March 2001
The Pitfalls of Prohibition: How the Drug War Lost the Crime Battle
by Patrick Basham
Federal and provincial governments have seldom given serious thought to drug policy, preferring instead to follow whatever variation on failure is being proposed during the latest "crisis." Unfortunately, such conventional thinking has only served to empower organized crime, hinder health care, and feed into an ever-growing law enforcement and penal industry. Common sense and experience have been ignored in a debate dominated by emotion, ignorance, and fear.
The intellectual, legal, and political ground, however, is now shifting toward a more unconventional, albeit more rational approach to drug policy. The respective analyses presented in a Fraser Institute e-book, Sensible Solutions to the Urban Drug Problem (available on our web site, www.fraserinstitute.ca) outline many of the most pressing objections to the continuation of the "war on drugs," as articulated by leading scientific, medical, legal, public health and academic authorities at a series of Fraser Institute conferences in Toronto and Vancouver.
The evidence accumulated over the past several decades confirms that most of the serious problems we associate with illegal drug use are caused directly or indirectly not by drug use itself, but by drug prohibition. Hence, the record of drug prohibition is a record of failure. Despite the vice squads, courts, prisons, and propaganda that collectively comprise the war on drugs, illegal drugs are everywhere, available to just about anyone who wants them. Despite the greatest anti-drug enforcement effort in history, the drug problem is worse than ever. The worldwide trade in illicit drugs is conservatively estimated at $600 billion. That figure constitutes eight percent of all international trade, sufficient to line the pockets of an ever-expanding global criminal class.
All the arrests and all the incarcerations have not stopped either the use or the abuse of drugs, or the drug trade, or the crime associated with black-market transactions. In our prisons, drugs are plentiful and their use is widespread. No matter what they try, prison wardens cannot keep drugs out—an important lesson for those who would turn this, or any country, into a figurative prison to stop drug use.
On a day-to-day basis, the most tangible cost of the war on drugs is criminal behaviour. Most drug-related crime is, in fact, prohibition-related crime. According to the American Research Triangle Institute, 90 percent of drug-related crime results not from drug use, but from the illegality of drugs. Whether it is drugs or alcohol, prohibition stimulates crime. Prohibition stimulates violence. In downtown Vancouver, where 10,000 addicts roam the streets, 90 percent of property crime is drug-related. Across Canada, there are 64,000 documented drug offenses committed each year. South of the border, a 32-city survey by the United States Justice Department found that, in 2000, 62 percent of arrestees tested positive for illegal drugs.
Why is there so much drug-related crime? The answer is that so many addicts must spend their days stealing the large amounts of money (on average, between $500 and $1,000 a day) needed to buy their drugs. Why are the drugs so costly? The only reason is their illegality. The street price of cocaine and heroin is usually from 50 to 100 times the pharmaceutical cost of producing the drugs. The risks incurred by the black market suppliers and dealers are rewarded by the exorbitant retail prices paid by users.
In 1997, 2,000 Canadians went to jail for simple marijuana possession. Cumulatively, hundreds of thousands of Canadians have criminal records for possessing small amounts of cannabis. Of course, the scale of the American problem is much worse. In the US, there are more than one million drug arrests per year, including half a million marijuana-related arrests. Today, 50 percent of all American prison inmates are drug offenders. In 1980, there were 50,000 US drug prisoners; today, there are 400,000.
What makes this situation particularly frustrating is the fact that drug treatment and rehabilitation programs are both cheaper and more effective than prisons at conquering drug addiction and the social dysfunction that may accompany it. For every dollar invested in a good drug treatment program, seven dollars in social costs are saved. Further insights are offered by Ethan Nadelmann1 in his chapter in Sensible Solutions to the Urban Drug Problem on common sense drug policy, and by Robin Room and Patricia Erickson in their respective chapters on "harm reduction," a progressive approach that works within the constraints of current legislation to allow, for example, methadone treatment, heroin maintenance, and needle exchange programs, as well as safe injection sites and marijuana decriminalization.
This European-tested approach forms the basis for the new drug strategy announced in November 2000 by the City of Vancouver. A December 2000 poll conducted by Viewpoints Research found a majority of Vancouver and Victoria residents favour heroin maintenance programs; recent Market and Opinion Research polling among Vancouver residents found 61 percent in favour of heroin maintenance programs and 71 percent in support of safe injection sites.
Irrationally, prison sentences for drug offenses, designed to suppress the illegal drug trade, frequently rival the sentences for murder and rape. The results are overloaded courts and prisons. Increasingly, then, it is being realized that the criminal justice system is the most expensive method of intervening in the drug area. Of course, the expense might not appear so onerous if it produced results. However, all of the evidence suggests that criminalizing drug users does not work.
In practice, the drug trade is like an old mattress—whenever it is pushed down in one area, it springs up in another. This is because drug use is largely insensitive either to price or to punishment. The demand for drugs rises and falls largely according to social factors impervious to the efforts of governments. Drug use, like alcohol consumption, is sensitive to social mores, education, and the perceived health risks.
