Click here to read the separate paper by Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University, which finds that ending drug prohibition would boost America's economy by $76.8 billion a year.

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• INTRODUCTION
• ALCOHOL PROHIBITION
• TODAY'S DRUG PROHIBITION
• RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICYMAKERS

INTRODUCTION

America is in an economic and fiscal crisis, our worst since the Great Depression. Unemployment is rising dramatically. Corporate earnings are collapsing. Great financial institutions are disappearing. Analysts speculate about the very real possibility that our greatest industrial corporations such as General Motors and Ford will face bankruptcy.

Many federal, state and local government agencies are cutting their budgets and shrinking basic public services like schools, police, child protection, recreation and transportation. Public employees are facing an end to cost of living adjustments and merit raises and are anticipating furloughs, layoffs and reductions in force. Assuredly, this fiscal crisis will endanger public health and safety.

But by learning a lesson from American history and ending today’s expensive and counterproductive prohibition of drugs like we ended the earlier prohibition of alcohol, we can cut wasteful spending and generate new revenues, all while making America’s streets safer. A legal and regulated drug trade will lead to far fewer people being arrested and incarcerated at taxpayer expense and will generate essential new revenues, some of which can be earmarked to finance improved drug treatment and recovery.

Under the current prohibition approach, police are forced to endlessly chase and imprison dealers and users. When we take cops off this beat, we need not fear increased violence, crime or drug abuse, because we can apply the protective tools that regulate markets to improve public safety and health.

As we saw in the earlier prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s, much of our street violence stems not from drug use but from the illegal nature of the drug market. In any trade, competitors vie to control markets. Under drug prohibition, rival organizations resort to violence to decide who will triumph in the marketplace. Disputes surrounding quality, delivery, price and credit are not resolved in courts or by arbitration, but at the point of a gun. In legal businesses, valuable inventory can be protected from thieves with legitimate security firms, but in prohibition, only gangsters are hired to provide protection against robbery, embezzlement or fraud. In the illegal market, price and quality information is unreliable. There is no trademark protection, no dependable quality control.

But while today’s prohibition is a failure for much the same reasons as the last one, its consequences are even graver. Whereas alcohol prohibition allowed domestic gangsters like Al Capone to rake in rich profits, today’s illegal market helps fund the efforts of international cartels and terrorist networks like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. After prohibition is repealed, America will be rid of a major source of violence, crime and disorder that plagues every major city and most Indian reservations, counties and municipalities in the United States as well as communities worldwide.

The professionals of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation (CJPF) know from long experience that when we arrest a rapist or robber the number of rapes and robberies in the community diminishes because “we got the guy.” But when we arrest a drug dealer at any level, we simply create a job opening that is quickly filled from the endless ranks of people willing to risk prison or death for the chance of obtaining huge profits.

After spending a trillion tax dollars and making 39 million arrests¹ for nonviolent drug offenses, drugs are now generally cheaper, more potent and easier for our children to access than they were 40 years ago at the beginning of the “drug war.”

Whenever we attempt to confront our very real drug problems with the brute force of prohibition, we make little progress. The few who have been helped are greatly exceeded by the millions who have been hurt, all while precious resources and opportunities are squandered in the process.

In addition to necessitating billions of dollars in direct police and corrections expenditures, our policies have numerous indirect costs that act as a significant drag on our economy. For example, how many cars do prisoners and convicted felons buy each year? How much shopping do they do? Has one of our fastest growing industries – prison construction – made us competitive with other industrialized countries? How could denying college aid to some 200,000 students as a punishment for drug use help develop our workforce? How does denying credit to people with past drug offenses help to grow our economy? These are some of the reasons a large and growing movement of citizens, lawmakers – and cops – are calling for an end to today’s dysfunctional drug prohibition.

The 75th anniversary of the end of alcohol prohibition is an appropriate occasion to examine the historical parallels between that failed experiment’s unintended consequences and the even farther-reaching harms of today’s drug prohibition.

