To War on the War On Drugs
The war on drugs is, as presently instantiated in policy, essentially a pessimists first-order thinking on drug policy.
Imagine, hypothetically, there was a society wherein a large cohort of disillusioned people, suffering from psychological / emotional / physical pain, were engaging in a very specific type of self-destructive, albeit sedative / distracting / self-medicating, behavior. Imagine further that this cohort effectively had two options: continue living normally in society and attempting to constructively deal with their pain and disillusionment, or check-out via the escape hatch that is this aforementioned harmful / self-destructive / self-medicating / numbing behavior. Now imagine that the proposed governmental intervention to respond to this conundrum was simply this: ban the harmful behavior and criminalize all who facilitate it / engage in it.
As is obvious, this is effectively the drug war in the abstract. And as should be evident, the solution to this somewhat intricate conundrum is so base and so simplistic that even my pre-teen siblings could think of a much more nuanced policy response. It’s so simplistic that it makes you wonder if the policy makers who imposed it may have been mentally impaired by drugs themselves, and thus unable to think more robustly about addressing the issue (certainly other famous law makers in US history, such as Joseph McCarthy, were often under the influence; in Joe’s case heroin).
Banning drugs out right is first-order thinking (I’ll address the pessimistic aspect later). There is no nuance to such a policy, instead substances ranging from crack-cocaine to LSD (but also including many, many more) are placed on Schedule 1, banning them outright and denying any medical benefit to them. Furthermore, this sort of policy response fails to adequately consider and respond to the most important thing: why people are taking drugs in the first place (this relates to the pessimistic aspect I will address in a moment). Instead, a facile solution is offered, i.e. ban the drugs. Little thought or attention is given to the ramifications and unintended consequences such a heavy handed and distortionary policy might have. Failing to consider both the underlying reasons for drug use as well as the unintended consequences of prohibition has been the sine qua non of the drug war’s first-order thinking. If the situation regarding drug use in America were a patient preparing to receive surgery, then the war on drugs would be the equivalent of the surgeon foregoing a scalpel in favor of a hammer and bone-saw.
Less often discussed, though, is that the war on drugs is also a pessimistic response to the problem of drug use in society. Instead of thinking aspirationally about how things could be changed to, indirectly and by comparison, make drug use less appealing (i.e. increasing the pleasure of normal societal engagement), drug war advocates have focused their attention on how to make drug use less appealing directly (I.e. attaching punishment, pain, and stigma to drug use). While both positive and negative inducements may have their place to some extent, the disproportionate focus on making the escape hatch from society (i.e. addictive drug use) ever more painful is a rather sad approach, and reflects a pessimistic world view. No matter how bad your station in life is, we can make it worse for you if you do drugs. In effect this disproportionate focus on making drug use painful is saying that we would rather see you suffer more than figure out how to fix and ameliorate your environment so that you don’t desire to turn to drugs in the first place. This is an oversimplification and not representative of all advocates of the drug war, but by and large the disproportionate focus on making drug use more painful for users via stigmatization and punishment, while focusing much less on the aspirational aspect of making people’s lots in life better, makes the drug war a generally pessimistic policy prescription.
So what has our pessimistic and base policy of a war on drugs gotten us? Here’s the kicker that drives home the folly: the vast majority of deaths related to drugs in America, and in the world more broadly, (i.e. one of the core things we desire to remedy with our drug policy) can be attributed to the war on drugs. That’s a shocking claim. Let me repeat it: the vast majority of drug related deaths (in a broad sense) is attributable to the war on drugs. Think about it: people die in two main ways as a result of drugs (if we exclude for the moment alcoholic induced violence/accidents): overdoses and violence surrounding the drug trade. I submit that the war on drugs is indirectly (at best, and in some ways directly) responsible for the vast, vast majority of overdoses while it is directly responsible for the violence related to the drug trade. Let’s talk about overdoses first.
In America in 2017, well over 70,000 people died from overdoses. That is a staggering number. Roughly 60,000 U.S. soldiers died in the Vietnam War.
