Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

Mar 5th 2009From The Economist print editionProhibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solutionA HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghaifor the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcoticdrug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the InternationalOpium Commission-just a few decades after Britain had fought a warwith China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans ofmood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assemblycommitted member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to“eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium,cocaine and cannabis by 2008.That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages thesense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for acentury. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers acrossthe world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannotbe fulfilled.Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to setinternational drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-wargenerals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same.In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed statesin the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the richworld. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has beenilliberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economistcontinues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly betterfor producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumercountries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers wouldsuffer. But in our view, more would gain.The evidence of failureNowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about adrug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”,meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adultpopulation, still take illegal drugs-roughly the same proportion as adecade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just aneducated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.)The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as itwas a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocainehas declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in themid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some$40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. Itarrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking uphalf a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why onein five black American men spend some time behind bars. In thedeveloping world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexicomore than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000).This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country-GuineaBissau-was assassinated.Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. Theprice of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost ofdistribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up betweencoca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumpingweedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local priceof coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price,which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or theUnited States.Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all thecocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States doesseem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the pastyear. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. Onthe other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug businessquickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repressionmerely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved fromTurkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where itundermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.Al Capone, but on a global scaleIndeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterismon a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’sperhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some$320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwiselaw-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily haveended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It alsomakes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaineand heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreadingHIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside thelaw, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries inthe emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relativelydeveloped democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-deathstruggle against gangsters. American officials, including a formerdrug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as theirneighbour.The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals,especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting thefocus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction”(such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approachwould put more emphasis on public education and the treatment ofaddicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and thepunishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That wouldbe a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequatelyfunded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of thepicture.Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it wouldtransform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-healthproblem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would taxand regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and thebillions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about therisks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs tominors should remain banned. Different drugs would command differentlevels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly andimperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measuretrade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strikea balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging ablack market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to whichaddicts now resort to feed their habits.Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, whereorganised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. Thetough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is themain political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept thatlegalisation would be the right answer for the people of LatinAmerica, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in thefight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for theirown children.That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more peoplewould take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong.There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and theincidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notablyAmerica but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drugwarriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even infairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to thenumber of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have preciselythe same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply(pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrillwould go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue thatsales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widelyavailable would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would bewise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should bescrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Althoughsome illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most arenot especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually allof them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and evenheroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they deriveenjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). Itis not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument,as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addictioncan also inflict misery on the families and especially the children ofany addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouragingand treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hencethe second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal withaddiction properly.By providing honest information about the health risks of differentdrugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumerstowards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent theproliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories.Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try toimprove the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax andsaved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment toaddicts-a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. Thesuccess of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco,which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds forhope.A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article<http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13251312>).Reviewing the evidence again (see article<http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13234157>),prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weakof the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out ofdrugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoidand rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed stateslike Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century ofmanifest failure argues for trying it.