Breakthrough in the war of the drugs.

The Becker- Posner Blog

A blog by Gary Becker and Richrd Posner

No, no breathrough. Its true that earlier this week the White House released its National Drug Control
Strategy 2013, heralded in some quarters as a breakthrough in national drug control strategy because it
calls drug addiction a disease and promises to devote a higher percentage of federal drug control funds to
treatment and prevention of drug abuse than in previous years. But a solid majority of federal drug control
funds (58 percent) will continue to be devoted to the enforcement of the federal criminal laws, with their
savage sentences, against participants in illegal-drug markets.
The publication of a White House National Drug Control Strategy is an annual event, which wordily
(the 2013 version is 95 pages long) heralds nonexistent progress and makes false promises of more to
come. The General Accountability Office has evaluated the 2013 version and found it wanting, noting the
governments lack of progress toward achieviing the goals of diminished drug use stated in the 2010
version.
The new (that is, the ostensibly new) strategy gives continued primacy to the war on drugs, which best
describes the criminal-law and (abroad) paramilitary campaigns against the drug trade. No one thinks
these campaigns can eradicate illegal drugs. The realistic-seeming objective is, by increasing expected
punishment cost and by taking out of circulation (through imprisonment) those not deterred by the cost,
the war on drugs raises the prices of illegal drugs. Yet those prices remain very low. The reason appears to
be the very high elasticity of supply of drug dealers. Its like Karl Marxs reserve army of the
unemployed; if there is no dearth of persons willing to be drug dealers at modest wages, the principal
effect of law enforcement may be to increase labor turnover, at enormous cost in police and prosecutorial
resources and above all in incarceration: half the federal prison population in the United States consists of
drug offenders. Some 1.7 million persons who are in prison or jail (state or federal) or on probation or
parole (or its federal equivalent, supervised release) are in those situations of confinement or restriction
because of drug offenses. No doubt the mere fact that drugs are illegal deters some consumersbut how
many relative to the large number of persons who have no interest in consuming mind-altering drugs,
legal or illegal?
Increasingly the war on drugs seems an expensive failure. But treatment and prevention (prevention other
than through the threat or actuality of imprisonment) are no panaceas. There are several problems. The
first is the difficulty of distinguishing between harmful and harmless use of drugs. Much of the
consumption of illegal drugs is either not harmful to the user at all, or is no more harmful than the legal
substitutes (such as cigarettes and alcoholic beverages) to which consumers of mind-alterating drugs
would be likely to turn if the illegal drugs were unavailable or very expensive. It would be foolish to
break a person of his cocaine habit only to see him become an alcoholic.
Furthermore, not all drug users are addicts; and not all addictions are harmful. Much behavior is habitual,
yet harmless; addiction is simply a pejorative term for habitual behavior.