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Will Rogers once said that "it's not what you don't know that hurts you; it's
what you know that ain't so." Everybody knows that drug abuse and crime are
sort of the same thing, and therefore fighting the war on drugs is a good way
to reduce crime.
Unfortunately, that ain't so.
And we distinguish sharply between policies to reduce drug abuse and the damage
that it does to individuals and the people around them, and policies to reduce
predatory crime, which is roughly hurting people and taking their stuff in all
its varieties.
And yes, drug abuse has a connection with predatory crime, but it's not the
same thing, and a lot of the stuff we do that's supposed to control drug abuse
actually turns out to increase predatory crime.
We can think about not doing that.
In particular, drug law enforcement has a natural tendency to increase the
stakes in drug dealing—put more money on the table, put more time behind bars
at risk and therefore to increase the value of violence to people engaged in
illicit drug trade.
So we should expect all things equal, that ramping up drug law enforcement is
going to increase rather than decrease violence.
That's what we've been seeing in Mexico.
Now, that doesn't have to be true.
You can focus drug law enforcement in a way that reduces violence by in effect
saying to market participants, "your chances of being nailed for your drug
dealing activity goes up if you hurt people in the process."
The main thing we do to reduce drug abuse is make the drugs illegal.
That makes them expensive and hard to get compared to any legal drug.
We need to enforce those laws to keep them from being dead letters.
But enforcement probably can't change drug abuse very much.
The job of enforcement is to limit the side effects
that are created by prohibition. Right?
If we prohibit a drug that a lot of people want, then we're going to have a big
illicit market and we're going to have crime, corruption, violence around that
illicit market.
I think of the job of drug law enforcement primarily as reducing those side
effects.
So we shouldn't measure drug enforcement in terms of whether we can make the
drugs more expensive or harder to get or reduce the number of users.
That's not the law enforcement job.
The law enforcement job is protecting people from aggression.