USA - Drug czar: Milton Friedman's drug-war critique 'demonstrably untrue'

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Posted by Chris Reed October 4, 2007

signonsandiego.com

I've looked forward to interviewing the U.S. drug czar for years, and Tuesday afternoon I finally got the chance when current czar John Walters visited with the U-T editorial board. I'm happy to note that he took my libertarian griping seriously; many drug warriors seem amazed that anyone could suggest that the drug war is futile, costly, counterproductive and hypocritical, and often amounts to an assault on civil liberties. I said to Walters that by any possible statistical reckoning of deaths, car wrecks, suicides, drownings, crimes of violence, etc., alcohol is vastly more destructive in the U.S. than all illegal drugs combined. I asked if he disputed this.

He didn't answer me directly even after I reposed the question. Basically, he said that while alcohol may be a big and destructive problem, the fact that alcohol is legal doesn't mean you don't try to reduce the use of other, illegal drugs. He said "the danger of marijuana today" is far greater than in the old days, thanks to its potency.

Did he in any way acknowledge the oddity of having a war on drugs that don't kill all that many people while tolerating drugs (alcohol, tobacco) which fill up graveyards 24-7?
Nope.

I said that many libertarians object to the drug war not just on the grounds that government shouldn't tell people what they can put in their bodies but on the grounds that the execution of the drug war routinely involves assaults on civil liberties. I cited past drug czars' eager touting of confiscation policies, in which a family could lose its only car without even a court hearing if one member were caught driving the car while in possession of pot. Did he see the drug war as diminishing civil liberties?

Walters offered a broad defense of asset-forfeiture tactics as being "designed to reduce the demand in a tangible way. ... I'm not going to say" that "laws sometimes aren't misapplied," but claims that civil liberties are a routine victim of the drug war are "great misrepresentations" and a "great mischaracterization."

He said the "magnitude of the injustice" suffered in some cases was exaggerated.
I wanted to get to other questions before our time ran out, so I didn't ask him the obvious follow-up about the fact that no one is actually ever charged with a crime in many asset forfeiture cases, and that there is plenty of evidence that giving police agencies a motive to seize property (they can sell it later and add to their budgets) is a horrible idea.

Then I got into Milton Friedman's critique of the drug war, noting the evidence that the drug war -- by making popular intoxicants illegal and only available via a highly lucrative black market -- was responsible for lots of crimes beyond buying and selling, and that it had led to police corruption, among many other unintended consequences. I asked what he would do to combat drugs if could start over from scratch.

He said "the problem is not that we make drugs a crime; it is that drugs are catalysts to crime." And he said what "the facts really say" is that Milton Friendman's criticisms of the drug war were "untrue -- demonstrably untrue."

Here's what Friedman had to say in Newsweek in 1972 as the drug war was first gearing up:

Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?

But, you may say, must we accept defeat? Why not simply end the drug traffic? That is where experience under Prohibition is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic. We may be able to cut off opium from Turkey but there are innumerable other places where the opium poppy grows. With French cooperation, we may be able to make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin but there are innumerable other places where the simple manufacturing operations involved can be carried out. So long as large sums of money are involved -- and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal -- it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce seriously its scope. In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion and example are likely to be far more effective than the use of force to shape others in our image.

Still looks "literally hopeless" to me. Walters offered stats showing declining use of certain illegal drugs, but so have past drug czars -- and guess what? New drug crazes emerged like clockwork (meth, oxycontin, etc.). Has the basic human interest in altered consciousness ever waned? Of course not.

Here's what Friedman wrote in 1992 as a follow-up to his 1972 Newsweek column:
Very few words in that column would have to be changed for it to be publishable today. The problem then was primarily heroin and the chief source of the heroin was Marseilles. Today, the problem is cocaine from Latin America. Aside from that, nothing would have to be changed.