As both Eugene Oscapella and the late Gil Puder illustrate in their respective chapters, drug prohibition also leads to the corruption of the police, the courts, and customs officials. According to lawyer Clayton Ruby, "We’ve built up institutions that depend on jobs and incomes from chasing drugs." Although policy changes are coming, change is slow because so many bureaucrats, police officers, and prison guards are making a living off the war on drugs. Among the professional drug warriors themselves are found some of the most tragic personal cases. For example, in late November 2000 the RCMP’s drug education officer for Vancouver Island died of a heroin and cocaine overdose.
Richard Stevenson’s insightful chapter on the economic cost of the "War on Drugs" establishes that the fundamental economic problem with drug prohibition is that it ignores the basic laws of supply and demand. To win the "War on Drugs," either supply or demand must fall. On the supply side, there are two strategies. The first is "interdiction"—preventing illegal drugs from entering the country in the first place. In theory, this sounds fairly straightforward; in practice, however, it has proven a disaster. For example, American customs and drug agents prevent only 10 percent of illegal drugs from crossing the US-Mexican border. The second strategy is termed "alternative crop subsidization." This means paying Latin American and Asian farmers to grow other things. Again, the theory is reasonable but, in practice, impoverished farmers grow what pays best—and nothing pays like illegal drugs.
Even if these strategies were to prove successful, victory would be short-lived at best, for this is an economic vicious circle: if you reduce the supply of drugs, the price of the drugs rises. The rise in price leads to a rise in crime, as addicts have to perform more illegal acts to afford their illegal habits. In addition, the increase in price, with its suggestion of increased profits, is an incentive for more people to enter the supply business.
As neither interdiction nor alternative crop subsidization have proven to be viable strategies, attention focuses on domestic demand. This means apprehending and punishing those who buy drugs for personal consumption. However, domestic demand is sufficiently large that, as a result, in North America the bulk of police, prison, and court resources are devoted to drug law enforce- ment. In total, the annual economic cost of North American drug law enforcement is approaching $100 billion.
Prohibition has created a business environment in which there’s nothing as profitable as smuggling and selling illegal drugs. For the drug entrepreneur, the profit margins are extremely high. For example, the retail prices of cocaine and heroin are five times their import prices. Now, throw into the mix the fact that the profits are tax-free. This reality has two very negative consequences for the successful prosecution of the war on drugs. First, it provides a huge incentive for others to enter into this line of work; and, second, it provides a huge incentive for suppliers and dealers to create more demand among their potential customer base. Therefore, the economic rationale for entering into the illegal drug business is pretty straightforward.
In response to chilling public health statistics (e.g., 25 percent of injection drug users in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland are infected with HIV), Health Canada recommended the opening of four safe injection sites in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside. The goal is to mirror the success of similar programs in three European cities. These programs have led to dramatic declines in HIV cases and in the number of overdose deaths. As Ambros Uchtenhagen details in Sensible Solutions, heroin maintenance programs have been successfully experimented with in Switzerland. The resulting decline in social dysfunction, including crime, has led to similar programs in Spain, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The contributors to this volume contend that if we ended the war on drugs, drug addicts could be treated as patients, not as pestilence.
In his chapter on public opinion and illicit drugs, pollster Daniel Savas quantifies how ordinary Canadians are finding the prohibitionist argument increasingly unpersuasive. Recent confirmation of Savas’ findings comes in the form of a December 2000 Market and Opinion Research poll that found 57 percent of Vancouver residents favoured the legalization of marijuana, up from 47 percent in 1997.
A further reason for cautious optimism is the possibility that Canada may be beginning to travel the same path advocated by Jeffrey Singer in his chapter on the medicalization of drug policy. In the last four years, 9 American states have passed pro-medical marijuana laws. In this country, following a December 11, 2000 Alberta court ruling, soon patients may be free to consume marijuana for medicinal purposes without fear of being branded as criminals. Ten days after this ruling, the federal government hired a private company to supply marijuana for clinical patient trials.
The war on drugs has failed to reduce the supply of illegal drugs, or to reduce consumption, but it has succeeded in flooding our prisons, fuelling the AIDS crisis, and making multi-millionaires out of drug traffickers. Clearly, drug prohibition has all the characteristics of numerous other well intentioned, yet expensive, counterproductive government programs that have outlived any usefulness. As Sensible Solutions to the Urban Drug Problem reveals, the continued use of methods proven to fail will lead inevitably only to more and to deeper failures in the urban drug problem.
Note
1 Click here for the full text of the papers from The Fraser Institute conference "Sensible Solutions to the Urban Drug Problem".
Patrick Basham is a Senior Fellow in the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute, and was formerly the Director of the Social Affairs Centre at The Fraser Institute.
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