Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War
2017-07-09 · Guest: Jeffrey Miron (Harvard economist and Cato Senior Fellow) · 51:27
Economic failures and violence of drug prohibition
Bob Zadek and Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron discuss the failures of the War on Drugs, specifically addressing Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ push for stricter enforcement. They explore how prohibition creates violence through underground markets, the racial history of drug laws, and the massive economic costs of incarceration and lost tax revenue.
Topics: War on Drugs, Prohibition, Jeff Sessions, Economics, Violence, Federalism, Civil Asset Forfeiture, Incarceration, Racism, Public Policy
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Jeffrey Miron, Caller (Dan), Caller (Nick), Caller (Evan), Caller (Steve)
Introduction: The War on a Noun [00:28]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Thanks so much for listening. I am, as always, your host, Bob Zadek.
Never in the history of our great country has more money been spent on a more flawed policy than our so-called War on Drugs. The giveaway, of course, is anytime we declare war on a concept, war on a noun, that war is doomed to fail. War on poverty, war on drugs—even all of these “war on”s are simply a marshaling call for people who wish to promote an agenda which is flawed. And nothing is more flawed than our War on Drugs, from its inception to how it’s been carried out to its goal. Every part of it is indefensible.
Things were going swimmingly for a while; the War on Drugs seemed to have been calmed down until the election of President Trump and his appointment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Jeff Sessions is a self-described drug warrior, and he has, in a recent op-ed piece, complained that being soft on drug sentencing means more violent crime. And he has taken a solemn oath before the American public to vigorously enforce our flawed, indefensible drug laws to the detriment of individuals and to our country.
In response to Sessions’ op-ed piece and, more importantly, to his policies, I’m happy to welcome to my show Jeffrey Miron. Jeffrey is a senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard. He’s a senior fellow at Cato. His expertise is the economics of libertarianism. He has written four books, including, of note, Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition. Jeff has also written Libertarianism from A to Z. Jeff, welcome to the show this morning.
Jeffrey Miron: Thanks very much for having me.
Does Prohibition Cause Violence? [04:10]
Bob Zadek: Now Jeff, Attorney General Sessions has announced more than once, of course, that he supports a vigorous War on Drugs because he is trying to counter the violence of drug use. And of course, every premise in his op-ed piece, every premise in his policy, is flawed and almost indefensible. But what’s wrong—there seems to be, if one reads mainstream media, one learns about drug violence, criminal activity, drug gangs, violence south of our border in Mexico and in Central America. Isn’t Jeff Sessions right that drugs beget violence?
Jeffrey Miron: So, I don’t think he’s correct. In fact, he’s got it almost precisely backwards. It’s not that drugs beget violence. It is very rare that the consumption of drugs induces anyone to engage in violent acts or commit other criminal acts. The correct connection between drugs and violence is that drug prohibition induces violence. The same way that prohibition of all sorts of goods or services can and does create violence.
The basic idea is that when you ban something, whether it’s drugs or prostitution or gambling or alcohol, you don’t eliminate those markets. You don’t eliminate the supply and demand, but you drive it underground. And in underground markets, people can’t resolve their disputes, their disagreements about trade issues and purchase and sale and contractual disagreements and all those sorts of standard things which happen in any market. You can’t resolve them with courts and with lawyers, and so the obvious substitute is violence.
An employer in the drug trade, someone who operates a street corner and hires sort of lower-level people to actually stand there and sell the drugs, he wants them to believe that if they steal the stuff instead of selling it and returning the revenues to the boss, the boss is going to come and break your kneecaps. And so there are fights over drug territories, fights over enforcing contracts, and those are resolved violently in underground markets.
Bob Zadek: So it is actually the absence of—because the drug trade, the commerce in drugs, is forced underground, they don’t get, if you will, the benefits of a civilized system, a system we all live under to resolve disputes, and therefore they are left only with violence, only with guns, purely to resolve their disputes.
And there’s been a blurring, going back as part of—it’s almost part of American mythology, maybe going back to Reefer Madness, that movie Reefer Madness in the ’50s and before that. There’s this assumption that drug users per se, because they use drugs, they commit violence. That is, as Jeff has said, there is a link between the use of drugs and violence, and of course, that link doesn’t exist. And it is the violence that fills the void because drug trade, drug commerce, is forced underground.
