The Lucid Economist

To honor the 100th-year anniversary of the Shanghai Convention, which paved the way for a drug-prohibited 20th century, The Economist calls for its revocation. Here are some of the relevant portions: 

The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

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[P]rohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

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Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

As usual, the magazine makes a solid case. I like that The Economist never paints a legalized world as a utopia, that it acknowledges that legalization would be fraught with problems as well. I do, however, wonder if the magazine slips into somewhat fanciful thinking with this portion: 

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism.

As Gancho pointed out last week, the support for legalization of marijuana in the United States is far higher than in Mexico, which is a poster child for a narco-addled producer nation. I can only imagine a similar discrepancy exists for cocaine and other drugs. I'm not sure why the authors think it would be fairly easy to sell the legalization of all drugs in a nation where barely 17 percent support the legalization of weed. Perhaps it should be easier to convince Mexicans that legalization is the best path, but the polls don't leave you thinking that it would be.