More people now die from drug overdoses in a single year than died in a near decade of war in Vietnam. With an insane statistic like that, one might think that we really do need a war on drugs! But wait, we already have a war on drugs, and it’s been ongoing for the last five decades (and in some ways even longer, see: Chasing the Scream). There is no reasonable way to conclude that with drug overdoses soaring to new heights, even amidst our continued drug war, it has been a success. It is hard to concoct a counter-factual reality wherein there would be more drug overdoses than in our current reality. For, indeed, not only has our war on drugs not positively contributed to ameliorating this plight, it makes the situation worse. Overdoses are accidents, which is to say people don’t plan to overdose on drugs. Some people get sloppy and drink too much and die. This is a somewhat rare occurrence, thankfully, because people understand alcohol ingestion and there are clear labels and % content lists. But for illegal opiates, which are responsible for most drug overdoses, there is no such system for verifying the purity or strength of the heroin. There is no way of knowing what is in the drug, and many people who take these drugs have never learned proper safety or best-procedures for taking them. And to make matters worse, illicit drug users are afraid of calling for help. Drug users suffer and die in the 10s of thousands due to conditions of fear and uncertainty surrounding their drug use. Forcing people to do drugs illicitly, getting them from sketchy sources and sketchy people, in dank street corners in the dark, increases the prevalence of overdoses. While it may deter some users at the margins from ever trying the drugs, it condemns vast numbers to a grizzly death.
But perhaps the most direct negative consequence of the the war on drugs is the violence it needlessly causes. The war on drugs truly has created a war. The only problem is that the targets being shot and killed aren’t inanimate drugs, they are human beings. From Peru to Colombia, to Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, and from Mexico to the U.S., societies are being ravaged by the violence caused by the war on drugs. When a product is made illegal the only suppliers of said product will operate outside the bounds of law and order. Unfortunately, due to the large and, amongst a large enough cohort, relatively inelastic demand for drugs, producing and selling drugs turns out to be a profitable enterprise. Nefarious forces have taken control of this black market and reaped the monetary rewards. Some of these illicit market players, such as the cartels in Mexico, have become so rich and so powerful that they effectively operate as quasi-States, maintaining their own militias to protect their lucrative product and instilling their version of justice as they see fit. Meanwhile, lesser crime organizations in America (in many instances working as arms of the cartels and other large crime syndicates), or gangs, operate their own drug-supported fiefdoms, selling drugs beyond the bounds of regulatory authorities on street corners and protecting their business at any and all costs. In inner cities, where lack of opportunity induces steep-discounting of one’s future, this dangerous line of work promises prestige and opportunity to those lucky enough to survive. The war on drugs, by creating the black markets and the economic incentives to engage in the drug trade, is directly responsible for all this bloodshed. What’s more, costly bureaucracies such as the ATF and DEA (and many more at state and local levels) devote scarce resources and precious human lives to dealing with and confronting this policy-induced problem. The policies undergirding the war on drugs not only create and worsen drug related violence, they extract resources from society-at-large to deal with this perpetual, and self-inflicted, problem, and then the policies proscribe the pointless sacrifice of American law enforcement officers.
The best that can be said about our war on drugs policy was that people with some praiseworthy goals (e.g. avoiding a society bogged down with unhealthy and unproductive addicts) implemented an overly simplistic policy prescription that has been a failure. At worst, we could say it was a racist concoction that was never laudable, was always doomed, and that policy makers simply didnt care. No matter how we interpret it though, certain consequentialist facts are undeniable: massive and expensive anti-drug bureaucracies, police state militarization, racial discrimination in enforcement, unprecedented numbers of overdoses, and black markets dominated by cartels and crime syndicates. How should we think about resolving all this?