Now, Jeff Sessions seems to be saying, “I am going to enforce the drug laws because they are laws, and therefore laws must be enforced,” without any discussion of whether more vigorous enforcement makes sense, indeed, whether the laws make sense. So it seems to be that he’s blindly just saying, “Because there is a law on the books, I do not look at its purpose, its goal, and whether it makes any sense. It’s a law, therefore I am going to enforce it.” Isn’t that what he seems to be doing?
Jeffrey Miron: That is certainly one of the reasons that he’s given for why he is going to—he seems likely to be going to reinvigorate enforcement of the federal drug laws, even though interest in enforcing such laws, especially for marijuana, has obviously waned at the state level to the extent that eight states now have legalized recreational use and about 15 more have legalized for medicinal purposes.
Now, I think his position is actually sort of an interesting and frustrating one for libertarians because, as a broad statement, libertarians might have some sympathy for the idea that we don’t want our elected and appointed officials to be able to just arbitrarily decide to enforce some laws and not others, because that could lead to laws being enforced in ways which are racist, or which foster crony capitalism, or which promote some political agenda rather than some appropriate policy goal.
There’s this teeny element of validity in his position, at the same time, I think, as overall not at all convincing. First of all, he could say, “Look, I feel bad that I have to enforce these drug laws, but that’s part of my job and I don’t feel that I can just ignore doing what’s supposed to be part of my job. But I think these laws are bad and I’m also going to simultaneously work to repeal them.” He’s not saying that, of course, at all, anything remotely like that.
Second, it’s obviously the case that prosecutors in every setting have finite resources. They can’t vigorously enforce every law that’s on the books. There’s not nearly enough money in the universe given all the laws that we have. And so they have to make choices, they have to choose priorities, they have to decide how vigorously to enforce some laws or others. So every prosecutor has some scope to decide what should be the main focus of their attention and where their resources go. So he could, of course, do that to some degree. But the first-order fix is not to try to reform Jeff Sessions’ attitude; the first-order fix is to convince the electorate, the voting population, to change the federal law and get it off the books, and then there’s no scope for anyone like Jeff Sessions to say, “Gee folks, I’m sorry, my hands are tied, but I have to enforce these laws because they’re on the books already.”
Federalism and the Controlled Substances Act [09:30]
Bob Zadek: You had mentioned in your comments of a second ago that 11—I think it’s 11 states—have in various ways decriminalized recreational marijuana; some states have decriminalized medical use of marijuana. So they have taken perhaps the first small step. But in making that point, Jeff, you point out to our listeners out there this very strange, very strange dichotomy between where states are permitted to and have regulated an activity, and where the federal government is permitted to and has regulated an activity. And it’s so interesting how this core federalism issue has been raised more so with drug regulation than any other issue. So help us understand: if it’s a federal crime, how can states legally decriminalize marijuana? And tell us about this strange, very strange conflict between state law jurisdiction and federal law jurisdiction. And doesn’t federal law prevail, so the states cannot decriminalize?
Jeffrey Miron: So, the short answer is no. The federal law does not require states to criminalize drugs. For example, going back to the history of alcohol prohibition, even though in that case Congress explicitly adopted an amendment—Congress and the country adopted an amendment, the 18th Amendment, that gave Congress the authority to outlaw intoxicating liquors.
Now, that’s a slight aside. I think that some of our libertarian friends would argue that even though there was a constitutional amendment, that constitutional amendment was itself inconsistent with other parts of the Constitution and was therefore highly problematic. But leaving that aside, at least Congress at that point had the decency to recognize that the Constitution only gives the federal government a small number of explicitly enumerated powers: making war and coining money and raising taxes in certain ways and so on. But it does not give it arbitrary power to do all the things it’s been doing for certainly for the last 100 years, and in particular doesn’t give the authority to outlaw a particular substance.
Perhaps with that explicit amendment, with the 18th Amendment, it did have the authority to ban alcohol. Contrast that with the situation for drugs. There’s never been any constitutional amendment that gave Congress the authority to outlaw drugs. And so I think many constitutional scholars, and certainly libertarians, would argue that the Controlled Substances Act, which is what bans drugs now in the United States under federal authority, is itself unconstitutional and should be stricken down.
That said, setting aside that aspect of the constitutional conflict, certainly the federal government can, under existing interpretations which say it has the right to outlaw drugs, enforce its federal law—the federal prohibition—in the various states. So if a federal officer identifies someone who is possessing or trafficking in the outlawed drug, the authority that they have under the Controlled Substances Act and its sequelae allow it to enforce the federal law on citizens of any state.
