From: Jim Rosenfield <[j n r] at [igc.apc.org]>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Date: 04 Jul 94 15:01 PDT
Subject: Milton Friedman in Police News

The Same Mistake By Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate in Economics

"We seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in handling drugs"

Most crimes are not committed by people hungry for bread.  By far more
are committed by people hungry for dope.  Should we have learned a
lesson from Prohibition?  When Prohibition was enacted in 1920, Billy
Sunday, the noted evangelist and leading crusader against Demon Rum,
greeted it as follows: "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon
be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails
into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will
smile, and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."

We know now how tragically wrong he was. New prisons and jails had to he
built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of
spirits into a crime against the state. Prohibition undermined respect
for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, and created a decadent
moral climate -- and in the end did not stop the consumption of alcohol.

Despite this tragic lesson, we seem bent on repeating precisely the same
mistake in handling drugs. There is no disagreement about some of the
facts.  Excessive drinking of alcohol harms the drinker; excessive
smoking of cigarettes harms the smoker; excessive use of drugs harms the
user.  As among the three; awful as it is to make such comparisons,
there is little doubt that smoking and drinking kill far more people
than the use of drugs.

Consider first the addict.  Legalizing drugs might increase the number
of addicts, though it is not certain that it would.  Forbidden fruit is
attractive, particularly to the young.  More important, many persons are
deliberately made into drug addicts by pushers, who now give likely
prospects their first doses free.  It pays the pusher to do so because,
once hooked, the addict is a captive customer.  If drugs were legally
available, any possible profit from such inhumane activity would largely
disappear, since the addict could buy from a cheaper source.

Whatever happens to the total number of addicts and the possible
increase of that number the individual addict would clearly be far
better off if drugs were legal.  Today, drugs are both extremely
expensive and highly uncertain in quality.  Addicts are driven to
associate with criminals to get the drugs, and they become criminals
themselves to finance the habit.  They risk constant danger of death and
disease.

Consider, next, the rest of us. The harm to us from the addiction of
others arises primary from the fact that drugs are illegal.  It has been
estimated that from one third to one half of all violent and property
crime in the United States is committed either by drug addicts engaged
in crime to finance their habit, or by conflicts among competing groups
of drug pushers, or in the course of the importation and distribution of
illegal drugs.

Legalize drugs, and street crime would drop dramatically and
immediately.  Moreover, addicts and pushers are not the only ones
corrupted. Immense sums are at stake.  It is inevitable that some
relatively low-paid police and other government officials -- and some
high-paid ones as well - succumb to the temptation to pick up easy
money.

Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and
improve law enforcement.  It is hard to conceive of any other single
measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order.  But,
you may ask, must we accept defeat?  Why not simply end the drug
traffic?  That is where experience both with Prohibition and, in recent
years, with drugs is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic.

We may he able to cut off opium from Turkey - but the opium poppy grows
in innumerable other places.  With French cooperation, we may be able to
make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin, but the simple
manufacturing operations can be carried out in innumerable other places.
We may be able to persuade Mexico to spray or allow us to spray
marijuana fields with parachute - but marijuana can be grown almost
everywhere. We may be able to cooperate with Columbia to reduce the
entry of cocaine - but success is not easy to attain in a country where
the export is a large factor in the economy.

So long as large sums of money are involved - and they are bound to he
if drugs are illegal - it is literally impossible to stop the traffic,
or even to make a serious reduction in its scope.

Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of
drug-related crimes, hut also on the belief that relieving our police
and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will
enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to
combatting other forms of crime.  We would thus strike a double blow:
reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the
efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention. 

-- "excerpted from "Tyranny of the Status Quo",,V.-X@
<L3|x
The Same Mistake By Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate in Economics

"We seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in handling drugs"

Most crimes are not co