I basically have two veins of thought on this issue.
The Bureaucratic/Legal/Regulatory Problems
Let’s say that we remove the criminalization of prohibited drugs in our culture. This means it is no longer illegal to sell them, no longer illegal to transport them, no longer illegal to possess them.
What happens the next day? Well, somewhere in the United States, someone sells drugs, just like the day before. A few days later, or maybe even that same very day, a current head shop owner starts selling previously illegal drugs over the counter.
Fast forward a year, and this is happening all over the place, people selling drugs to all kinds of other people.
Will this increase the rate of drug users in our society? I actually doubt it, I can imagine a few people might try pot or something, but I think it won’t have a significant impact on drug usage. So, all this buying and selling won’t be a big change, what will be a big change is how it is being done.
It is being done legally. And if there is one thing I am as certain of as anything in this world, it is the taxman. There’s no way in hell the government isn’t going to start taxing these transactions. Even an America that would be willing to decriminalize drugs would never be willing to ignore billions of dollars a year in revenue, would be willing to let people make their living without taking a share of said living.
That’s just how governments operate, period.
Eventually, the drug trade would move from the (previously black) gray market to the legitimate market, drugs would be sold more and more by legitimate business men who file tax returns. Government would get its share. Eventually you might even see these drugs for sale at Walgreens and other places.
In the short term (say 5 years from decriminalization) this would lead to much lower prices, big corporations would get involved in the processing of these drugs. This would bring with it a more standardized product, as consumers would demand a standard, pure chemical product from a major corporation–the sort of demand they would never make of a street pusher.
This would bring with it new issues though, what happens when someone dies because they use a drug that is chemically impure, or adulterated with some even more harmful chemical? Today, not much. There is no accountability for that kind of thing today.
But, five years into drug decriminalization, when big corporations are the ones making the product–you’re still going to have some overdoses and accidental death. I imagine it will be much rarer, but it will happen (currently legal drugs kill people, for example, all the time.)
There will be lawsuits and consumer outcry. People will say, “How can this mega corporation make billions off of selling us cocaine, but not be held to any of the regulatory standards that companies like Pfizer or Merck are? This is a totally unregulated pharmaceutical product that can have severe side effects and can cause significant harm to its users, yet the companies have no accountability! How can the government make billions in taxing these companies while not protecting its citizens?!”
Then, regulation starts. Eventually, given the nature of many of the currently illegal drugs, I see a whole new layer of regulatory complexity in place. I find it hard to believe that at some point, the FDA doesn’t get involved. Maybe not, though.
I will say this, though–this isn’t a wholly negative scenario. When all is said and done you’d have:
- Products that were standardized
- Products that were chemically pure
- Products that were regulated and subjected to oversight by government
- Products that are almost definitely cheaper at POS, illegality of a product and all that that entails puts an enormous price premium on anything
- Organized crime has traditionally survived based on illegal things. When prohibition ended it was an enormous blow to the mafia, they survived on gambling and other illegal activities, but prohibition was the golden age for the mafia–and for good reason. Today, drug smuggling is the bedrock of organized crime, it is how organized crime makes its money. Organized crime can’t compete with major corporations, it can’t provide a chemically pure, standardized product. It only dominates this market because it is a black market that requires all sorts of illegal tactics to survive in. So, this “new world” would see organized crime taking a massive body blow.
So where is the problem? This is an enormous bureaucratic move, and one that all the bureaucrats in power know will happen. It simply will never be that we can just “decriminalize” all the drugs that we have prohibited for so many years and leave it at that. It’s a major institutional shift for all the regulatory bodies involved, and I think that this leads to a lot of the “institutional” reasons that work against decriminalization. Basically, bureaucracies don’t like major changes, and this would be a dramatic overhaul of the system.
The “Illegality Creates the Problems” Myth
I don’t buy into the argument that drugs cause problems because they are illegal. Problems come about for drug users because they are illegal, sure, no one can deny that. The illegal nature of drugs causes problems for society, that part of it–I won’t deny.
However, drugs cause problems for individuals for reasons wholly independent of their legal status. The most destructive addictive substance in human history is alcohol, without a doubt.
It is involved in more violent crimes, more destroyed lives, and destroyed families than any other drug in history. This goes back to the very earliest days of human alcohol use, even ancient history has examples of people doing terrible things under the effects of alcohol (remember Alexander killing Cleitus?)
I’m not saying this is justification for prohibiting drugs–I’m just saying, that the motivation to prohibit drug use (and the temperance movement, for example) wasn’t borne entirely out of a socially conservative desire to crack down on the “undesirables.” There is a genuine societal concern about the harm caused by these substances.
