Really Bad Arguments Against Repealing Drug Prohibition

This will not be a comprehensive argument in favor of drug legalization, just a list of really bad whoppers I have heard and my responses to them.

“There will be a huge surge in drug use.”

This is the most obvious objection, and it’s wrong for a number of reasons. In historical cases where the legal status of a drug has been changed, you just don’t see that large a demand response. In the United States most recreational drugs have been illegal for a very long time, so it's hard to say what demand was "before" and "after." But use rates have failed to respond to massive shifts in drug enforcement efforts. Also, massive changes in use rates of any particular drug have fluctuated wildly despite there not being any change in enforcement effort. In other words, neither the legal status nor the intensity of enforcement appears to affect usage rates by much. (The empirical evidence for this is fully fleshed out in Jeffrey Miron's Drug War Crimes and also in Matthew Robinson's Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics. I'll stop there, because I don't want to list every book on my "drug policy" shelf.)

I think the people who say this are implicitly assuming that the only thing holding people back from drug use is the legal status of the drug, which is a very absurd assumption once you say it out loud. The main thing keeping people away from dangerous drugs are the inherent risks of addiction, social dysfunction, drug-related health problems, and overdose. People who are willing to endure these risks are not much affected by adding legal risks on top of these. The people who want do use these substances are already doing them. It is absurd to think that people are undeterred by the pharmacological risks of drug use but then respond strongly to the legal risks of drug use. (Remove the words "pharmacological" and "legal" from that sentence to see the absurdity. To make drug prohibition sound like a good idea, someone has to actually square this circle.) There isn’t an enormous pent-up demand that will surge forth if the dam of drug prohibition bursts.

“Bad guys will just find something else to do.”

I first heard this one at a debate on drug legalization at my undergraduate university, and I’ve heard it a few times since. This is the kind of thing that people can only say if they have not incorporated any economics into their worldview. Proponents of drug legalization often argue that much of the violence in society is due to black market crime. (Again, see Drug War Crimes, which has an entire chapter devoted to this topic.) Drug dealers killing each other over territory, killing witnesses, killing or beating subordinates, drug users retaliating against a dealer who ripped them off, etc. There really is quite a lot of this kind of violence. It makes up a significant fraction of total murders and assaults. This becomes very clear if you look at countries like Mexico or Columbia, where the violence is almost noticeable in everyday life. It exists in the United States, too, even if to a lesser degree.  

When you make something illegal, you don’t actually stop people from producing and selling it. All you do is ensure that the most violent individuals will be in charge of production and distribution. Simply put, there are more bad guys in the world because drug prohibition has made it more lucrative to be a bad-guy. The proponents of this argument are making some kind of daffy assumption that there is a fixed number of wrong-doers, regardless of the relative costs or rewards to being a wrong-doer. Most of these people are “law-and-order” types who love heavy criminal penalties, so it is truly stunning to hear them argue that the bad guys don’t actually respond to incentives.

To anyone who is committed to this viewpoint, we legalizers happily accept your surrender. If, by your own admission, bad guys will do bad regardless of the rewards or penalties they face, legalization is a no-brainer.

I suspect that this argument is simply an ad hoc attempt to deny one of the major benefits of drug legalization, given that it’s (usually) contrary to the speaker’s actual worldview. It’s the kind of argument you get when people try to “wrack up bullet-points” rather than actually think about what they are saying.

“Drug prices won’t fall much, so you’ll still have all the economic crimes by drug users trying to finance their habit.”

I heard this one recently, and it’s new to me. It’s another ad hoc attempt to dismiss an argument in favor of drug legalization, but in fact someone who takes this position seriously is actually making an incredibly strong case for legalizing drugs. The whole purpose of drug prohibition is to make drugs so expensive (in monetary and other costs) that people stop using them. If the drug warriors are ready to admit failure on this front, once again I’d happily accept their surrender. I don’t understand how someone could still favor drug prohibition after insisting that prohibition has failed to achieve its one true objective. Nevertheless, I have heard this claim more than once, and by people who put drug "offenders" in prison. Legalizers like me sometimes make the argument that if drug prices are allowed to fall to their true market value, there will be far less property crime from addicts trying to support a habit. These people can find real jobs and live lives with normal schedules, rather than constantly seeking their next fix and stealing or "hustling" to finance it. I view the "drugs won't get cheaper" argument as a pathetic attempt to deny this benefit. 

In actual fact, drug prohibition has increased the market price of drugs. The black-market markup has been exaggerated by some writers; it’s not in the “factor of 100” range that you sometimes hear. In “The Effect of Drug Prohibition on Drug Prices: Evidence from the Markets for Cocaine and Heroin”, Jeffrey Miron concludes that the black market price of cocaine is 2-4 times the legal price and heroin is 6-19 times the legal price. Not exactly a “factor of 100” (an extreme claim that Jeffrey Miron is attempting to tone down) but still a significant financial relief for the severe addicts who spend most of their resources feeding an expensive habit.

“Drug laws are a good way to arrest real criminals when those crimes are hard to prove.”

This one is shocking to the conscience. It is pretty disturbing to hear law-and-order types suggest that drug laws allow an end-run around the constitution, and that this is a feature rather than a bug. I’m sure they have a point. If you “know” someone is a criminal, it’s probably easier to pat them down and find a baggy of drugs than to actually discover evidence of a real crime. That being said, I’m always disturbed by the confidence that law enforcement types have in their own estimates of who is or isn’t guilty. 

I dearly hope that proponents of this argument aren’t actually saying that we should make something arbitrarily illegal just so the police and prosecutors can arrest and imprison whoever they want to. I suspect this is just a throw-away, “Oh, by the way…” kind of argument. Perhaps it doesn’t, on its own, support the policy of drug prohibition, but is in some sense a mitigating factor to an otherwise bad policy. I don’t approve of this viewpoint at all. In fact, I think that too many resources are diverted from policing real crimes to policing drug crimes, and that’s part of the reason for social decay in some neighborhoods. If not for drug prohibition, there wouldn’t be so many missing young men spending time in prison, there wouldn’t be as many shattered families, and there wouldn’t be so much distrust of the police. Under those circumstances, maybe the communities could actually forge some kind of relationship with the police, and real crimes would actually get solved because of the resulting cooperation.

That's it for now. I hate to do these "fish-in-a-barrel" responses to really stupid things that I've heard. I like Scott Alexander's concept of steel-manning an argument, as in "making the argument under scrutiny as strong as possible, even if the person delivering it wasn't very articulate or reasonable." But I've heard these silly claims so I might as well respond to them and say why they're wrong. I plan to eventually do a long round-up post that unifies arguments in favor of drug legalization made in several earlier posts.