What a Waste!

Here's a graph that paints a clear view of something I find profoundly sad – the fact that our prison population is dominated by people convicted of illicit drug use.

But the dominance of drug-related “crime” is actually much worse than this chart depicts.  Why?  Because a significant fraction of the non-drugs crimes at right were committed by drug users to fund their habit.  Depending on whose numbers you want to believe, something between 25% and 60% of all property crimes committed in the U.S. are indirectly drug-related.  The main reason drug users commit crimes to fund their habit is because of the extraordinarily high price of the drugs they crave.  Those drug prices are high only because they are illegal.  Precisely the same thing happened with alcohol during Prohibition.  It's happening here, too.

Many people aren't aware that drug regulations are a relatively recent “innovation”.  The very first law of any kind regulating drugs in the U.S. was passed in 1892, to regulate opium use (restricting it to designated “opium dens”.  This was aimed mainly at Chinese immigrants, and driven by widespread American disdain for Chinese culture.  Very little else happened in the way of regulation until the 1920s – before that, any American who wanted any drug – coffee, alcohol, opium, cocaine, heroin, hashhish, marijuana – was free to purchase and use it.  Drug stores kept opium, cocaine, and heroin on the shelf.  Marijuana was readily available, especially in the American south.  Alcohol and coffee were available nearly anywhere.  There were users of these drugs all across the U.S.  Some abused those drugs (like some abuse alcohol today).  Most did not.  American society didn't fall apart.  In fact, one could make persuasive arguments that our high incarceration rates today (10 times what they were 100 years ago) are more damaging to our society than drug abusers were when drugs were completely unregulated.

I'd sure like to see us going back to our former libertarian approach to drugs: let the use of them be by personal choice, and punish only those that through their irresponsible use of drugs cause harm to others.  In other words, let's treat all drug use the way we treat alcohol use today.  If we did so, we'd “repatriate” tens of thousands of productive citizens, and likely cut our prison populations by two thirds (some think more!).

This is one topic where I'm 100% in agreement with the libertarians (and there aren't many like that!)...