A Bad Argument Against Drug Legalization That I Keep Seeing

I keep encountering a very bad argument against drug legalization. I have pointed out before that there is no need to have legal penalties for the use or sale of drugs because you can accomplish any degree of deterrence less harmfully with a punitive tax or a requirement of licensure for drug users. L

The pushback I hear goes something like: I don’t think the tax would be a strong enough deterrent.

This is nonsense, of course. The tax can be set arbitrarily high. Does doubling the price not work? Fine, then triple it. Or quadruple it. Or increase it tenfold. This scale goes all the way up to eleven.

Or you can make the “recreational drug use licensure” more onerous. Make the form slightly more obnoxious to fill out, turn it from a half-day session to a full-day session, or a week-long session.  

In this, I feel kind of like Scott Sumner. If I understand him correctly, he keeps making the point that the Fed can print a lot more money if it wants to, but for whatever reason lacks the political will to do so. They have a continuously adjustable lever, but for some reason they forbear to adjust it beyond some threshold. Just so with drug taxes and licensure. If the penalty is too small, increase it. (I don’t think anyone can plausibly argue that we lack the political will to increase vice taxes. The popular answer to “How much should we tax cigarettes?” is always “More!”, rather than settling on some "correct" tax rate.)

I'll concede that the objection isn’t totally insane. If the penalty is set too high, you end up pushing people back to the black market. Some states are seeing this with marijuana. They have set their taxes a little too high, and the black market thus maintains a significant market share. Presumably a licensure requirement would similarly push people to the black market.

I think this isn’t so worrying. For one thing, the black market is much cleaner in this scenario, because the supply is diverted from a legal market with modern production standards and regulation (granting for that sake of argument that the latter are helpful). Also, we can always still penalize those people going to the black market for their supply. If necessary, “traditional” law-enforcement style drug prohibition is still around, with the harassment of motorists and jailing/ticketing of users. It’s just very much circumscribed.

I’ve seen this objection pop up in a few places, and it always strikes me as silly. It’s like saying, “We can’t build a fence to keep out intruders, because the fence wouldn’t be high enough.” So build a higher fence, silly.

None of this is to say I actually support punitively high taxes on recreational drugs. It’s just that if your goal is deterrence, there are far more compassionate and less socially destructive ways to achieve it. The only reason to opt for full-blown prohibition is that you actually enjoy violence or get some kind of sick thrill out of hurting people.