We Need to Legalize Drugs. Seriously. (Also, Prostitution.)

So lately I've been watching these documentaries on drugs.  They're pretty disturbing.  Watching someone stick a needle into themselves makes me cringe every time, but even at a higher level it's so sad to watch people destroy their lives.  And yet I guess it's like a train wreck (or so I've heard):  I just can't turn away.

But as disturbing as these activities are, should they be illegal?  As a libertarian, I say no.  The only things that should even be considered for prohibition are those things which have negative third-party effects.  And even then, those negative third-party effects need to be substantially greater than the negative third-party effects of the prohibition. (As Milton Friedman said, "There is a smokestack on the back of every government program."  Which is to say, every government program has negative third-party effects:  taxes, regulations, limits on human freedom, and unintended consequences.)

Are there negative third-party effects from drug use?  Absolutely!  Drug abuse destroys families and social institutions.  Pregnant mothers who do drugs put their unborn children at risk of disease and deformity.  Someone's got to treat an overdose (and drug addicts rarely have health insurance) or bury an addict who has overdosed to death.  Those are all horrific third-party effects that would exist whether drugs were legal or illegal.  But most of the third party effects normally associated with drugs, such as violence, disease, and property crime, are not third-party effects from the drugs themselves.  They are artifacts of prohibition, they are the smokestacks on the back of the "War on Drugs."  They are side-effects of the supposed cure and they are worse than the disease.

How does prohibition cause these things?  Let's take a step back and go back to the documentaries.  Much of their focus is on the production of drugs, which I find to be quite interesting as a chemical engineer.  Most of the product gets made in Afghanistan or the jungles of South America.  These people are using car jacks and wooden beams to press out water.  They're mixing this stuff up in square wooden boxes and stirring it with sticks. As an engineer, I'm just watching this and thinking to myself, " This is ridiculous! Think how cheaply Pfizer or Merck could make this stuff with some modern equipment!" (Of course, they'd probably want to patent troll it and jack up the price, but that's another blog for another time.)

Guy adding "chemicals" to the raw opium in the process of refining it into heroin, other guys stirring it with sticks.

Afghans pressing the water out of "refined" opium using a wooden plank.

But shouldn't we want to keep the price high?  No!  The reason drug addicts are committing property crimes isn't because of some inherent property of the drugs, it's because they need to find ways to get a lot of money quickly and the only ways to do that are illegal.  A heroin addict (apparently) needs about 3 hits a day to stay normal.  That's about $100 per day at these inflated prices.  You can't work a normal job and get that kind of money, especially when you're high all the time.  But what if the price was $20 a day?  Or $5 a day?  (Like the average American's Starbucks fix?)  As a junkie, you still won't have a normal life or career obviously, but your addiction suddenly becomes a lot smaller problem.  Instead of having to steal car radios or break into houses, you can beg for some money from your neighbor or a charity.  You can sweep floors for a few nights a week.  Something like that.  At the very least, you have to steal a lot fewer car radios.

Another thing you'll notice, if you watch the documentaries, is how many of the female addicts eventually turn to prostitution.  Why can prostitution pay for an expensive addiction?  Because their "goods," so to speak, are being sold at inflated, prohibition prices!  If prostitution becomes legal, suddenly addicts can't just turn to it when they need some extra cash.  They'd need to jump through all the hoops (health checks, job interviews, etc) just to be able to become competitive in the prostitution marketplace, and even then to command prices as high as they can today they'd probably have to be relatively professional about it.  Would you buy an apple from some grungy looking girl on the corner?  Of course not!  But you might have to if you really wanted apples and apples were illegal.  And you'd also probably have to pay through the nose even for an apple of questionable quality.

Back to drugs.  Another problem with making these drugs in the most primitive way possible is that they become dangerous.  In one of the documentaries there is a doctor who runs a heroin clinic that gives out free heroin to junkies who have a prescription.  He describes the heroin found on the street as "soupy" whereas the medical quality heroin is completely clear.  It's much safer.  The heroin for sale on the street has probably been "stepped on" (diluted with junk like baking soda, sleeping pills, drywall, or even rat poison) over a dozen times along the way.  It's of questionable quality and strength, and because of that a junkie can inadvertently take too large a dose (because he has no idea what is actually in one dose) or end up injecting a lot of harmful trash into himself along with the heroin.

Would you rather buy your heroin from this guy (he's diluting it with sleeping pills right now)...

Or this guy?

You might say you're glad it's dangerous to do heroin.  After all, less people will do it if it's dangerous.  Well... you might be right about that, but if my brother (for example) had a heroin addiction I would much rather he be able to use it (relatively) safely than have to buy junk on the street.  I would rather my brother get clean, but if he's not going to get clean I don't want him to die from an overdose or inject himself with harmful chemicals.  I would want him to be able to get his fix in the safest possible way. The other up-side to letting people get their heroin at a clinic is that they can be checked for diseases like hepatitis, syphilis, and AIDS while they are there and get treatment.  This reduces third party effects from the spread of disease.

Of note to the citizens of Cascadia, Washington state is going to have Initiative 502 on the ballot this fall which would basically decriminalize marijuana in the state of Washington.  I've been talking about hard drugs in this blog, but they are a much harder case than marijuana.  Marijuana is more or less a drug like alcohol, in fact it probably has fewer third party effects than alcohol.  Treating it like alcohol seems extremely prudent.  Prohibition of alcohol didn't work, why do we think prohibition of marijuana will?