About 15 years ago I wrote a commentary that was published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch in response to a shooting that occurred in my neighborhood. The shooting involved several St. Louis City Police officers who were responding to a call at a home where there happened to be a couple of undercover St. Louis Police officers working a drug case. While I wasn’t there, apparently what happened was that the two undercover officers were shot multiple times by the officers responding to the call.
The local news led with the official version of the story and only later did it seep out that the undercover agents had attempted to identify themselves, but that the St. Louis City Police had basically shot first and asked questions later.
After the story broke, “For Sale” signs started popping up throughout my neighborhood, which was already having difficulty. After the truth came out about the shooting, I started to question why this had happened? Was it truly necessary for the cops to come in guns a blazing? Should the undercover narcotics agents have been there in the first place.
I broke out my old college economics books and read some articles that had been published by any number of respected economists. The conclusion that I came to was that this tragedy should have and could have been averted.
If our society would do the math and realize that drug prohibition ends up costing us much more than it would end up costing us if we would approach drug abuse as a medical and cultural problem as opposed to a law enforcement problem.
It basically boils down to the laws of supply and demand. That is; as the price of an item goes up, people will demand less of it and if the price of at item goes down, people will demand more of it.
Different items are affected differently. Commodities (such as a bushel of wheat) are considered to be almost perfectly “inelastic”. That is, the markets are so big and the item is so generic that there is no reason to pay above the “going” price.
Medicines (such as insulin) are much more elastic. That’s because if you need an item in order to live (or in the case of illicit drugs, to get your high) you’ll pay whatever the going rate is in order to get your medicine (or buzz). If prices go down, you probably wouldn’t buy more insulin simply because it was cheaper. You’d buy what you needed, but that’s it.
The end result is that if you do the math and take into account ALL of the costs involved on both sides of the equation, the costs of drugs being illegal is much higher than the costs of legalizing and regulating the illicit drugs.
How About Now, Does The Math Still Hold Up?
Well, 2 + 2 still equals 4 and the laws of supply and demand haven’t changed. What has changed is that because of the country’s economic woes the costs of having drugs be illegal is higher than ever!
In Parade Magazine (Sunday March 29th, 2009 edition) Senator Jim Webb (D. Virginia) wrote a piece on prison over-crowding in which he quotes the statistic that 33% of the prison population is incarcerated due to drug offenses. If you take into account crimes that were committed in order to finance drug additions, as well as crimes that were committed because illicit drug users are relegated to fringes of society or suffer economic hardships that are due to the stigma of a felony conviction, then I’m sure that the actual percent of the prison population that could be traced back to drug prohibition would actually be much higher.
As it is, the United States of America (The Land of The Free) locks up a higher percentage of our population than any other industrialized country on earth. Much higher than countries that we tend to look down upon such as Syria and Iran! According to Senator Webb’s article, the United States currently has one out of 31 of our citizens either in jail or on supervised release from jail.
Human costs aside, locking up this high a percentage of our population ends up costing us over $68,000,000,000.00 a year! When you factor in the human costs that can be translated into dollar costs such as additional welfare payments and lost employment taxes, the cost is actually much, much higher!
Another cost that our society bears that needs to be factored in is the cost of drug interdiction. No one truly knows how much the various government entities, from country sheriffs to the DEA spend each year “fighting” illicit drugs, but I’m sure that it also is in the billions of dollars. I remember a picture that was in the paper that showed a United States Navy Ship that had “pulled over” a sail boat in order to search it for contraband. I wish that I had saved it because it perfectly illustrated the obscurity of our countries drug interdiction efforts.
Finally, the last costs that we need to factor in is the opportunity costs of not having these drugs legal and taxing them! Can you imagine how much money the government could raise if instead of knocking down pot heads front doors, they taxed what they were smoking?
Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t costs to society because people use these drugs. There are. But these costs will be incurred whether or not drugs are illegal. Think about it! Do you think that the crack head who is looking for a fix is really that bothered by the idea that what he is doing is illegal? No, he just wants to get high.
Opponents to my argument will raise the objection that if we make drugs legal then more people will then do drugs. The fact of the matter is that this simply isn’t true. While there will be “some” additional people who will experiment, the demand curve that we discussed at the beginning of this article shows us that as drugs become more available (and the costs drop due to) the numbers won’t increase all that much!
All told, now is the time for the government to get out of the drug prohibition business! Accept reality as it is and not as you want it to be. People have always used illicit drugs and will continue to do so. We’re bearing the costs of the drug problem one way or the other. By doing away with prohibition, we can lower these costs and actually do more to help those who are addicted!
R.B. “Bob” Mitchell