But that in no way, shape, or form says that the states have to themselves criminalize it, or that the states have to cooperate with the federal government in helping to enforce those federal drug laws. So they are absolutely entitled to repeal the existing state laws that outlaw drugs. It’s interesting to note that during alcohol prohibition, a whole bunch of states never outlawed alcohol, including many of the more populous states, and the enforcement came only from the federal government.
And somewhat in recognition of the federal government’s limited ability to force states to enforce drug prohibition, the federal government operates a policy of returning the proceeds from seized assets to cooperating state and local agencies as a way of enticing them to cooperate in the War on Drugs.
Bob Zadek: So-called “equitable sharing.” That’s called equitable sharing.
Jeffrey Miron: Equitable sharing, exactly. And that sort of makes sense if they don’t have the ability to force the states to do it without enticing them with these payments.
Bob Zadek: Equitable sharing is a concept which encourages municipalities and state governments to enforce federal drug laws by confiscation of property. And if they do, the incentive is given that the states can retain a portion of the confiscated property, which otherwise would go to Washington. It’s called, in broad terms, it’s called “policing for profit.” It’s been the subject of prior shows of mine, and it’s a pretty insidious process.
And the reason it exists is because the federal government, lacking a federal police force—there’s no such thing in theory—the federal government lacks the resources to enforce its own laws. It has too many of them, and it can’t enforce them. So the only way federal government can enforce its own laws is to dragoon or to incentivize state and local governments by almost bribery, by paying them money, by hiring them as subcontractors to enforce federal law. And that’s the process that Jeff described. It’s known as equitable sharing in terms of its legal concept.
The Economic and Philosophical Case for Legalization [15:40]
Bob Zadek: Now Jeff, this is a libertarian radio show, and you and I are libertarians. Why does the libertarian community so oppose on principle grounds the prohibition of drugs? What is the core governing principle? Because these shows, the shows that I’ve been doing for 10 years, are not about discrete issues. The shows are all born of a governing philosophy. So what is the philosophy that has you and I feeling so strongly that prohibition of drugs and other substances is per se wrong?
Jeffrey Miron: I get a version of that question frequently, and I tend to turn it around and say, “Well, why wouldn’t it be legal for individuals to produce, sell, distribute, buy, consume drugs?” After all, it’s legal for individuals or companies to buy, sell, produce, consume, etc., all manner of things, some of which are very dangerous when used inappropriately, some of which might be more dangerous even when used appropriately than the currently outlawed drugs.
We have a Constitution aimed in part to protect individual rights. We have long-standing tradition that we can do what we want, so long as we’re not harming anyone else. To me, the question is almost comical: why? Because the presumption should be that everybody is allowed to do whatever they want with respect to drugs or anything else as long as they’re not harming anyone else, as long as they’re not infringing on anyone else’s freedom.
A different way of describing the same position that many libertarians would find appealing is the sort of non-interference or the right to be left alone. We don’t think that government should be doing anything to interfere with our liberty, to get in our way, unless, again, individuals are doing is harming someone else’s ability to run their own lives, to engage in their own private affairs.
I would also add that I come to all the libertarian issues not so much from the philosophical perspective, although I don’t think there’s any conflict with the philosophical perspective. I come to it as an economist. I think about any policy in terms of what benefits and costs it generates for society and for different people within society—who is harmed and who is helped. And my analysis is that prohibitions of alcohol, drugs, gambling, prostitution, and so on, don’t generate much in the way of anything that anyone would consider a benefit, and they typically have very large costs.
The alleged benefit is reducing drug use, and there’s of course some evidence that outlawing drugs reduces use, but not to a dramatic degree, and in particular, not necessarily reducing the use of the people who use irresponsibly. Instead, probably mainly reducing the use of the people who would use these substances in moderation and responsibly if they were legal. So we’re not getting much of a benefit of any kind, even if you regard the reduction in drug use as a benefit. I don’t necessarily; libertarians don’t necessarily. But even if you did, that benefit is modest, and the cost of trying to reduce drug use by a prohibition seem to be quite large: the increased violence that we’ve talked about already, there’s other types of crime that are fostered by the higher drug prices, there’s corruption that’s generated because the industries that are being in effect regulated by prohibition can’t communicate their unhappiness or their views about the regulation through lobbying and all the standard things that happen in legal industry. So instead, they bribe politicians and police officers and judges and so on. There’s the disruption of other countries, there’s the restrictions on the medical uses of various of the controlled substances, the infringements on civil liberties, the exacerbation of racial tensions. There are all of these factors that happen because we try to outlaw drugs, all of that for some small and not even unambiguous benefit in the form of mild reductions in drug use. So if you think about it as a cost-benefit analysis, think about it in terms of its consequences like an economist, it also utterly fails as a sensible policy.
