Legal Commentary

The Economist Calls for an End to the Drug War

By Ethan Brown

The Economist has an excellent cover story this week cataloging the extraordinary failures of the drug war.

I was particularly gratified to read the Economist's editors write that the fear of legalization 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."

That's exactly right, as I argued a couple of weeks ago here at Talk Left in a post titled "The Legalization Scare" [More...]

"There's good reason to be skeptical that legalization would yield...huge increases in use/abuse...because, well, drugs of all kinds are readily available to anyone who wants to experiment with them."

As the failure of drug prohibition becomes increasingly evident, drug war opponents need to make a few simple points as loudly and often as possible:

1--The drug war has in large part led to sky high incarceration rates that are inherently undemocratic;

2--Drugs are just as available as they were when anti-drug measures were ramped up in the 1980s;

3--The drug war is fast turning Mexico into a failed state with dangerous national security consequences for the United States;

4--Legalization is unlikely to lead to more people taking drugs and indeed legalization will free up much needed funds for rehabilitation and will therefore curb demand for drugs.

It's long past time to end the stupid, immoral, costly and vastly counter-productive drug war.

Bravo to The Economist for a great cover story--here's hoping that other media outlets take a similarly courageous stance on one of the more egregious public policy failures of our time.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 09, 2009 (boomark / email).