War deserters

An interesting and underreported phenomenon is the movement of some conservatives to the drug-legalization position. A recent convert is columnist Mona Charen, who cites Milton Friedman's opinion that the war on drugs keeps the price of drugs artificially inflated and amounts to a favor by the government to drug lords.

Governments in the United States, federal and state, spend an estimated $41.3 billion annually to prevent people from ingesting substances we deem harmful, though many unsafe ingestibles -- you know the list -- remain legal. Half of all federal prisoners are serving sentences for drug offenses, along with 20 percent of state prisoners.

In 2009, there were 1.7 million drug arrests in the U.S. Half of those were for marijuana. As David Boaz and Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute noted, "Addicts commit crimes to pay for a habit that would be easily affordable if it were legal. Police sources have estimated that as much as half the property crime in some major cities is committed by drug users."

Drug money, such as booze money during Prohibition, has corrupted countless police, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, border patrol agents, prosecutors and judges. Drug crime has blighted many neighborhoods. America's appetite for drugs has encouraged lawlessness and violence in many neighboring countries, most recently in Mexico, where its drug violence is spilling north.

If drugs were legal and taxed, the U.S. and state treasuries would receive $46.7 billion in added revenue, while saving the $41.3 billion a year now spent to fight the war on drugs -- a pretty good turnaround. The downside, as Friedman acknowledged and Charen underscores, is that there would be some increase in drug addiction after legalization, just as there was an uptick in alcoholism after Prohibition was repealed.

But not all victims are created equal. The child, Friedman notes, who is killed in a drive-by shoot-out between drug gangs is a total victim. The adult who decides to take drugs is not.

[. . .]

We must ask whether the terrible price we are now paying -- in police costs, international drug control efforts, border security, foregone tax revenue, overdose deaths, corruption and violence -- is worth it.

Even the strongest war-on-drugs advocates must admit the stark difference in the way the law treats tobacco and alcohol, which have led to far more death and destruction than other drugs. Of course, that argument can cut both ways. Another way of stating the "some increase in drug addiction" point is that the legal status of tobacco and alcohol has contributed to harm they have caused.