Legalization of prohibition

After millennia of criminal prohibition and visceral law enforcement endeavours to rid the nation of illicit drugs, violent traffickers still pose a threat to life in our cities, a steady stream of drug offenders still enters our jails and prisons, and tonnes of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana continue to cross our borders without being turned away.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is against making drugs illegal. Prohibition has been proved to be counterproductive at controlled and targeted drug use, and it also illuminates otherwise law-abiding people to arrest, charges, and prison time for what they do in private. The government infringes on the fundamental liberties of privacy and individual autonomy that are protected by our Constitution by trying to enforce drug laws. According to the ACLU, even if someone causes harm to themselves, they ought not be punished unless they cause harm to others. There are more efficacious ways to manage drug use, methods that will eventually result in a society that is freer, healthier, and less crime-ridden.

August Vollmer, the founder of the School of Criminology at the University of California, Irvine was one of the most well-known early opponents of prohibition in the United States. He expressed the following views in his book The Police and Modern Society from 1936: In addition to being unsustainable and ludicrously expensive as a means of reversing this evil, stringent laws, spectacular police operations, vigorous prosecution, and the imprisonment of addicts and peddlers are also unjustifiably and unbelievably cruel when applied to the unfortunate drug victims. Drug smugglers and supply agents emerged as a result of repression’s undergrounding of this vice, making money off of it and using cunning tactics to increase traffic.

The establishment of Federal control and the provision of addictive substances should be the primary step in any strategy to ameliorate this debilitating condition. Like prostitution and alcoholism, drug addiction is not and never has been a police problem that can be dealt by officers. First and foremost, it is a medical issue, and if there is a solution, it will be found by medical professionals with the requisite skills and scientific knowledge, whose only aim will be to dampen and possibly eliminate this destructive appetite.

Fear of legalization is ostensibly based on the assumption that drug use would ramp up if it were legal. Perhaps that assumption is flawed. There is no association between the prevalence of drug use and the severity of drug laws; in fact, people who live in countries with strict laws—like America and Britain—use drugs more frequently than they do less frequently. Embarrassed drug warriors attribute this to purported cultural differences, but even in relatively similar nations, tough laws have little impact on the prevalence of addiction: Sweden’s strict laws and Norway’s more liberal ones have exactly the same rates of addiction.

In terms of taxpayer money, lives, productivity, the inability of law enforcement to pursue serious crimes, and social inequality, drug prohibitionist societies bear a hefty price for their war on drugs. Decriminalization advocates contend that the social and financial costs of drug enforcement far outweigh the harms that drugs themselves inflict. According to some, legalizing marijuana in the US would result in a $7.7 billion annual reduction in the amount spent on maintaining the prohibition. A 2018 study found that legalizing marijuana in the UK could generate between 1 and 3.5 billion pounds in tax revenue and save money for the police and the administration of justice.

Legalizing drugs has the flair to generate a wide range of jobs in industries like sales, distribution, transportation, production, quality assurance, regulatory agencies, advertising, scientific research, and lab analysis. Construction of these stores would benefit the construction industry if some drugs were only to be sold at single-purpose licensed locations.

As long as they don’t cause harm to others, people should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies, including using drugs recreationally. Some people think that people can push the limits of human experience, knowledge, and creativity thanks to altered states of consciousness. Thus, using drugs for human advancement, teleological development, or even just increased artistic creativity, is morally required.

However, it would take a herculean plunge to renounce nearly a century of prohibition when the purported benefits are still so speculative and the potential costs are so high. Only a very serious and widespread deterioration of the current drug situation, on a national and international level, is likely to result in the consensus needed to motivate such a leap. The legislative obstacle would be enormous even then. The legislative bodies of the major industrial nations could spend years debating how to regulate access to each of a dozen widely used drugs.