ALCOHOL PROHIBITION

America has a long history with temperance movements, which achieved full expression through the 1919 ratification and 1920 enactment of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, banning the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages nationwide. To overcome traditional states’ rights concerns, prohibitionists in some parts of the country played on fears of immigrants and growing urbanization. During World War I, for example, beer (strongly associated with German culture) was equated with a lack of American patriotism. Interestingly, prohibition took root at a time when alcohol consumption was continuing a steep, multi-year decline.

It failed as prohibitions fail:

1.  While estimates on alcohol use before, during and immediately after prohibition rely upon incomplete data, sociologists identify two trends: first, alcohol became associated with a rebellious, adventurous lifestyle, which increased its desirability, especially among the young. Second, alcohol remained fully present in daily urban life. In New York City, for example, in the year before prohibition went into effect, there were 15,000 saloons. Five years into prohibition, those saloons were replaced by as many as 32,000 underground speakeasies.² It is without question that problematic alcohol use of all kinds increased due to this policy.
2.  The prohibited drug became more available in its most concentrated and potent form, a natural result of the costs involved in smuggling and concealing it. Beer and wine were largely replaced by liquor in illegal speakeasies.
3.  Providing liquor to meet the public demand required industrial scale production and distribution, and it was enormously profitable. The inevitable result was the creation of modern organized crime syndicates. The Great Depression made things even worse, as laid-off workers and even active duty cops found employment with the alcohol smugglers. The homicide rate reached unprecedented levels during this period, as gangsters struggled for control of the lucrative market by killing each other, police officers and any innocent citizen who stood in the way of their immense, untaxed profits.
4.  Public health suffered. In New York, for example, there was a 525% increase in deaths related to alcoholism and alcohol poisonings during the first six years of prohibition.³ Since there was no regulation or oversight of the manufacture or sale of the drug, thousands of people were blinded or killed by adulterated bathtub gin, the “poor man’s alcohol.”
5. Courts were clogged with alcohol prohibition-related offenses. Increasingly, public officials at all levels allowed themselves to become corrupted by the gangsters’ payrolls rather than enforce an increasingly unpopular, untenable policy. Public respect for the rule of law suffered greatly as a consequence. Corruption was so widespread that one upstanding Treasury Department unit became famously known as “The Untouchables” because, in not responding to bribes or intimidation, they were the exception and not the rule.
6.  Vital services and programs had to be cut because, in addition to the expensive costs of prohibition enforcement, government budgets were deprived of tax revenue from alcohol sales, alcohol industry workers’ salaries and the properties where alcohol was produced, stored and consumed.

Things hadn’t worked out as well as the prohibitionists had planned.

It didn’t take very long for Americans to conclude that prohibition – even for a drug as dangerous as alcohol – was an unaffordable, dysfunctional “luxury” that could no longer be tolerated during an economic crisis.

A large and active anti-prohibition movement emerged and grew very rapidly in the late 1920s and early 1930s. While Democrat Alfred E. Smith, an anti-prohibition presidential candidate, was defeated in 1928 by prohibitionist Herbert Hoover, by 1932 the Democrats had included an official anti-prohibition plank in the party platform and 40 percent of the Republican convention delegates that re-nominated President Hoover also voted for a prohibition repeal plank of their own.⁴  In the November 1932 elections, voters elected to repeal state prohibition policies in nine states and gave the presidency to anti-prohibition Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in an Electoral College landslide.

Thereafter, the repeal movement gained momentum so quickly that the prohibitionists couldn’t even muster enough support in 13 states to block repeal. On December 5, 1932, a resolution to repeal the 18th Amendment was introduced in the lame duck session of the 72nd Congress. It was immediately considered and came within six votes of the two-thirds necessary for passage. On February 20, 1933, the 73rd Congress sent the proposed repeal amendment to the consideration of the state ratifying conventions. The 21st Amendment was added to the Constitution when Utah became the 36th state to ratify it on December 5, 1933. What many had once called “the noble experiment” was officially certified as a failure.⁵

With the end of prohibition, the homicide rate plunged, and those rates stayed low until the 1970s, when active enforcement of the “war on drugs” began in earnest.⁶

TODAY’S DRUG PROHIBITION

Today’s prohibition of the many so-called “controlled substances” is similar to, but is in many respects significantly more complex than, alcohol prohibition. The wide variety of prohibited substances; their global cultivation, production and trade; the global ease of capital movement and the connection between the illegal drug trade and political insurgencies are all modern features of prohibition that our great grandparents did not have to face. Nonetheless, in so many of its essential features drug prohibition has echoed alcohol prohibition’s impact on the economy, crime, public safety and public health. Alcohol prohibition involved ethnic, religious and regional prejudices, and those ugly features are dramatically worse under the racial stereotyping and disparities of today’s drug enforcement.