The Economics of Incarceration [20:11]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m spending the morning with Jeffrey Miron. Jeffrey teaches economics at Harvard University. He teaches the economics of libertarianism. He has written four books, including a wonderful book discussing the economics of drug prohibition. We are talking about Jeff Sessions’ avowed declaration of his own private war declaration, War on Drugs, War on drug users, War on people who “traffic”—I hate that word, traffic. All they do is buy and sell a commodity. It is not trafficking; it’s buying and selling anymore than Safeway traffics in milk. But the word traffic has a nice sinister tone to it, so people talk about drug trafficking. It’s nothing other than drug commerce.
Now Jeff, you were talking about the economics of drug use. That raises to me two interesting issues. First of all, there is of course the fact, as you pointed out in your opposition or in your response to Jeff Sessions’ op-ed piece, Sessions in his declaration of war, he is going to further populate federal prisons with drug offenders. And the economics of incarceration of these prisoners is pretty overwhelming. There’s a very high percentage of the population of federal prisons that are drug-related, is there not? And isn’t that pretty expensive?
Jeffrey Miron: There’s a substantial fraction in federal prisons that are on drug charges. Now, to be careful, the total prison population in the US, only about 10% of that is federal prisoners. The remaining is state and local prisons, jails, other detention facilities. And if you looked at the percentage of prisoners at the state and local level that are on drug-related—directly they are on drug-related charges—that’s much more modest. It might be 20 to 22%, something like that in recent years.
Now, that’s still a large number given how many prisoners we have in the United States, but it’s not as overwhelming a fraction as it is at the federal level where it’s been for the past several decades maybe 50 or 60%. In terms of the economics, the costs of locking someone up for a year run $30,000 to $50,000 per prisoner per year, depending on exactly which state and which facility and so on and so forth. So that adds up to real money when you have close to 2 million prisoners in the United States.
Although only maybe 20% of the state prisoners are there directly on drug charges, there are potentially many more who are there on charges that wouldn’t have happened had it not been for the drug wars. That is, some of the people who are there on violence charges were there because they were involved in drug trafficking. Some people were there on other types of charges for theft, for robbery, for assault—all things fostered and encouraged by driving the market underground and making it more dangerous and generating violence broadly. And so it’s easy to imagine that one could make a very large dent in the state and local and federal prison budgets by repealing the drug laws and getting both the direct incarcerations due to drug laws out of there as well as the indirect effects.
Bob Zadek: You have pointed out in your response to Jeff Sessions’ op-ed piece in the Washington Post, you pointed out I think you mentioned about half of the federal prisoners in federal penitentiaries are drug-related. That would mean that these are appropriately labeled as “drug prisons” rather than federal prisons, because half of them could be closed up if we simply decriminalized and made legitimate the drug use and drug sale and controlled it and, dare I say, tax it—although I don’t support that, but that would be okay with me. So these federal prisons are really just drug prisons. That’s all they are. And anybody else who’s in there is sort of just filling up space, but they really exist solely to incarcerate people who were engaged in drug trafficking.
Racism and the History of Drug Prohibition [24:50]
Bob Zadek: And you had mentioned, Jeff, an interesting point. You had mentioned in your opposition to Jeff Sessions’ piece that one of the problems with the War on Drugs is it exacerbates racial tensions because, after all, there is a lot of—allegedly a lot of drug use in the inner cities, and blacks in the inner city are alleged to be both victimized by and participants in drug commerce.
And the history of drug regulation in our country is so fraught with racism. We go back to the earliest days of attention being given to drug regulation, and drugs were feared to make—and the word used at the time—“negroes” into better pistol shots and made them sex-crazed. Opium was blamed—supported the anti-Chinese population. Heroin was used to incarcerate and to accuse and build fear in Mexicans.
