This is the fourth in my series on the social costs of drug prohibition. You can read the first part here (prison-industrial complex), part two (militarization of the police) here, and the third part (confiscation of civil assets).
Prohibition policies are often sold to a willing public under the guise of reducing crime. This is particularly true when it comes to the discourse on violent crime, as public policy has long assumed a causal relationship between drug use and increases in violent crime. An example of this assumed relationship is laws prohibiting gun ownership by people who are addicted to drugs or illegal users of controlled substances (McGinty, Choksy, & Wintemute, 2016). The underlying belief is that violence is inherently a psychopharmacological side effect of drug use. This belief among policymakers persists despite the abundance of research showing that the majority of drug-related violence is systemic – the result of black market demands – rather than psychopharmacological (Goldstein, Brownstein, & Ryan, 1992). Simply put, it is prohibition that causes violence at a higher rate than the use of banned substances.
The reasons for this should be as obvious to policymakers as they are to economists, sociologists, political scientists and criminologists, but the paradigm endures. Because enforcement efforts, such as prohibition, reduce supply, while demand remains relatively inelastic even with the arrest of a drug users, prices increase. This makes control and protection of trafficking routes and sales territories more valuable, thereby increasing tensions between rival organizations and gangs. Although these competing organizations sometimes enter into agreements, the illegal nature of their activities makes them unable to use legal dispute resolution channels, such as courts, to mediate disagreements and enforce agreements (Castillo and Kronick, 2020 ). Thus, the lure of higher profits makes violence an attractive alternative to respecting low-stakes territorial agreements. Drug policy, by its nature, creates a trade-off between a reduction provide and increased violence.
It would be a policy failure if increased violence were the only negative externality associated with current drug policy, and as we will see later, much of the violence caused by these policies occurs outside of our national borders. We began this series by detailing how the paradigms created by prohibition have influenced current drug laws and enforcement mechanisms, and examining the similarities between the two. There is, however, one major difference that must be taken into account. Alcohol production occurred on a national level, which concentrated the resulting violence in local American cities. This led to a public backlash against the Eighteenth Amendment, resulting in its repeal. Much of the production of illegal substances such as cocaine or heroin takes place in other countries, which then traffic these goods into the United States. The result is that much of the violence caused by domestic ban laws is offshored to countries like Mexico and Afghanistan, masking the human costs for which domestic politicians must respond.
Violent crime is not the only area affected by drug policy, however, and the relationship between this set of tradeoffs often goes unnoticed by the public. As noted previously, efforts to prohibit the flow of controlled substances and maximize the incarceration of sellers and users incur opportunity costs. Grossi observes that influx of inmates convicted of drug crimes has crowding out effect, thereby reducing the space available to incarcerate those who have committed other types of crimes. Additionally, performing a pooled analysis of 51 separate state-level regressions (including DC) using the FBI’s seven index crimes as a base measure, Defina and Arvanites (2002) find a positive correlation between drug arrests and an increase of five of seven. Index crimes in the majority of states. Although this is not uniform across states – some states see an overall reduction in crime due to drug-related arrests – overall, the stronger the drug policy, the more there is crime in other areas such as property crimes. and theft.
In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 92,700 fatal overdoses in the United States; an increase of 29% compared to 2019. This rate of approximately 28 per 100,000 people is almost double the rate of 14.7 per 100,000 people in 2014. Much of this explosion in overdoses has been fueled by the opioid crisis. Recall from my previous article’s discussion of the concept of the iron law of prohibition, the economic principle that artificially imposed barriers to entry and supply exert pressure to simultaneously minimize volume and maximize profits. While drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines impose transaction costs associated with illegal trafficking, legal opioids provided a readily available and initially legal substitute for illegal opioids such as heroin. Conversely, efforts to criminalize the nonmedical use of legal opioids such as oxycodone increased trafficking and use of easily obtained synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
Gottschalk (2023) offers a fascinating retrospective on the evolution of the opioid crisis. She traces its beginnings to the moral panic of the 1980s over crack, a cheaply produced derivative of cocaine that provided a convenient justification for politicians to engage in “tough on crime” rhetoric. Despite the lack of solid and valid evidence, this rock on which to build a political religion of expanded prohibition asserted that this new scourge would instantly and inevitably create addiction, invariably provoke violent and antisocial behavior among users, and would give rise to a new generation of drug addicts. disabled babies who would need expensive medical care throughout their lives. Although separable from the later opioid crisis itself, this situation provided the backdrop against which illegal synthetic opioids could both thrive and provide a new enemy against which policymakers could rally.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, which billed itself as a leader in cutting-edge pain management, led the charge in convincing regulators to allow the sale of its synthetic opioid OxyContin in 1995. OxyContin, and d Other variants of oxycodone have proven to be very effective. addictive, which the manufacturers of these synthetics knew in advance. Working with conspirators such as Walmart, Walgreens, and CVS, these pills were widely marketed, particularly in rural communities, where doctors readily prescribed them to anyone complaining of pain. Very quickly, regulators and policymakers recognized that an epidemic was imminent and took action. Predictably, instead of treating the growing wave of addictions and overdoses as a public health crisis, they responded by seeking to limit the supply of these drugs, limiting the number of pills that doctors could prescribe, to whom they could prescribe them, and by creating a prescribing system. monitoring program that criminally prosecutes doctors who exceed prescribing limits.
Supply always eventually follows demand, and in the absence of the preferred product, substitute products will fill the void. In this case, users addicted to oxycodone and its similar synthetic derivatives turned to existing opioids available on the street, namely heroin. Although, of course, prohibition efforts limit the available supply of heroin to some extent, it is possible to increase the potency of the available supply. Enter fentanyl, a synthetic opiate that is both available on a legitimate prescription domestically and relatively easy to smuggle across borders. Fentanyl can be up to fifty times more powerful than heroin, which naturally increases the potency of drugs containing fentanyl. The result has been a marked increase in the frequency of overdoses, both fatal and non-fatal, as well as communicable diseases spread through needle sharing (Meyer, et al., 2023), (Leyton & Krausz, 2024). The tragedy is that none of this is necessary.
Tarnell Brown is an economist and public policy analyst based in Atlanta.
