Why Not Keep Drugs Illegal?

To balance Radley’s anti-drug-war piece I linked to earlier, the Culture11 site also includes a piece by David Freddoso arguing that we should “Keep Drugs Illegal!” He makes a better argument than you usually hear, but it doesn’t really hold up.

Freddoso’s first argument is a relatively new one. He asserts that eliminating the War on Drugs won’t eliminate street violence the way drug legalizers claim because criminals will just move on to something else:

The cause of criminal violence is not drugs or alcohol but rather criminals. To believe otherwise is to expect every drug dealer in America to give up and apply for a job at McDonald’s or WalMart the day legalization occurs. Every society contains a sizable element whose members refuse to make an honest living under any circumstances. The legalization of drugs will not change this large-scale reality of human behavior.

I doubt that most of these people are refusing an honest living. They’re just looking for an easy way to earn an easy living, and unlike most of us, they aren’t worried if it’s illegal.

Also, don’t knock those jobs at McDonald’s and WalMart. Entry-level drug dealers—corner crews and such—usually earn less than minimum wage. This is one reason why corner kids are always kids: Once they get older, many of them can find decent jobs that are less hazardous.

For now, many societal malefactors have the option of selling or trafficking drugs. But their real trade is to profit from the unwillingness of others to take the risks involved in illegal activity. Think of drug legalization, then, as a new government regulation on the drug dealer. It removes the illegality, and therefore much of the profit, from his trade. Experience suggests that such changes in government policy motivate economic actors to find loopholes. For the drug dealer or supplier, that means finding some new illegal activity through which to cash in on one’s tolerance for the risks of crime.

Suppose every bit of this is true, that if the illegal drug trade goes away, the criminal underclass will just find something else to do that is equally violent and illegal. This may mean that legalizing drugs won’t make the violence go away, but by the same argument, winning the war on drugs won’t make the violence go away either. In that case, let’s take the path that’s cheaper and less destructive to civil liberties. Let’s legalize drugs.

Freddoso goes on to list a bunch of horrible crimes that drug dealers could turn to, from money laundering to trafficking in conflict diamonds(!). Of course, the crime of money laundering is another part of the war on drugs—if legalization takes the money out of drug dealing, what will there be to launder?

Criminals don’t have to wait for drug legalization to move into those other areas, they could do that now. They must be dealing drugs because it’s their preferred way to make money. If we eliminate the profits from illegal drugs, it will force some criminals to fall back to their second-best illegal option. Since this is by definition not as desirable, a few of them will get out of the game.

Freddoso’s second argument is more familar:

Despite the wishful thinking of its proponents, drug legalization would result in broader drug use, and for exactly the same reasons a legal narcotics market tends to reduce the size of an illegal one–lower prices, greater convenience, more reliable supply, and far more security in one’s transactions. A great number of weighty disincentives to drug use would disappear. Many people who do not currently know how or where to obtain drugs would continue to abstain, but many others would want to try them.

I agree with every bit of that. Legalizing drugs would lower their cost, and people buy more of something when it’s cheaper. But then Freddoso missteps:

As with alcohol, minors would find it much easier to obtain drugs if they were legal.

I’m not so sure of that. Alcohol is sold by licensed businesses, whereas illegal drugs are sold by criminals. Who do you think is more likely to sell to a child?

Freddoso continues:

Drug use itself–not just the drug trade–has enormous social costs in the form of crime, homelessness, and an increase in demand for taxpayer-funded social services. Wider drug use would inevitably exacerbate these costs.

That doesn’t necessarily follow. A lot of the social problems of illegal drugs are due to the environment created by drug prohibition. Eliminate the poor quality control, the variable purity, the adulterants, the non-sterile needles, and the high dosage characteristic of illegal drugs, and you greatly reduce the direct harm from drug use. Also, you don’t see users of legal drugs stealing from their families to finance their habit. It just isn’t that expensive.

That brings the argument to alcohol, where Freddoso’s argument careens completely out of control:

The worst arguments for drug legalization compare hard drugs to alcohol, as though alcohol were as addictive or as destructive as heroin, crack, or crystal meth, or as though hard drugs had the same social benefits that countless millions of responsible drinkers enjoy without incident.

Our history with alcohol shows that legalizing a drug encourages milder forms of the drug to enter (or re-enter) the market. Legalizing alcohol did not lead to liquor stores selling gallon jugs of moonshine and bathtub gin. Similarly, we can expect that, for example, legalized cocaine will not be sold in crack bottles. We’d probably see a return to a time when people could ask the bartender to punch up their drinks with a pinch of cocaine. Allowing Coca-Cola to be the real thing (again) is not a recipe for a social disaster.

To be sure, neither a health risk nor a possible ill effect is necessarily grounds for creating any prohibition in law. But some prohibitions are reasonable and should be kept in place. Even the staunchest libertarian expects government to protect him from precisely the sort of bodily harm that certain drugs–specially meth–have a long history of facilitating.

I think Freddoso doesn’t know many libertarians. The “staunchest libertarian” most certainly does not want the government to protect him from knowingly taking dangerous drugs. He doesn’t even want the government to use his tax money to stop other people from taking dangerous drugs.

Sigh. The anti-drug authorities have been telling us horror stories about every drug they’ve ever made illegal. But let’s just say that this time I’m willing to believe that they’re not telling lies. Maybe crystal meth really is as bad as they say.

Fair enough. So let’s keep crystal meth illegal. Hell, let’s keep crack cocaine illegal too. Now could we stop ruining people’s lives over all those other drugs that aren’t anywere near that bad?

Update: Kip takes issue with Freddoso’s argument that there will always be criminals, and he’s not as nice about it as I am.