Drug Prohibition Leads to Unnecessary Deaths
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I wrote an op‐ed about ending the drug war in the New York Times in 1988. It’s taking the world a long time to come around to my position. Meanwhile, the effects of prohibition persist. I complained in 1988 about 824,000 arrests a year. It was more than 1.6 million in 2018. I noted that the federal government was spending $3.9 billion a year on the drug war, and the figure is far higher now, though estimatesvary.
This week’s newspapers have reminded me of some of the less immediately obvious effects of prohibition. As with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, it’s not enough simply to announce a ban on the possession, use, and/or sale of some substance. Since people want to use the substance — that’s why other people want to ban it — the law will have to be enforced. That means police, arrests, courts, prisons, and billions of tax dollars. And some amount of violence will be involved, both by the police and among rival drug sellers. Almost half the people in federal prisons are there on drug‐related charges.