IS LEGALIZING DRUGS A GOOD IDEA? ---Warren D Smith Feb 2003------ It's been suggested that drugs such as cocaine and heroin should be legalized. (A less-radical suggestion is that marijauna be legalized.) Let's look at this via NUMBERS and MATH. Annual deaths in USA from various causes (2000 AD) -------------------------------------------------- 430 K smoking 19 K homicide (of these: FBI says 1450 were drug-related in 1994, but 795 in 1998) 41 K motor vehicle accidents 17 K AIDS 81 K alcohol related accident or disease 14 K drug related 3 K world trade center destruction etc ...so... what can we conclude? [Aside from noting that smoking and alcohol presently each cause a lot more deaths than drugs...]? Well, if the rationale for legalizing, say, Cocaine, Heroin, etc., is that then drug criminals would no longer BE criminals and would no longer feel the urge to kill each other in great numbers (although perhaps drug users might still feel that urge)... we see that up to 795 or 1450 lives/year would be saved by drug legalization. However it seems likely (since 14000 drug related deaths) that many more than 1450 lives would be lost to extra drug-related deaths, so... INITIAL CONCLUSION: in terms of saving lives, NO, drug legalization is not a good idea. Sanity check: during "prohibition" 1920-1929, did the number of alcohol-related deaths drop? Apparently not much. For the first few years, alcohol consumption dropped but then it came back to essentially the same levels (perhaps even higher) than before [Clark Warburton, The Economic Results of Prohibition, New York: Columbia University Press, 1932]. Also, then alcohol got more expensive, crime increased, and prison populations increased. Most Americans regarded prohibition as a failure which is why it was repealed. It was not totally repealed, in the sense that alcohol is still heavily regulated and taxed. Extrapolating from this experience perhaps indicates legalizing drugs would not increase drug related deaths (in which case our initial conclusion invalidated). On other hand some of these drugs are more dangerous than alcohol, so such extrapolation is unjustified. Consider also the large cost borne by taxpayers who pay to support the DEA, the cops, etc, money that would no longer be paid. That cost is $1.9 billion for the DEA alone in 2003, which (at $1 million per "life") means 1900 wasted lives worth of work/money/time go to paying for the DEA per year. Assuming all the other police agency's anti-drug activities cost a comparable amount, maybe 4000 wasted lives worth of money support these activities per year. CONCLUSION: This cost isn't enough to affect our logic - the 14000 drug related deaths outweigh these 4000 plus the 1450 put together. Stay with drugs=illegal. BUT... before closing the book on this... consider also the large number of "drug criminals" who are now in prison serving (often) rather large sentences for (often) rather minor crimes. Consider the total number of years of all of those sentences as (at least partially) "lost years of life"... if this is factored in, do our conclusions change? I mean, if drugs were legalized, all those people would not be in prison wasting their lives. Over 1 million US prisoners are now serving time for drug crimes. If the average sentence is 5 years (I do not know if this is true) that would be the equivalent of about 70000 or more lost lives. In that case, YES, it seems legalizing drugs WOULD save (effective) lives, at least if we assume that drug use would at most increase some small factor (say 2) after legalization. (As I said, it is not clear how much it would increase.) CONCLUSION: That (70000+4000+1000) now outweighs 14000 by a lot! This seems to make a very strong case for either drug legalization, or at least for reducing the prison sentences for most drug crimes drastically. So I favor: drugs such as cocaine and heroin should stay illegal, but most sentences for drug crimes should be a lot smaller than they are now. (Another reason to support this position: statistics show that drug enforcement and sentencing in the USA is presently very racist.)