In the New York Times, there was a time in America that Sears and Roebuck catalog—remember that?—sold cocaine in their catalog for $1.50 for a small dose. So all of this—the history of drug policy in America is profoundly irrational. It never was based upon any sound policy. And Jeff, I think the first statute, the Harrison Act in 1913 if I remember correctly, that all started as all pure emotion, no science whatever, no sound policy whatever. And we have a policy that the country gave birth to the policy for wrongheaded, irrational reasons, and the policy itself never went away and was never questioned. And that’s the problem: it isn’t questioned.
Jeffrey Miron: So, I certainly second what you just said, the broad outlines. And to add a few details to that, the history of drug and alcohol prohibition certainly correlates very strongly with attempts to suppress minorities or specific ethnicities. You gave some of the examples: the Chinese immigrants in the 19th century to the West Coast, at that point banned smoking in an opium den; the attempt to outlaw marijuana in the ’20s and ’30s, which coincided with immigration from Mexico, and so on.
Now, I think the best recent analysis of all this is Michelle Alexander’s book called The New Jim Crow. And at some level, that book is very—even more depressing than you might think, because it suggests that somehow legalization, which is what you and I would advocate, is only going to be a partial solution to the problems of the criminal justice system. That we might be pinning too many hopes on simply getting rid of the bad laws, because her story is there is an inherent racism—not in every human being or everyone in the United States, but there is enough that what happened as Jim Crow laws were repealed and that segregation was—the explicit aspects of segregation, legal segregation, were peeled back, is that part of the white majority wanted some new way to keep African Americans away, to keep them down, to keep them suppressed.
And locking them up under the cover of the drug laws ended up being a politically acceptable, convenient way to do that. But if that’s the right interpretation of the history, then eliminating the drug laws by itself is not necessarily going to get rid of those unwanted racist attitudes. They may manifest themselves in some other way. And so we should remember that as we talk about the benefits. There are huge benefits and it undoubtedly will help, but it’s only part of a broader sort of change in attitudes about the role of criminal justice and whether the government can be used to impose restrictions on people more broadly.
Caller Segment: Subsidies, Personal Responsibility, and Harm Reduction [29:43]
Bob Zadek: Nixon had a role to play in that. I’ll share that story in a moment, but first we have a caller from Sonoma. Dan, good morning. Welcome to the show. How are you this morning?
Caller (Dan): Thank you very much. What I want to find out is why are commodities such as tobacco and alcohol subsidized, and doesn’t that create further chaos in regard to regulating them? Because the government subsidizes a product and then tries to discourage its use.
Bob Zadek: That’s a great question, Dan. Jeff, go ahead.
Jeffrey Miron: Well, I’m not sure I would say it creates chaos. It certainly creates confusion and redundant effort and inefficiencies. The history, the exact reason as to why some commodities have been outlawed and others have not, and for certain ones like alcohol, they’ve at times been outlawed and other times not—that’s not an easy thing to answer trivially. Certainly some of the things that we just discussed about racism played a role as to why some substances were singled out.
The fact that there’s a long history for a large fraction of the population of consuming alcohol in moderate ways probably is part of why alcohol has managed to sort of escape, for the most part, the extreme regulation of prohibition. But I think more fundamentally, there’s this confusion over whether the negatives come from the substance or come from the policies. And I fear that we’re going to end up doing something like outlawing tobacco because people will decide that it’s a bad substance and therefore it has to be banned, not recognizing that we have seen an enormous reduction in tobacco use over the last 60 or so years without actually banning tobacco, without locking people up, without drive-by shootings or any of those sorts of tactics, simply by allowing the health information to get to people and letting them make decisions on their own about whether they want to use tobacco.
Caller (Dan): Is there any benefit to subsidizing tobacco?
Jeffrey Miron: For the tobacco growers, but not for anybody else. I mean, it may tend to keep the price a little bit lower, but it’s mainly just a big transfer to tobacco growers. That reflects political power and the accidents of history. There’s no rational economic reason for that. Obviously, if we want to be discouraging—if you think government should be in the business of telling people what to do about their health, then you would want to, if anything, be raising the price of tobacco products, not lowering it by subsidizing it.
And of course, we simultaneously tax it and subsidize it, so that’s just goofy. And of course, ideally in a libertarian land, we would stop subsidizing any particular agricultural product, no matter what it was; we would let those products survive on their own in the competitive marketplace. And I think libertarians would be very hesitant, maybe not absolutely unalterably opposed in every case, but very hesitant to impose what are frequently called “sin taxes,” that is, higher than normal taxes on certain substances that we regard as particular health risks, such as possibly tobacco. Doing that is a worse policy.
