High Times?

There was a time, not so long ago, when only hippie college professors, libertarians, and High Times subscribers openly advocated for an end to marijuana prohibition. Thanks to a global recession and escalation of drug cartel violence in Mexico, the idea is becoming more openly accepted. Here are some excerpts from recent articles and commentaries supporting a lift to the ban on marijuana in the United States:

Publication: The Economist
Article: "How to Stop the Drug Wars"
The Economist, first arguing for legalization in 1989, recently published a series of articles in a special drug edition. This particular article offers a complete argument for legalization and highlights the failures of prohibition. Notable excerpts:

The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

The article also offers some insight into how drugs could be regulated:

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

Finally, the article attempts to alleviate some fears of legalization:

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

Publication: CNN.com
Article: "Commentary: Legalize Drugs to Stop Violence" by Jeffrey A. Mirion
Mirion, a senior economics lecturer at Harvard, argues that only the legalization of drugs can end the escalation of violence in Mexico:

Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground. This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.

Violence was common in the alcohol industry when it was banned during Prohibition, but not before or after.

Violence is the norm in illicit gambling markets but not in legal ones. Violence is routine when prostitution is banned but not when it's permitted. Violence results from policies that create black markets, not from the characteristics of the good or activity in question.

Additionally, Mirion argues there other compelling reasons to end the prohibition on drugs, namely that prohibition breeds corruption in law enforcement and politics, and is a huge drain on state and federal financial resources.

"Publication": As much as I hate citing a 24-hour news network: CNBC
"Article": ??
This is a clip from CNBC featuring a panel discussing marijuana prohibition, sparked by Attorney General Eric Holder's comments suggesting a different approach to marijuana laws by the Obama Administration (from the Associated Press: Holder "told reporters federal agents will target marijuana distributors that violate both federal and state law — a departure from the Bush administration which targeted medical marijuana dispensaries in California, even if they complied with that state's law.").

Of course, there remains plenty of vocal support against legalization (or legalization's boring cousin - decriminalization) and according to a recent CBS News poll, only 31% of Americans believe marijuana should be legal. However, perhaps this increase in coverage means we're ready to have an open conversation about American and international drug policy. Or maybe it just means the hippie college professors, libertarians, and High Times subscribers got jobs as economists and journalists.