The challenge of illicit drugs

The challenge of illicit drugs is to balance the negatives of drug use against the negatives of policies that attempt to reduce drug use. Drug use can reduce health and productivity. Drug use can cause traffic and industrial accidents, harm unborn fetuses, and diminish the public purse if drug users make excessive use of government-funded health care. Policies that attempt to reduce drug use, however, have their own costs. These include: black markets, violence, corruption, unwarranted restrictions on use of drugs as medicine, excessive restrictions on civil liberties, aiding terrorism, the increased spread of HIV, enriching criminals, diminished respect for the law, and the direct costs of enforcing these policies. The question is therefore which policy achieves the best balancing of costs and benefits?

The solution

The solution proposed here is to legalize the production, sale, distribution and possession of all illicit drugs. A legalized regime might include a number of auxiliary policies that currently apply to alcohol and tobacco, such as driving-under-the-influence laws, sin taxation, age restrictions, subsidized treatment, advertising restrictions, and the like. The analysis here takes no stand on these auxiliary policies; the conclusions hold under any reasonable set of auxiliary policies so long as these occur in a regime where drugs are legal and not subject to regulation or taxation that drives the market underground.

An analysis of prohibition versus legalization

To assess legalization relative to prohibition I first review prohibition's impacts on drug users, non-users, and society generally.