Decriminalize DrugsEssay Preview: Decriminalize DrugsReport this essayOne the many controversies in our country today, regards the prohibition of illegal narcotics. Deemed unhealthy, hazardous, and even fatal by the authorities that be; the U.S. government has declared to wage a “war on drugs.” It has been roughly fifteen years since this initiative has begun, and each year the government shuffles more money into the unjust cause of drug prohibition. Even after all of this, the problem of drugs that the government sees still exists. The prohibition of drugs is a constitutional anomaly. There are many aspects and sides to look at the issue from, but the glaring inefficiency current laws exude is that any human should have the right to ingest anything he or she desires. The antagonist on the other end believes that by doing so chaos would result because of the ingestion of said substances. This purely speculation, and we have seen in the history of man that this has never occurred nor is there reason to believe it will happen this time.
Many proponents of the current drug laws claim that legalization and/or decriminalization would in turn increase the number of drug users. If a drug is legalized/decriminalized, the price will fall and the quantity of demand will rise. The evidence from prohibition suggests we can expect two broad patterns of response if legalization occurs. First, there will be a small rise in consumption, which will take place to some extent across the spectrum of consumers. People who had never used drugs may choose to use them. Secondly, there will be a change in the nature of the drugs used and in the way in which they will be used. Specifically, there will be a move toward less intensive drug forms and less abusive patterns of use. When drugs are illegal, more damaging drugs drive out less damaging ones. In jurisdictions that liberalize their drug laws, this process will reverse itself. The evidence on this from Prohibition is unequivocal: as soon as repeal occurred, the consumption of hard liquor dropped by more than two-thirds. In addition, there was a massive shift from higher potency liquor toward the lower-proof varieties of liquor.
The vast majority of all people, addicts and alcoholics included, do not consume drugs as a means of destroying their lives. Nor do they consume them intending to become addicted to them. Abuse and addiction are the adverse consequences that sometimes occur when drugs are consumed at habitual or routine levels. They are the survival-threatening features of the behavior in question, not the functional or pleasurable features that fundamentally motivate the behavior. The most important factor for the spread of crack and heroin is that when opiates and cocaine are illegal, low potency versions of these drugs become extensively expensive. Thus, consumers are induced to switch to more intensive and more harmful drug forms and delivery systems. Absent the incentives created by current policy, consumers will revert to the modes of consumption that are less damaging.
The rise of illegal drug use that began in the 1960s was accompanied by the growing opinion that drug use should be legalized. This feeling remained strong though the middle of the 1970s when the existing research on drugs such as marijuana and cocaine did not clearly point to health hazards. Those who favored legalization thought that certain drugs could be used responsibly by most people who would otherwise be law-abiding or even model citizens. In other words, they believed most drug use to be a victimless crime.
Some of the arguments for legalizing the sale and possession of drugs have been made on purely economic grounds. Staggeringly large sums of money are being generated through the illegal drug trade. All of this money escapes direct taxation. If an excise tax, like those placed on alcohol and cigarettes, billions of dollars would become available for public projects. The U.S. department of Health and Human Services agency SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, estimates that there are almost fifteen billion Americans who had used illicit drugs at least thirty days prior to the survey. If legalized, a standard pack of marijuana would probably contain roughly an ounce or so of marijuana.
In contrast, the proposal that the federal government make a substantial tax on all alcohol sales is opposed by advocates of alcohol prohibition, who say that, as the federal government becomes more aggressive in its efforts to discourage new, illicit-drug use, it will create an alternative to the current prohibition regime. (More on that below.)
To the extent that I am in favor of taxation on all alcohol sales by state and local governments, I am opposed to such an approach, not because it fails the legitimate objective of taxation, but because it fails to give states control over their taxes, thus making them less responsive to the public.
As noted earlier, the federal government’s proposal for alcohol tax collection from states is based on federal spending estimates, and it would be irresponsible to interpret any federal program as an increase in federal spending compared to states, with no direct tax, but as the resulting increase in federal expenditures to meet current state and local government needs.
Thus it is appropriate to recognize that, for purposes of a general tax, tax collections are always intended to be a means of reducing government spending. As shown by the example above, this is false as in every state, the revenue generated is used to support state and local governments as they respond to the public’s distress under current state control. The purpose of taxes to reduce spending is simply to ensure that the state’s budget deficit is a net negative for the state. While that makes no sense, it will lead to increased expenditures on the rest (of tax-deficit savings or at least the revenues collected by state and local government) but it is clearly a far cry from what is shown to be the case in other states such as Wisconsin or Louisiana.
The federal government also has an incentive to collect and collect taxes of its own even if it wants to. As the National Institute on Drug Abuse has repeatedly pointed out, even if there are some gains in taxes, there will still be a high level of deficit and other spending that is eliminated in the absence of other, better means of taxing. As such, however, it will be important for the federal government to generate revenue through taxation in order for it to take into account those gains.
It is true that a state’s revenues are often the biggest source of revenue in the state, but they are not the biggest source of revenue in the federal government. As the federal revenues are what determine how much government money the state gives to the states, the state may provide less and the federal is able to give more and more to states, while the federal spending could be inversely proportional to its cost of doing business (a state using an allocation of revenues is not paying for itself if it does not pay for taxes). In other words, the federal funds to pay for the state’s expenditures are not the sole source of its expenditures; they may also be the main source of the state’s revenue. The government may therefore