Fueled by fears of children becoming addicted, of “date rape drugs” and of drug-inducing insanity and promiscuity, the “war on drugs” has had enormous impact. Since its rhetorical and legal launch in 1970, annual federal spending on the war has increased to $19.2 billion⁷, annual arrests for nonviolent drug offenses have quadrupled⁸ and imprisonment for federal drug offenses has increased by 28 times.^{9, 10}
It fails as alcohol prohibition failed. Only worse.

1. According to the federal government, in the decade preceding the start of the war, 4 million people in the United States above the age of 12 had used an illegal drug in their lifetime (2 percent of the population).¹¹ By 2007, the government revealed that 114 million people above the age of 12 had tried an illegal drug (46 percent of that population), an increase of 2,850 percent.¹² Drug use became a badge of rebellion, although very widely worn. According to the World Health Organization, the United States has the highest rates of marijuana and cocaine use in the world, despite our having some of the harshest penalties.
2. Drugs have become more concentrated and potent, a natural result of the costs involved in avoiding law enforcement. The average purity of cocaine at retail increased from 40 percent pure in 1981 to 70 percent pure in 2003, while its wholesale cost dropped by 84 percent over the same period. The purity of street-level heroin nearly tripled, while its wholesale cost has dropped by more than 86 percent.¹³ 
3. The homicide rate skyrocketed through the 1970s and 1980s, corresponding with increasing expenditures on enforcing prohibition.¹⁴
4. Organized crime has flourished once again, but this time goes well beyond mere domestic street gangsters running amok in our cities, although we still confront that. In Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica and the Bahamas, organizations specializing in delivering drugs to the United States have arisen along with violence and corruption. In Afghanistan, the Taliban that hosted international terrorist Osama Bin Laden in 2001 alternately profited from taxing the opium crop and banning its cultivation after it had cornered the market.Over the past two years in Mexico, President Felipe Calderón has stepped up his country’s war on drug traffickers, asking U.S. taxpayers for $1.4 billion to fund increased police and military operations. While these efforts have slowed neither the supply nor the demand for cocaine, the crackdown has resulted in increased illegal drug market violence as well as corruption reaching even the highest levels of the country’s law enforcement apparatus, including the federal attorney general’s office. The cartels have used the insider intelligence that they have gained to keep tabs on the government’s operations and respond accordingly, most flagrantly to determine the location of Mexico’s top law enforcement official, whom they murdered in May 2008.¹⁵. It is not hard to imagine how so many Mexican police have allowed themselves to become corrupted by the cartels. They are tasked with confronting a well-armed, well-funded enemy operating what American authorities estimate is a $23-billion-a-year business¹⁶ that has been blamed for 58 deaths on one day alone in November 2008 and a total 2008 death toll to date of about 4,000,¹⁷ surpassing the nearly 2,500 deaths for all of 2007.¹⁸   The collateral damage of Mexico’s increased prohibition enforcement has spilled over into the U.S. as well. At least one U.S. Border Patrol agent has been charged with being on the payroll of the traffickers, having allegedly allowed 3,000 pounds of cocaine into the country under his watch.19 A seven-year-old boy was recently kidnapped at gunpoint in what authorities think was a drug market dispute.²⁰ Thanks to Americans’ demand for illegal drugs, Mexican cartels are now active in every region of the United States and dominate the drug trade in most areas.²¹
5. Often, people addicted to drugs cannot support their habits with their salaries. To afford to buy drugs, many are reduced to prostitution, larceny and fraud or to selling drugs themselves. Estimates vary, but an undeniably significant portion of our street crime stems from our drug policy, not the drugs themselves.
6. Public health suffers. Since there are no regulations on drug production and distribution, our hospitals are besieged by people suffering not only from drug abuse, but often from unknown, cheaper and more dangerous substances that dealers sometimes cut into their products to maximize profits. And just as amateur distillers harmed themselves and others in accidents related to manufacturing “bathtub gin” under alcohol prohibition, today’s makeshift methamphetamine labs present great dangers. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “injection drug use has directly and indirectly accounted for more than one-third (36%) of AIDS cases in the United States,”²² tragedies that could be avoided with safe needle exchange, an effort made far more difficult under prohibition.
7. Courts are clogged with drug cases; public officials at all levels are deeply corrupted by the enforcement of an increasingly unpopular, unenforceable policy and by the roughly $500 billion the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the United Nations estimate are generated by illegal commerce in drugs every year.²³
8. One obvious result of arresting 1.8 million people a year on drug charges under prohibition is an ongoing squeeze on federal, state and local government budgets.²⁴ Again.   