Bob Zadek: Dan, thank you so much for your call this morning. I would just supplement what you said a tiny bit. If we are talking about activities that are bad for us, such as drug prohibition, I would list—our country is all over the map on the regulation of bad activities. Eating too much sugar is a bad activity and, by some accounts, it is addictive. Gambling is addictive, a bad activity, yet all states, most states operate lotteries and encourage gambling, albeit with a warning label telling you to be sensible, which label you get when you buy your lottery ticket. Smoking, as Jeff mentioned earlier, is bad for you; there is clearly a relationship between your health and smoking. We never have banned smoking; we regulate it, we tax it, we scold people, we put warnings on the packs.
And various other types of drugs are prescription drugs are perhaps addictive, but we allow them to be prescribed and we hope doctors do a sensible job. So we are all over the map on how we deal with personal responsibility for activities that are bad for one. And drugs are the only activity where we send the activity totally underground with aggressive regulation. It’s indefensible, even if you stipulate that drugs are bad. So are all the other “sins” that I mentioned, none of which have been outright criminalized. So it’s such an irrational and wrongheaded policy. And the reason we spend time on the show is because it’s so darn expensive. Jeff, do you have any sense at all as to how much this “War on Drugs” costs us?
Jeffrey Miron: Yes, I have some estimates of what the War on Drugs is costing us. There are two main aspects of that from a budgetary perspective. One is the explicit expenditures for police, judges, prosecutors, prisons, and so on. In round numbers, my estimates are about $50 billion a year. And then there is, of course—$50 billion a year with a “B.” And then in terms of foregone revenue, there is—I’m sorry, but there’s some really bad interference that I’m hearing on the call. Bob, are you still there?
Bob Zadek: I’m here. Can you hear me okay?
Jeffrey Miron: Now I can hear you better. Now that interference seems to have gone away. Maybe the previous caller had not fully hung up his phone or something like that. So, to go back to the question: the expenditure on enforcing drug prohibition, adding together state, federal, and local, roughly $50 billion a year. The foregone tax revenue, a similar order of magnitude, about $40 to $50 billion a year. So that’s a change in the overall US deficit situation of $100 billion. If we got all that, it still wouldn’t change the fact that the US is currently bankrupt for all practical purposes, that the path of our fiscal expenditure is not sustainable, but it would certainly go in the right direction. And it’s something which makes sense to do on every other basis because it will improve the welfare of people who use drugs, it will reduce crime, reduce corruption, and all the other things that we talked about.
Bob Zadek: We have another caller. I knew we’d have a lot of callers for this show. Nick in San Carlos, good morning. Welcome to the show. What’s on your mind this morning?
Caller (Nick): Good morning. I’m sorry, I think I was on the line the whole time chatting and I apologize, I had no idea I was on the line. Please accept my apologies.
Bob Zadek: No problem.
Caller (Nick): This is very interesting. So, a couple points. First, I’m a research scientist and I work on drug development. Early on, I worked in hepatitis. Along the way, you see a lot of what’s called NASH, in fact, fatty liver. Bottom line is caused by drinking. And you talk about a coming flood that is going to impact this country. So here’s the deal: smoking cigarettes is carcinogenic, and I can go down the line with other things. Drinking will cause NASH, which will lead to chronic health, which will lead to cirrhotic liver. There are some responsibilities. Should we institute harm reduction for that? That’s the first part.
My second question is, I know there must be data somewhere for some of the either regions or countries around the world that have legalized some type of a drug. And I’m curious if there are endpoints available around whether it’s crime, outcomes for addiction, the ability to function in society. And I realize that some of these countries are small, so the population statistics may be a bit skewed, but I wonder if you could talk about that, sir. And I’ll listen off the air. Mr. Zadek, I love your show. Take care, sir.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Nick. So Jeff, two questions: isn’t it appropriate policy if we are reducing harm to the population from our point of view? And second part of Nick’s question is: what has been the experience of other countries around the world who have experimented with the legalization or decriminalization of drugs?