Here it is almost twenty years later. What were then predictions are now observable results. As I predicted in that column, on the basis primarily of our experience with Prohibition, drug prohibition has not reduced the number of addicts appreciably if at all and has promoted crime and corruption. Here's what Friedman wrote in 1991 about the vast toll the drug war took on the poor, especially minorities:

We can stop destroying the possibility of a decent family life among the underprivileged in this country. I do not agree with many people who would agree with me on that point about the role that government ought to play in the treatment of addiction. I do not agree either with those who say that the tragedy of the slums is really a social problem, that the underprivileged do not have enough jobs and therefore government has to provide them with jobs. I want to tell those people that government performance is no better in creating jobs and solving other social problems than it is in drug prohibition.

It is 2007, and nearly 30 percent of young African-American males in many cities are in jail, on probation or on parole, and the drug war is the main reason. It is 2007, and it is still common to hear black youths and young adults describe an urban lifestyle so barren that pro sports and drug dealing are the only way out. Is Milton Friedman "demonstrably untrue" in warning of the drug war's collateral damage in ghettos? Of course not.

Here's what Friedman wrote in 1988 about a huge problem with the drug war that's rarely mentioned:

Legalizing drugs would reduce enormously the number of victims of drug use who are not addicts: people who are mugged, people who are corrupted, the reduction of law and order because of the corruption of law enforcement, and the allocation of a very large fraction of law enforcement resources to this one particular activity.
Is he wrong again? Hardly. Especially after 9/11, our eagerness to spend billions a week to wage an unwinnable war on drugs is simultaneously wasteful, irrational and dangerous.


Walters didn't say what he would do to reduce destructive drug use if he could start from scratch. He seems to believe in the status quo.
Why? Because in fighting the drug war, ''There are clear signs of progress.''

No, that wasn't just the sort of thing Walters said Tuesday. That was President George H.W. Bush talking in 1990 on the first anniversary of his appointment of the first drug czar, Bill Bennett. Similar claims came out of the Clinton administration in 1997 after stepped-up cooperation with Mexico. Now we're hearing the same from this Bush administration.


This isn't even Orwellian; it's too simple-minded. We are making progress in the drug war, the government tells us, now and always.

Shouldn't perpetual progress at some point add up to something substantial and significant? Shouldn't perpetual progress mean at some point, a la the "defense dividend" after the end of the Cold War, that we can spend less on the drug war?

Why, of course not. Such questions aren't helpful. What's important, after all, is that we are making progress in the drug war. Just look at our charts and graphs.

The mind reels. The only thing "demonstrably untrue" about Milton Friedman's drug-war critique is the idea that it has been discredited.

http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/web...es/015076.html

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Milton Friedman talked a lot of sense about the drug war (his theories about small government and the shock doctrine are much less convincing), quite surprising from a pillar of the right wing. He spoke out against the drug war at it's inception in 1992. For those who are curious, her is the article, He words could be said to be prophetic.
__________________________________________________ _

Prohibition and Drugs

by Milton Friedman

From Newsweek, May 1, 1972

"The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and comcribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."

That is how Billy Sunday, the noted evangelist and leading crusader against Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in early 1920. We know now how tragically his hopes were doomed. New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Prohibition undermined respect for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, created a decadent moral climate-but did not stop the consumption of alcohol.

Despite this tragic object lesson, we seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in the handling of drugs.

ETHICS AND EXPEDIENCY

On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, Would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.

I readily grant that the ethical issue is difficult and that men of goodwill may well disagree. Fortunately, we need not resolve the ethical issue to agree on policy. Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse-for both the addict and the rest of us. Hence, even if you regard present policy toward drugs as ethically justified, considerations of expediency make that policy most unwise.

Consider first the addict. Legalizing drugs might increase the number of addicts, but it is not clear that it would. Forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the young. More important, many drug addicts are deliberately made by pushers, who give likely prospects their first few doses free. It pays the pusher to do so because, once hooked, the addict is a captive customer. If drugs were legally available, any possible profit from such inhumane activity would disappear, since the addict could buy from the cheapest source.

