Could the United States Use an Extra $1 Trillion?

For years, Hollywood feasted on stories of the battle between the G-men – notably “untouchable” Elliott Ness – and the rum-runners and speakeasies during Prohibition. In 1919, the total U.S. ban – effected by a Constitutional amendment – on the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages created a war between a whole pile of ordinary citizens wanting their cup of gin or their glass of fine Bordeaux, aided and abetted by a complex lattice of organized crime, against axe-wielding federal officers and religious groups happy that once and for all demon rum was gone from American shores. Thompson sub-machine gun fire punctuated the late night streets of major cities across the land, and booze flowed like a river, even financing future political dynasties like the powerful Massachusetts Kennedy clan that spawned a U.S. president in the 1960s. By 1933, the experiment had run its course – an utter failure – and Prohibition was repealed. Apparently, we learned nothing from this experience.

Addiction is nasty business, and the impact of hard narcotics on productivity, families and the world around addicts is deep and profoundly negative. Perhaps we wouldn’t care so much if addicts only damaged themselves, but they clearly decimate those who are nearest and dearest to them, often committing crimes to feed their ugly habits. Making such drugs illegal, of course, only increases the street price, which places more pressure on addicts to commit bigger or more frequent crimes to the extent that they cannot otherwise afford their habits. If we actually were effective in reducing consumption levels with illegality, that would certainly justify the harsh treatment we mete out for dealers and junkies alike. Unfortunately, with all the laws against drug trafficking, we have yet to make a dent in drug use from casual user to hard core addict.

“Over the past four decades, the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion fighting the war on drugs. The results? In 2011 a global commission on drug policy issued a report signed by George Shultz, Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan; the arch-conservative Peruvian writer-politician Mario Vargas Llosa; former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker; and former Presidents of Brazil and Mexico Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ernesto Zedillo. It begins, ‘The global war on drugs has failed ... Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption.’ Its main recommendation is to ‘encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.’” Time Magazine, April 2^nd.

So if such narco-legislation is so completely ineffective, why can no politician touch the subject? Why in a time of deficit impairment are we unwilling to legalize and control such trafficking, perhaps adding billions of dollars in annual revenues from the federal and state taxes that would be generated from the legal use of drugs, spending billions every year to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate drug offenders, making the United States the incarceration capital of the world? Such control would certainly reduce the carnage in neighboring Mexico (which has now spilled into the border states) where U.S.-sourced weapons have flooded that nation to support drug cartels keeping the path up to the border open to the free flow of narcotics. It’s useful to keep in mind that over half of the cost of a bottle of distilled spirits in the country is directly attributable to state and federal taxes. Think of the revenues that taxing drugs would generate. Instead, we seem to prefer to spend money to keep the price of drugs high enough to encourage organized crime to keep that business alive.

With global warming opening up shipping channels in the “hotly” contest Arctic regions north of Alaska, even our Coast Guard is unable to keep up with the demand to police our ocean pathways: “The Coast Guard is shrinking and may have to cut back on traditional missions like fisheries protection and drug interdiction to free up resources for new issues like cybersecurity and the thawing of the Arctic, warned the service's commandant, Admiral Robert J. Papp, … at the Navy League's annual Sea-Air-Space convention.” AOLDefense.com, April 16^th. Our uniformed services cannot keep up with the drug runners, and our criminal justice system is, for all practical purposes, spinning out of control because of drug crimes.

“The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That's not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain--with a rate among the highest--has 153. Even developing countries that are well known for their crime problems have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. As [Pat] Robertson pointed out on his TV show, The 700 Club, ‘We here in America make up 5% of the world's population but we make up 25% of the [world's] jailed prisoners.’

“This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.'s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison… That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of America's federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession.” Time.

Want to do something that is a tad less than legalizing all narcotics? How about just legalizing marijuana? “More than 300 economists, including three nobel laureates, have signed a petition calling attention to the findings of a paper by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, which suggests that if the government legalized marijuana it would save $7.7 billion annually by not having to enforce the current prohibition on the drug. The report added that legalization would save an additional $6 billion per year if the government taxed marijuana at rates similar to alcohol and tobacco.” Huffington Post, April 17^th. We really need to do something. It is well past the time when we need to rethink this issue before we spend another futile trillion dollars.

I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes realizing what you cannot do is the most important lesson of all.