Jeffrey Miron: First, on harm reduction, we can do an enormous amount to reduce harm that people are experiencing from their drug use by legalizing it. A huge fraction of the harms come not from use of the substance per se, but they come from using it under a condition of prohibition. So a simple example is shooting up heroin or other opioids. Why do people inject heroin as opposed to taking a pill or some other method of consumption? Partially, substantially because it’s expensive. And if it’s very expensive, you want to consume it in a way that gives you a big bang for the buck. Get a big bang for the buck, you should inject.
So first, by raising the prices through prohibition, we’ve given people a strong incentive to want to consume in this relatively dangerous manner. Second, we simultaneously have laws in most states that make it impossible for people to buy clean disposable syringes over the counter and so on. So we’ve made it harder for people to be able to inject in a safe way, i.e., not sharing needles with other drug users. When you share needles that someone else has put in his or her arm, of course you’re taking a risk that you get diseases from that other person, and in particular HIV and hepatitis C, some other blood-borne diseases. So the first thing to do to reduce harm is stop creating all the harm that we’re creating by making drugs illegal. And there are many, many other examples that would reinforce that point.
Bob Zadek: And I would just remind, before you get to the second point, Jeff, I would just remind Nick and our listeners that you pointed out earlier in the show that in fact we have effectively reduced harm without prohibition in our experience with cigarettes. You made that point earlier, I want to just remind our listeners that we have experience with exactly that.
Jeffrey Miron: Yes, excellent point. Now, if we had a world in which all these substances were legal and they were for starters all taxed at essentially the same rate as anything else, and someone said, “Okay fine, that’s better than current policy, but I still think that some people consume excessive amounts of alcohol, I still think that some people are using drugs in ways which are not good for them. Shouldn’t we do something to help such people?”
So my answer would be, “Alright, that’s at least a fair instinct. I understand that you’re well-intentioned. But in order to figure out exactly which things we should try to discourage or encourage requires an incredible sort of analysis, amounts of data that we are never going to have.” As you made this point earlier: do we know that it’s actually consuming too much alcohol which is on net bad for people and we should have a sin tax on alcohol? Or is it watching television for too late at night, so you’re tired the next day at work and you aren’t as productive? Or you drive, not in any crazy way, but you just drive when you’re exhausted and take the risk of having accidents, which of course sometimes hurt other people, not just yourself?
So to do this harm reduction thing in a thoughtful, rational way, I think requires information that’s utterly beyond the scope of any analysis that one can imagine doing. So I’m very skeptical about that. Now, some very non-coercive methods of trying to reduce harm—public service messages, information that’s provided to kids in health education in high school and things like that—those probably don’t do great harm, maybe they nudge behavior in a useful direction. So I could certainly live with those if that was a cost of getting these things to be legal. But many of the harm reduction things that people propose—sin taxes or anything that’s at all coercive—I’m extremely hesitant about, in part because it’s impossible to figure out what harm we exactly we should be trying to reduce.
Now, the second question from this caller was about other countries that have experimented with drug—like Portugal, for example. Right. So unfortunately, we have a lot fewer such countries for which we can examine data than we would like, because overall not too many countries have gone from prohibition to legalization. And that’s partially because of US pressure in the direction of maintaining prohibition throughout the world; it’s partially because of UN treaties that the US supports that try to impose drug prohibition throughout the world.
But we have a few examples: Portugal as you mentioned, to some degree the Netherlands, we have several US states that have legalized marijuana, we have other cases where countries have at least de-escalated their wars on drugs even if they haven’t actually legalized or medicalized. And the evidence from those is incredibly consistent across all those observations and consistent with the libertarian view. None of the horror stories painted by the drug warriors—booms in drug use or crime—none of that has come true. Mainly we’ve seen relatively little change in crime, in use rates, in HIV infection rates. To the extent that we have seen changes as a result of these de-escalations or legalizations, they’ve been almost always in a beneficial direction. That is, if anything, use rates have stayed the same or gone down, crime rates have gone down, HIV infection rates have gone down, and so on and so forth. So the evidence is at this point somewhat limited, but it’s entirely consistent and supportive of the libertarian perspective.
Caller Segment: Prison Guard Unions and Future Outlook [47:18]
Bob Zadek: Thanks Jeff. Jeff, I knew we’d have a lot of callers. We have another caller, Evan. Good morning. Welcome to the show. Sorry we kept you on hold for so long.
