopoly of farms and manufacturers? Should the industry be restricted to petty bourgeois or third world manufacturers, or should large monopoly companies be able to market their product?
Will advertising be permitted? Will there be health warnings on the packets, and saying what? Can the products be genetically modified, considering the pharmaceutical industry is probably very interested in them? Should the product be rationed by anything other than price?
Was the Swiss model that went to referendum recently, both progressive and practical?
Does the cost-benefit analysis of legalisation also include economising on military, and "humanitarian",expenditure in a country like Colombia?
Chris Burford
London
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>From the (London) Observer
Sunday August 15, 1999
The economic case for drugs: Legalisation would cut crime and save money
Jeffrey Miron, Chairman of the Department of Economics at Boston University.
America spends at least $20 billion (£13 billion) a year on drug enforcement, and arrests more than one million people a year on drug charges. Yet, according to standard economic analysis and existing evidence, drug legalisation would be a far superior policy to drug prohibition.
Drug prohibition does not eliminate drug markets or drug use; it simply moves them underground. Prohibition raises some costs of doing business for drug suppliers, and it probably reduces demand by some consumers.
But substantial drug consumption persists even in the most repressive prohibition regimes. Data in the US suggests that more than 30 per cent of the population aged 12 and over has used marijuana, and more than 10 per cent has used cocaine. Violation of prohibition is widespread.
Prohibition increases violence, because buyers and sellers of drugs cannot use the official justice system to resolve disputes. Prohibition also plays a key role in non-violent kinds of crime, by diverting criminal justice resources from the deterrence of non-drug crime. It facilitates the corruption of police, judges and politicians, partly because huge profits are at stake, partly because the legal channels of influence are not available.
The homicide rate rose rapidly in America after 1910, when many states adopted drug and alcohol prohibition laws, and it rose through World War I and during the 1920s as efforts to enforce alcohol prohibition increased, but then fell dramatically after Prohibition's repeal in 1934. In the late 1960s, homicide again increased dramatically and stayed at historically high levels throughout the 1970s and 1980s, coinciding with a drastic increase in drug law enforcement.
Prohibition also means diminished health. In a black market, the drug users face a heightened uncertainty concerning the quality and purity of the drugs they purchase, plus an incentive to consume drugs using methods, such as injection, that are unhealthy but give the biggest bang for the buck.
During alcohol Prohibition in the US, deaths due to alcoholism rose relative to other proxies for alcohol consumption, presumably because consumption of adulterated alcohol increased.
On top of these deleterious effects, using prohibition to deter drug consumption means society cannot levy taxes on sales of drugs or collect income taxes from hose working in the drug trade. This means drug suppliers and drug users - persons deliberately breaking society's rules - gain at the expense of taxpayers generally.
The beneficial tax and expenditure effects of legalisation help explain why this policy is preferable to decriminalisation - under which small-scale possession and purchase are permitted but production and sale are still outlawed - since decriminalisation by itself does little to convert the untaxed black market for drugs into a legal, taxable one.
The budgetary implications of legalisation are likely to be substantial; estimates for the US suggest increased tax revenues of at least $3 billion a year, and perhaps as much as $17 billion. Combined with the elimination of expenditure for enforcement, this implies a net improvement in the budget of at least $23 billion a year.