As was the case during the Great Depression, people are saying, “Enough!”

Recent polls show that 67% of police chiefs²⁵ and 76% of the public²⁶ agree that the “war on drugs” is a failure. Thirteen states have legalized medical marijuana despite dire warnings of a floodgate effect from this “loophole” in the prohibition.  And in not one of those states did youthful marijuana subsequently increase. Just last month, despite predictably dramatic opposition, voters in Massachusetts overwhelmingly approved a ballot question decriminalizing possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. The warnings of the prohibitionists are increasingly shrill, increasingly desperate, increasingly ignored.

The movement to repeal this prohibition is growing and has the support of a remarkably diverse constituency. What other movement can claim the support of a wide spectrum of progressives and conservatives like Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, William F. Buckley, Noam Chomsky, George Shultz and Barbara Ehrenreich?

Drug prohibition is undeniably entrenched and horrific, but thanks in part to an emerging group of law enforcement professionals who fought on the front lines of the “war on drugs” and who know it’s time for a new direction, it is newly vulnerable.

The case of Joel Giambra, a county executive in Erie County, NY is illustrative. When, in response to the brutal murder/robbery of a nun by a man addicted to crack cocaine, Giambra said that we should consider drug legalization to avoid such horrors, he was demonized in the press. The next week Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) lent its full support for Mr. Giambra at press conferences, on local talk-radio and television and by flooding the newspapers with letters to the editor each time the executive was portrayed negatively in the press. Two weeks later The Buffalo News allowed Mr. Giambra to publish an op-ed in favor of legalization and later published their own article, which suggested, “years from now, they may look at him in the same way we see Susan B. Anthony and other pioneers for women’s rights.”

While LEAP’s credibility played a part, the larger story behind this amazing media turnabout is prohibition’s weakening grip. Other examples abound: The National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators and the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed resolutions calling for an end to the “war on drugs” and for drug abuse to be treated as a health problem. The National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the National Organization for Women and others have also passed supportive resolutions. Newark Mayor Cory Booker and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom have held press conferences to say the “war on drugs” must be stopped because it is destroying their cities.

We are in the early but unmistakable phase of an historic moment in which prohibition will be put on the defensive and revealed as unworkable, inexcusable and expendable.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICYMAKERS

Until federal prohibition in Congress and state prohibition in the 50 state legislatures are repealed, many of the harms detailed in this report will remain unaddressed.

We recognize that the belief that prohibition is the only appropriate means to control the problems of drug abuse has been well entrenched in our political and popular culture for almost 100 years. However, as our national experience with alcohol prohibition in 1932 and 1933 teaches, when a prohibition is widely understood to be a failure, a dramatic change in the economy and political environment can make change in policy much more rapid than anyone anticipated.

Yet, we acknowledge that it may still take some time for the modern repeal movement to reach critical mass. Accordingly, we immediately:

1. Call on the United States Congress to empanel a blue ribbon commission to do a true accounting of all costs to our nation stemming from this prohibition. A strict cost-benefit analysis would help Congress and the public evaluate the policy’s consequences. This analysis should include, but not be limited to, such indirect costs as lost wages, thwarted community economic development, lost educational opportunities and specific impacts on targeted economic sectors. Congress created the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse in 1970 (known as the Schafer Commission), which issued re-ports in 1972 and 1973 that evaluated our drug policies. President Nixon famously ignored its findings and recommendations, but in light of the current economic crisis, we believe the new administration and Congress will welcome an evidence-based approach to drug control issues.
2. Call on state legislatures and local governments to carefully review their police, courts and corrections policies and budgets to determine whether the expenditures for prohibition enforcement are the best use of extremely scarce resources. We urge policymakers to consider the real-life impacts of these policy and budget decisions: Should a teacher be laid off in order to pay several months of police officer overtime necessitated by the prosecution of a handful of drug cases? Should a school nurse be laid off in order to incarcerate someone who has lapsed in his or her effort to recover from opioid addiction? Should a recreation center for hundreds of children be closed in order to finance helicopter flights to detect illicit marijuana cultivation?
3. Support ongoing efforts to reduce incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction through incremental reforms and harm reduction strategies such as the repeal of mandatory minimum sentences, decriminalization of small amounts of drugs, clean needle exchange and all efforts to replace punitive incarceration with proven treatment.

    However, until prohibition is repealed and drugs are legalized so they can be effectively regulated, we will have illegal drug money fueling gangs, cartels and terrorists; a deep hole in our public budgets; millions of Americans with criminal records removed from the productive arenas of education and the workplace; lack of respect for the rule of law; vulnerable people afraid to seek help for their addictions…the list is almost endless.

    At a moment that is as economically threatening to millions of Americans as the Great Depression, we would do well to learn the lessons that history so clearly and compellingly provides and repeal prohibition, eliminating its numerous unintended consequences.

 Again.

ENDNOTES

1. Crime in the United States. 2007. United States. U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2008.
2. Lerner, Michael A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Harvard UP, 2007.
3. Oulahan, Richard V. “Dry Conflict Acute After 10-Year Test.” New York Times 1 Jan. 1930.
4. Kyvig, David. Repealing National Prohibition. Kent State UP, 2000.
5. Ibid.
6. Vital Statistics. United States. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2008.
7. National Drug Control Strategy: FY 2003 Budget Summary. United States. White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. 2002.
8. Federal Bureau of Investigation, op. cit.
9. Pastore, Ann L., and Kathleen Maguire, eds. “Federal prison population, and number and per-cent sentenced for drug offenses.” Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics. www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t657.pdf.
10. Prisoners in 2006. United States. U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2007.
11. DEA History Book. United States. U.S. Department of Justice. Drug Enforcement Administration. 2003.
12. Results from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings. United States. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. 2008.
13. National Drug Control Strategy: Data Supplement. United States. White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. 2005.
14. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, op. cit.
15. Roig-Franzia, Manuel. “Mexico’s Police Chief Is Killed In Brazen Attack by Gunmen.” Washington Post 9 May 2008.
16. Drug Control: U.S. Assistance Has Helped Mexican Counternarcotics Efforts, but the Flow of Illicit Drugs into the United States Remains High. United States. Government Accountability Office. 2007.
17. Lacey, Marc. “In Mexico Drug War, Sorting Good Guys From Bad.” New York Times 1 Nov. 2008.
18. Miller Llana, Sara. “Mexico, U.S. step up drug-war cooperation.” Christian Science Monitor 23 Jan. 2008.
19. Becker, Andrew. “Border Inspector Accused of Allowing 3,000 Pounds of Cocaine Into U.S. Over 5 Years.   New York Times 9 Nov. 2008.
20. “Abducted Boy Found Alive in Las Vegas.” Associated Press 19 Oct. 2008.
21. Situation Report: Cities in Which Mexican DTOs Operate Within the United States. United States. U.S. Department of Justice. National Drug Intelligence Center. 2008.
22. Drug-Associated HIV Transmission Continues in the United States. United States. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2002.
23. McCaffrey, Barry. “McCaffrey Urges Global Cooperation Against Drug Trafficking.” El Universal 8 Feb. 2000.
24. Federal Bureau of Investigation, op. cit.
25. Drugs and Crime Across America: Police Chiefs Speak Out. Drug Strategies & Police Foundation. 2004.
26. Zogby International. “Zogby/Inter-American Dialogue Survey: Public Views Clash with U.S. Policy on Cuba, Immigration, and Drugs.” Press release. 2 Oct. 2008.