Caller (Evan): Yes, definitely. This is one of your best shows in a long time. And I would say that some of the things that tie into it are some of the research that I’ve done myself, particularly two books—actually, there could be a third. But the two books were John L. Williams, who wrote the book Operation Gladio, which doesn’t tell you a whole lot until you see the subtitle and it says “The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia.” Now, what’s really amazing is that this guy used to be an advisor for the FBI, and he’s still alive. And the second guy, there’s been rehab counseling for many, many years, and he wrote—it was John L. Potash. His book was called The Drug Wars in America. Anyway, he had written both of these books were like 440 pages, 391 pages on the John L. Potash book. And these were books that had almost one-quarter of the book referenced to documentation and the research and the notes that were just irrefutable. They’re very, very impressive. There’s a third book too called The Paradigm Conspiracy, which isn’t so directly related, but for anyone who’s an iconoclast and non-conformist individual as many libertarians are, this book was by Christopher Largent and a woman who wrote it too, I think it’s a husband and wife team. And they had been in various meetings for many, many years that had to do with just being your own individual self and not being interfered with. And it said how our system of government, church, schools, etc., interfere with our individual rights. And so they call it the conspiracy paradigm. And John L. Potash’s book…
Bob Zadek: Evan, thank you so much. I just wanted to thank you for being a listener, for sharing these books with us. Do you have a question for Jeff you’d like to have Jeff respond to?
Caller (Evan): Yes, I caught the show a little late and I didn’t have his total name. Was it Jeff the first name?
Bob Zadek: Jeffrey Miron. M-I-R-O-N. Jeffrey Miron.
Caller (Evan): M-A-R-I-S?
Bob Zadek: No, M-I-R-O-N.
Caller (Evan): O-N, Miron. Okay. Got it. Thank you, thank you very much.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much for being a listener, Evan. Thanks for listening to the show. Now Vince, we have another caller, please. Good morning. Welcome to the show.
Caller (Steve): Good morning, Bob. Thanks for your show because it’s really a venue for freedom. I have a question for Professor Miron. Could you please comment on the influence of prison guard unions on drug laws?
Jeffrey Miron: I don’t know that I’ve thought specifically about the role of the prison guard unions. A lot of people have commented on the private prison movement as being one factor in why we have a huge incarceration rate in the United States and as a factor helping to continue the War on Drugs. And that certainly makes sense to me, although this escalation of the War on Drugs and all of the confused thinking about it long predates the private prison boom.
Bob Zadek: I can help a little bit, if you will. I’m in California where the prison guards union is the strongest public service union in the state, and they vigorously fought—successfully fought—the decriminalization of marijuana when it was on the ballot a number of years ago. They are strong opponents of decriminalization because it is for them bad for business. So Steve, in California, they are a very big deal and they are the arch-enemy of decriminalization. So your question is directly on point, at least in California. So thanks so much for your question, Steve.
Caller (Steve): Thanks to you too.
Bob Zadek: Thanks a lot, Steve. Thanks for being a listener. Jeff, we’re winding down, regretfully. We didn’t succeed in covering a semester’s worth of work in an hour, but tell our friends out there how they can follow your work and your writing and the work of Cato.
Jeffrey Miron: So, the best place, easiest way to follow my writing would be to follow the Cato blog. I put my thoughts about drug policy and other things into that every few weeks, and then most of my work these days is published via Cato and would show up as a policy analysis or white paper or other types of publication through Cato.
Bob Zadek: I always like to try to end, if I can, on a positive note. Is there a positive way we can end the show in terms of our failed, misguided, expensive War on Drugs? Is the future look bleak, bright, or who knows?
Jeffrey Miron: Honesty compels one to say who knows, but if I were to try to spin it in a positive direction, on drug policy and much more generally, a number of positive things have been happening from the libertarian view for decades. And that overall, the US and many other countries still have broad protections of individual liberty and freedom. And that the bad things which may be happening in the US under the Trump administration and under the Attorney General Sessions, I don’t see as necessarily a sea change or a radical difference in the way the population is going to vote and what it’s going to support going forward. I see it more as a perfect storm of the particular politician in question, of the particular frustrations of the moment, of the politician—Hillary Clinton—that Trump was running against. So I am guardedly optimistic that the pendulum will swing back in the other direction and we will have reasonable policy—certainly not perfect policy from libertarian view—but we can get back to some of the relatively positive things that were happening for libertarians before the election of Donald Trump.
Bob Zadek: Jeff, thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time and all of your wisdom. To all my friends out there, have a very nice Sunday. Enjoy the rest of the week.