Whatever happens to the number of addicts, the individual addict would clearly be far better off if drugs were legal. Today, drugs are box incredibly expensive and highly uncertain in quality. Addicts are driven to associate with criminals to get the drugs, become criminals themselves to finance the habit, and risk constant danger of death and disease.

Consider next the test of us. Here the situation is crystal clear. The harm to us from the addiction of others arises almost wholly from the fact that drugs are illegal. A recent committee of the American Bar Association estimated that addicts commit one-third to one-half of all street crime in the U.S. Legalize drugs, and street crime would drop dramatically. Moreover, addicts and pushers are not the only ones corrupted. Immense sums are at stake. It is inevitable that some relatively low-paid police and other government officials-and some high-paid ones as well-will succumb to the temptation to pick up easy money.

LAW AND ORDER

Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?

But, you may say, must we accept defeat? Why not simply end the drug traffic? That is where experience under Prohibition is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic. We may be able to cut off opium from Turkey but there are innumerable other places where the opium poppy grows. With French cooperation, we may be able to make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin but there are innumerable other places where the simple manufacturing operations involved can be carried out. So long as large sums of money are involved-and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal-it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce seriously its scope. In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion and example are likely to be far more effective than the use of force to shape others in our image.

http://www.druglibrary.org/special/f..._and_drugs.htm

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In 1991, he was making similar points:
___________________________________________

A War We're Losing

By Milton Friedman
From: The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, March 7, 1991 While we have just finished a war abroad, we are still engaged in one at home-the war on drugs. There was great concern-and properly so-about the casualties in the Gulf war. There seems to be far less concern about the casualties in the war on drugs, even though they are far more numerous than the casualties suffered during the Gulf war's entire course.

The war on drugs has many effects, some good, more, in my opinion, bad. I propose here to concentrate on a single effect, the cost in human lives.

The accompanying chart plots the homicide rate per l00,000 population from 1910 to 1989. (All figures are drawn from the "Statistical Abstract of the United States," and "Historical Statistics of the United States." ) There was a steady rise through World War I, and then an even steeper rise when the 18th Amendment prohibiting the production, distribution and sale of alcoholic beverages became effective. That rise peaked in 1933, the year in which the Prohibition amendment was repealed. The homicide rate then fell, at first rapidly, and then more slowly to the mid-1950s, except for a brief but sharp rise during and after World War II-repeating the behavior during World War I. In the mid-1960s, the homicide rate started to rise, and then soared after the war on drugs was launched by President Nixon and continued by his successors.
The second series in the chart, the number of prisoners received, for which data are readily available to me only from 1925, confirms the effect of both alcoholic prohibition and drug prohibition on recorded criminality, though unlike the homicide rate it has recently risen to far higher rates than during the 1930s.

The accompanying table shows the average rate of homicides and of prisoners received by decades from the 1950s on. The difference between the homicide rate in the 1980s and in the 1950s, adjusted for the current population of the U.S., implies almost 11,000 extra homicides per year; compared with the 1960s, more than 8,000. Similar estimates for prisoners received come to more than 80,000 extra prisoners compared with the 1950s, nearly 90,000 compared with the 1960s.

Granted that the whole of the difference may not be attributable to the war on drugs. Many other things were going on during the decades from the '50s to the '80s. However, there seems little doubt that the war on drugs is the single most important factor that produced such drastic increases. Even if only half the effect is attributed to the war on drugs, 5,000 extra homicides a year and 45,000 extra prisoners is a high cost, and that price does not include the lives lost in Colombia, Peru and elsewhere, because we cannot enforce our own laws, or the lives lost through adulterated drugs in a black market, or the culture of violence, disrespect for the law, corruption of law enforcement offi- cials and disregard of civil liberties unleashed by the war on drugs.

No doubt there have been some favorable effects of the war on drugs. There does appear to have been a considerable reduction in the casual use of drugs. But it is hard to believe that the good effects come anywhere close to being large enough to justify the human cost of the war on drugs in terms of lives lost and lives destroyed.

http://www.druglibrary.org/special/f...are_losing.htm

For more Friedman on the Drug War, click here.