April 21, 2012 – April 20 is the counter-culture “holiday” on which lots and lots of people come together to advocate marijuana legalization (or just get high). Should drugs—especially marijuana—be legal? The answer is “yes.” Immediately. Without hesitation. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200 seized in a civil asset forfeiture. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure. It’s high time to end prohibition. Even if you aren’t willing to go whole-hog and legalize all drugs, at the very least we should legalize marijuana.

For the sake of the argument, let’s go ahead and assume that everything you’ve heard about the dangers of drugs is completely true. That probably means that using drugs is a terrible idea. It doesn’t mean, however, that the drug war is a good idea.

Prohibition is a textbook example of a policy with negative unintended consequences. Literally: it’s an example in the textbook I use in my introductory economics classes (Cowen and Tabarrok, Modern Principles of Economics if you’re curious) and in the most popular introductory economics textbook in the world (by N. Gregory Mankiw).The demand curve for drugs is extremely inelastic, meaning that people don’t change their drug consumption very much in response to changes in prices. Therefore, vigorous enforcement means higher prices and higher revenues for drug dealers. In fact, I’ll defer to Cowen and Tabarrok—page 60 of the first edition, if you’re still curious—for a discussion of the basic economic logic:

The more effective prohibition is at raising costs, the greater are drug industry revenues. So, more effective prohibition means that drug sellers have more money to buy guns, pay bribes, fund the dealers, and even research and develop new technologies in drug delivery (like crack cocaine). It’s hard to beat an enemy that gets stronger the more you strike against him or her.

People associate the drug trade with crime and violence; indeed, the newspapers occasionally feature stories about drug kingpins doing horrifying things to underlings and competitors. These aren’t caused by the drugs themselves but from the fact that they are illegal (which means the market is underground) and addictive (which means demanders aren’t very price sensitive).

Those same newspapers will also occasionally feature articles about how this or that major dealer has been taken down or about how this or that quantity of drugs was taken off the streets. Apparently we’re to take from this the idea that we’re going to “win” the war on drugs. Apparently. It’s alleged that this is only a step toward getting “Mister Big,” but even if the government gets “Mister Big,” it’s not going to matter. Apple didn’t disappear after Steve Jobs died. Getting “Mr. Big” won’t win the drug war. As I pointed out almost a year ago, economist and drug policy expert Jeffrey Miron estimates that we would have a lot less violence without a war on drugs.

At the recent Association of Private Enterprise Education conference, David Henderson from the Naval Postgraduate School pointed out the myriad ways in which government promises to make us safer in fact imperil our safety and security. The drug war is an obvious example: in the name of making us safer and protecting us from drugs, we are actually put in greater danger. Without meaning to, the drug warriors have turned American cities into war zones and eroded the very freedoms we hold dear.

Freedom of contract has been abridged in the name of keeping us “safe” from drugs. Private property is less secure because it can be seized if it is implicated in a drug crime (this also flushes the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty” out the window). The drug war has been used as a pretext for clamping down on immigration. Not surprisingly, the drug war has turned some of our neighborhoods into war zones. We are warehousing productive young people in prisons at an alarming rate all in the name of a war that cannot be won.

Albert Einstein is reported to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By this definition, the drug war is insane. We are no safer, and we are certainly less free because of concerted efforts to wage war on drugs. It’s time to stop the insanity and end prohibition. Source.

April 13, 2012 – OAKSTERDAM university, a self-proclaimed “cannabis college” in Oakland, California, has been called everything from “the Princeton of Pot” to “the Harvard of Hemp”. Its founder, Richard Lee, has become the public face of the movement to legitimise marijuana. A paraplegic, he uses the drug for medical purposes, which is legal in California and 15 other states and in the District of Columbia. He also runs a dispensary for medical marijuana and sponsored a 2010 ballot measure in California to legalise marijuana completely in small amounts, whether medicinal or recreational. That measure failed narrowly, but the idea of legalisation continues to win converts.

Now, however, Mr Lee is busted, harassed and in danger of federal prosecution. This month, armed federal agents stormed into his house and offices to confiscate plants and documents. Mr Lee now says that, indicted or not, he plans to get out of his marijuana-related businesses.

The raids on his properties are only the most telegenic instances of a much wider federal crackdown that has taken states and counties by surprise. Dispensaries, and even landlords of dispensary-operators, all over California, Colorado and Montana have been getting menacing letters. Many have closed shop. Growers and users are by turns livid and scared. Some have protested. Others have ducked back into the black market, as in the old days before medical marijuana was allowed.

The question is why the federal government is doing this. On the one hand there is a federal law, the Controlled Substances Act, which recognises no exception for medical marijuana and thus considers all use and trade of it criminal. But on the other hand the Obama administration originally signalled that it would not deliberately clash with the states about weed. In the so-called Ogden memo of 2009, the Justice Department advised its lawyers to leave small-beer marijuana enforcement to the states and focus on graver crimes.

But then, last year, the administration issued the Cole memo (these things are named after the deputy attorneys-general who draft them). It seemed, in dense verbiage, to suggest that the Ogden memo had been misunderstood, and that federal prosecutors should indeed go after the cannabis trade, especially if they suspect that serious money is being made.

The overall effect has been to confuse everybody and leave matters entirely at the discretion of individual prosecutors. Thus there are few signs of federal aggression in New Mexico, Rhode Island or Vermont, for instance. Rather, the crackdown appears to be occurring in just six federal districts—the four in California, and those in Montana and Colorado.

To Ethan Nadelmann, the head of the Drug Policy Alliance, which lobbies for an end to the failed “war on drugs”, this suggests that six federal prosecutors may be acting on their own, perhaps even in conflict with the Obama administration. The president, in this scenario, is too afraid to touch anything that looks soft on drugs in an election year and stands weakly by.

States do not like it. Democratic and Republican legislators from five medical-marijuana states have written an open letter to Barack Obama to end the “chaos” and leave this matter to the states. Christine Gregoire and Lincoln Chafee, governors of Washington state and Rhode Island, have asked the federal government to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I drug (like heroin, say) to a Schedule II drug (like morphine) so that doctors can at least prescribe it safely in certain circumstances. Vermont, Colorado, Hawaii, and Connecticut have joined in the request. Ms Gregoire has already found herself having to veto a medical-marijuana bill she supports for fear that her state employees may be indicted by federal prosecutors. To all the good reasons for drug reform can now be added this classically conservative one: states’ rights. Source.