FRIEDMAN MADE RIGHT CALL ON LEGALIZATION

The Economist Who Died This Month Understood Decades Ago That Drug
Prohibition Was Bad For Public Policy, The Economy And Society

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 with so much vim and
vinegar, the immorality stemmed from making users into criminals.

In a Newsweek article Friedman wrote in 1972, he took a step outside
his realm of monetary policy and free marketeering and laid out in
clear, unequivocal 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
in him 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
human 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 30 years and what
we have to show for it was predictable from Day One.

Those who have gotten rich on the illicit drug trade are drug lords
and their cartels who use violence to control their enterprise. The
money that flows from the illegal sales corrupts everything it
touches from the cops on the beat to entire countries like Colombia.
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 nonviolent drug offenses every year. When you
put a rapist in prison another one doesn't get recruited to take his
place, but that is precisely what happens in drug dealing. Take one
guy off the streets and that becomes a job opportunity for someone
else in the neighborhood.

And despite this huge interdiction, enforcement and imprisonment
apparatus that we have shoveled money into over the last 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 really 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.

Miron found that government could save between $10 billion and $14
billion annually if marijuana were legalized and taxed. As the
Marijuana Policy Project noted, that would be enough to secure the
former Soviet Union's "loose nukes" within three years. If safety and
security is the goal, where would a yearly sum of $10 billion be better spent?

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.