Why We Should Legalize It

Everybody should be lucky enough to meet my beautifully beknockered friend, Wonder Woman. If you're luckier than I am, you'll meet her in a trampoline store or a nude beach. But she's also a talented blogger with a much wider and more influential audience than mine, so you should be reading her more than me. Also, her posts are much shorter.

I've always wondered why I was so long-winded, and I guess that it's just because I'm hung like a three-year-old. But enough about me.

Wonder Woman put up a post on Tuesday in response to Mexican President Felipe Calderon's recent call to just debate the legalization of drugs. The former president, Vincente Fox, this week supported legalization outright.

The Mexicans, of course, have a strong case for legalization of narcotics. Since President Calderon took it upon himself to fight the American drug war for the United States in 2006, some 28,000 of his citizens have met violent ends. That's a kill-rate equal to or higher than the United States military saw during the Vietnam War. Moreover, parts of the Mexican state are actually falling apart geopolitically.

And for what, exactly? Your average Juan or Pedro isn't likely to be in a Peter Tosh tribute band, or doing blow off of some stripper's ass. It's pretty clear that that's Lindsay Lohan's job. Average Mexicans, soldiers and cops, in particular, are getting killed at a remarkable clip because Americans really, really like getting high. And to judge by Miss Lohan's recent exploits, those Mexicans are dying for less than nothing.

It's even worse when you consider that those Mexicans are finding themselves dead almost exclusively because the drug cartels are heavily armed with American guns. The United States isn't even trying to be serious about the foreign traffic of their weapons because of ridiculous and inapplicable arguments about the Second Amendment, but Mexico is supposed to throw away countless innocent lives enforcing the laws of foreigners?

Wonder Woman's comments seem to have taken Calderon's remarks out of the context of what's happening in Mexico domestically, but they're still interesting and worthy of a response. And I've got the time, having a small pecker and all. I reprint her post in full.

It always amazes me...

Reasonable, seemingly intelligent people who advocate for legalizing drugs, based on the argument that it would benefit society and the economy to have drugs regulated and taxed.

Explain to me then, if drug dealers and biker gangs are willing to flout the drug laws and kill each other over distribution rights, what on Earth makes you think these people would be willing to convert it to a legitimate business and pay taxes?

Well, bootlegging alcohol isn't quite the business it was between 1920 and 1933. The statistics are pretty clear on that. Other than some toothless hill-people and the first two verses of Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road", you don't hear much about it at all.

The fact is that when something is criminalized, the risk involved in manufacture and distribution becomes astronomically higher. This necessarily drives price upward. No one is going to risk decades in prison to sell Indian reserve cigarettes when the tastier brands are still legal, but that could change. And if it did, a pack would probably cost about a hundred dollars or more. But as we saw with alcohol, the lessening of risk brought dramatic drops in price, even if you account for inflation and subsequent government "sin taxes."

Drug dealers and biker gangs would never "be willing to convert it to a legitimate business and pay taxes." That's because the market would do it for them. Criminals are actually pretty famous for being willing to supply a demand that others won't because that demand is against the law. Some call the high price of drugs, just as they once did with alcohol, a "danger tax."

When the criminal aspect of the demand evaporates, so do the incredible profits for the criminals. I know for a fact that Bayer can outproduce and outmarket the Hell's Angels forever on, say, amphetamine. I say this because they do it already. Mass production and commercial availability also tend to drive down prices.

Let's look at La Cosa Nostra, more commonly known as the Mafia. Prior to Prohibition, they were localized, nickle and dime outfits that concentrated on stuff like extortion, prostitution and gambling. Almost immediately after the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, the exploded into a worldwide syndicate of unimaginable power. Their Prohibition profits allowed them access into organized labor, construction and several other legitimate businesses.

The end of Prohibition didn't mortally wound them because they had, you guessed it, drugs to move into. Where do they go once drugs are taken away from them as a market?

There are other associated savings from drug legalization. The first is in public safety and disease prevention. Drugs are bad for you largely (although not entirely) because they're illegal. Criminals aren't likely to cut cocaine or heroin with glucose if rat poison is cheaper. They are also subject to "purity wars" - which is how most folks die of overdoses - that a regulated market wouldn't be. Legalization would also cut HIV-AIDS dramatically because there wouldn't be legal consequences for possession of syringes, thus eliminating the need to share needles.

Then there's what legalization would do for the criminal justice system. All the time, money and effort that's wasted by police, prosecutors and judges on mostly victimless drug crimes would be freed up to prosecute more serious crimes. Crime is infinite, but prison space is not. Since small-time drug offenders often get harsher sentences than sex offenders, sex offenders are not infrequently released to accommodate the drug offenders. Idiotic things like Megan's Law and sex offender registries were created for no other reason than because a lack of prison space.

Nor can the foreign policy aspects of the debate be ignored for much longer. The United States has five percent of the world's population, yet half of it's drug users. The War on Drugs has cost the American government hundreds of billions of dollars over several decades, yet demand has not decreased in any noticeable or sustainable way. Why should Mexicans, Jamaicans or Colombians be asked to die because the Americans are unable or unwilling to control their own problem? If Americans cannot go on a diet from heroin, why should already penniless Afghan opium farmers be made to suffer for it? After all, they're just supplying a demand in the only way that they can.

Modern conservatives forget a very important lesson: That supply and demand is a law that works even in areas that they aren't overly fond of. Were it otherwise, the drug war wouldn't be the monumental failure that almost everyone now agrees that is.

The market is there, and it isn't going anywhere. The only problem is that it's full of criminals when it doesn't have to be.