Let us return to our imagination. Let’s go to a mythological time and place wherein no federal drug policies have yet been instantiated into law. Call it point zero. What would things be like there? Well, assuming all else constant in our society (ceteris paribus), things would likely look like as they did during the era of big tobacco in the 40s and 50s. Corporations eager to profit off of these highly enticing substances would solicitously market them to consumers. They might get doctors (or someone dressed like a doctor) to appear in ads recommending this or that brand of mass-produced meth or heroin. Many people in society might buy these products regularly; teens would have easier access; many people might be addicted. There would be clear economic incentives for corporations to get people addicted to these substances, just as with cigarettes in the 40s and 50s. It would probably be deleterious to public health, induce more drug consumption than our status quo current reality, reduce overall productivity, and generally be repugnant.
Yet there would be no black markets filled with cartels. There would not be people hawking drugs on street corners protecting their profitable but illegal merchandise by any means necessary. There would no longer be an economic incentive or rationale for crime syndicates to sell these drugs, as massive companies would already be making them as cheaply as possible. The cartels and gangs wouldn’t be able to turn a profit, for there is little chance in a perfectly free market that corporations would be undercut by an inefficient international crime syndicate, much less your your local gang. And, importantly, there would also be far, far fewer overdoses. Consumers would be operating in the light of day, wherein they clearly understand the dosages of the substances they are purchasing. Corporations would have no incentive, nor would they be allowed (given the already existing legal structure), to surreptitiously cut their products. There would be no heroin laced with fentanyl. And the consumers would have unhindered (i.e. would not be deterred from using/ not stigmatized / not afraid) recourse to medical personnel should an emergency require it, just as alcohol consumers have in reality. Simply imagine what terrible PR it would be for a corporation, in the age of Yelp and social media, to be associated with and responsible for many overdoses. There would be a strong self-regulating force in the market to ensure safe use. The milieu would be similar to that of alcohol and cigarettes, except, unlike with cigarettes and lung cancer, overdoses from many of these substances (much like alcohol) would be immediate, direct, and easily attributable to the corporations.
Of course neither scenario — our war on drugs or full unencumbered legalization — are desirable. But a priori, is it not tempting to prefer the second to the first? And this is just the extreme case of full legalization with no regulation. Instead of using a hammer, as we have thus far in reality with our war on drugs policies, imagine if we could use nuanced instruments (like a scalpel) to methodically and thoughtfully intervene in a free market drug system. Let’s put down our hammer and Imagine for a second what we might do with a scalpel if our starting point was a perfectly laseiz faire market for drugs. In fact, we don’t have to strain our imagination very hard, as we already have a blueprint for how to proceed (and how not to) via alcohol, tobacco, and, increasingly, cannabis.
Ultimately, going to war on the war on drugs will benefit the American people. Most drug addicts are not malicious malcontents, rather they are people in pain looking for an escape from their suffering. The war on drugs is, unfortunately, one of the worst possible policy responses we could have settled upon. If we immediately ended this failed prohibitionist policy, black markets would evaporate, cartels would whither and die, and the American people would suffer far less. This should not be a pipe-dream, a pie in the sky idea that we whimsically contemplate. This is something that could literally be done tomorrow, if we had the political will. It will be tough. The reference point for many is the status-quo, drug war ideal of zero tolerance. This means that many people look at anything less than a total ban on these substances as immoral and soft. This is unfortunate, and the exact wrong way to look at it.
Instead, we should realize that this is one of the few issues that could not only be easily and quickly fixed (as many of the most pressing problems are simply caused by the current status-quo policy), it has the potential to be non-partisan. On the left, the war on drugs is already despised due to its undeniable racist origins and continued prejudicial enforcement. Libertarians don’t want the government infringing upon our personal liberties (and what is more fundamental than our ability to alter our conciousness?). While conservatives despise ill considered, big government interventions into markets. We must reset our moral reference points, acknowledge that the pain and suffering often surrounding drugs is made far worse by our current war on drugs, and then strive to build a bipartisan coalition to go to war on the war on drugs. Unlike the war on drugs, the war on the war on drugs is one that we can win. And it is one that we will all be better off for having fought.
