FRIEDMAN WAS RIGHT: WE SHOULD LEGALIZE DRUGS

In 1971, when Richard Nixon declared his "War on Drugs," calling for
harsher penalties and stricter enforcement of drug laws, the renowned
Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman had a John Lennon
moment. He suggested we give peace a chance.

To Friedman, who died earlier this month at 94, drug prohibition was
unsound public policy, economic insanity and inherently immoral. It
wasn't the drug user who was immoral, as the political world
asserted, the immorality stemmed from making users into criminals.

In a Newsweek article Friedman authored in 1972, he took a step
outside his realm of monetary policy and free marketeering and laid
out in clear terms what kind of social disaster we were buying with
Nixon's drug war. Thirty years later, we know he couldn't have been more right.

Friedman's views emanated from libertarianism. He resented the
government's interference in an adult's free will. But the economist
also recognized the inexorable market forces that drove the illicit
drug trade. He understood that as long as there was demand there
would be supply, and by making drugs illegal, those enriched by the
drug trade would be a violent, corrupting element of society.

In 1989, in a famous exchange he had on the pages of the Wall Street
Journal with then-Drug Czar William Bennett, Friedman told Bennett
that the prohibitionist's model was doomed to fail and would grind up
freedom in the process.

"The path you propose of more police, more jails, use of the military
in foreign countries, harsh penalties for drug users, and a whole
panoply of repressive measures can only make a bad situation worse.
The drug war cannot be won by those tactics without undermining the
liberty and individual freedom that you and I cherish."

Bennett apparently didn't see the hypocrisy in cherishing his freedom
to gamble, while waging war against the rights of others to engage in
their own personal vices. The Book of Virtues author who reportedly
lost millions in Atlantic City and Las Vegas (Bennett must equate
"moral" with technically legal), was a drug warrior of the first
order, dismissing Friedman's legalization prescription as
"irresponsible and reckless."

We've followed the Nixon/ Bennett drug-war model for years and what
we have to show for it was predictable from Day 1.

Those who have gotten rich on the illicit drug trade are drug lords
and their cartels who use violence to control their enterprise. Drug
use has not been curbed, yet our prisons have filled up with
low-level dealers and users.

We have spent $1 trillion on the drug war since 1972 and we arrest
1.7 million people for non-violent drug offenses every year. When you
put a rapist in prison another one doesn't get recruited to take his
place, but that is what happens in drug dealing.

And despite this huge interdiction, enforcement and imprisonment
apparatus we have shoveled money into in the past 30 years, illicit
drugs have become cheaper and more available.

Albert Einstein is credited with saying that insanity is "doing the
same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." We
must be nuts.

Friedman wasn't the only brilliant economist to make the case for
drug legalization. Nobel laureate Gary Becker wrote a column in
Business Week in 2001 titled "It's Time to Give up the War on Drugs."

Then, in 2005, Dr. Jeffrey Miron, a visiting professor at Harvard,
published a report which called for replacing marijuana prohibition
with a taxation and regulation scheme. It was endorsed by more than
500 distinguished economists.

Since his death, Friedman has been lovingly eulogized by the nation's
premier conservative voices, but few have lauded his bold and
visionary understanding of the drug war. Legalization of drugs is
Friedman's best economic and moral thesis that has been left untried;
and one day, when courage returns to politics and we take this
sensible step, experience will bear that out.