09/08/14 – Jeffrey Miron – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today is Jeff Myron from the Cato Institute and Harvard University.
Welcome to the show, Jeff.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
You're the author of this book, Drug War Crimes, the Consequences of Prohibition.
I see it here at independent.org, the Independent Institute, Jeff, David Thoreau and Anthony Gregory and our friends over there, Bob Higgs.
And here's your page at Cato, Director of Economic Studies there.
Good deal.
So the case that you are famous for making is one of my favorites.
And it's something that, honestly, I just take it for granted so much that I hardly even given any coverage on this show.
And that is legalizing not just weed, but legalizing all drugs in America.
And it's especially nice to have the case made by a Harvard economist and a Cato scholar as opposed to some drug addict who just likes doing drugs, even though that should be good enough, in my opinion.
Drug addicts can do drugs if they want.
But anyway, so go ahead and give us the kind of nutshell case for legalizing drugs and I'll try to do my best with follow ups and stuff.
That's all right.
Sure.
The nutshell case is that while some people misuse drugs and the use of drugs is sometimes harmful for the users or for other people, the attempt to suppress drug use and particularly to try to suppress irresponsible drug use by outlawing drugs seems to generate far more negative consequences than beneficial consequences.
Driving the market underground leads to more crime and corruption, to quality control problems, significant expenditure, to foregone tax revenue, and other issues.
So it is a case where the treatment is clearly worse than the disease, even while accepting that of course drug use is sometimes ill-advised.
There you go.
Well, so I guess, you know, I hate to get all Moses-like on you, but what about the children?
Because that's always the out, is that, you know what, there's a lot of things that, yes, you're right, ought to be up to adults to decide.
But if you legalize, especially, of course, the boogeymen, heroin and cocaine, you are telling children that it's okay and God dang it, it's not, and damn any other consequences.
We can't let you tell the children that, Jeffrey.
So I think that we let parents and other adults try to tell children what is good for them and what's not for good for them in a ton of cases that are very important without actually going to the extreme of prohibition.
Very simple example is alcohol.
Alcohol is legal for adults, and we still try to control access for children, but the main reason that kids don't do it, to the extent they don't, is that the parents are involved.
There's other things that we don't make illegal at all.
We don't make it illegal to not do your homework.
It's pretty important to do your homework and things like that, but we let parents make those decisions.
Most importantly, a lot of kids have already access to drugs under prohibition.
We're not preventing kids from having access by making it illegal.
You just have to walk by most high schools, you know, in the middle of the day, and you'll see there's some kids outside, you know, looking a little slightly shady because they're selling drugs.
So the policy is just not doing what it's trying to do.
You know, I was having a conversation earlier on a different topic where this just kind of came up as an example, but I think it's important for this case.
I actually remember where I was when I was 14 and with my 14-year-old friends, and we all decided that we like smoking weed.
It made us real high, and we didn't see what the big deal was.
We didn't have to puke or feel hungover, feel terrible, like when we got drunk from wine we stole from 7-Eleven.
And so, apparently, my friends concluded, and I remember everyone sitting around in the circle where we were skateboarding, and all of them, you know, the gears turning in their heads as they all, you know, agreed and concluded, came to consensus, that everything they told us about all drugs apparently is a lie.
So let's get a hold of any and all drugs that we can possibly get a hold of now because apparently it's all no big deal just because they lied to us about weed.
And I knew a little bit better than that and thought, well, you know, I think they might have a case because I think I learned why some of these drugs actually could be harmful in other ways.
But for them, that was all they needed to know, was that they'd been so propagandized against the devil weed, as soon as they realized what a big deal it wasn't, they just assumed that was the case for all the rest of the drugs.
That's how 14-year-olds think, you know?
I agree with that, and I think that's one of the crucial reasons that outlawing drugs, as opposed to milder measures that might be adopted to try to discourage the use of drugs such as tax rates or education information, are misguided is because when you outlaw something, you're saying it's just verboten, it has no legitimate use, you should never do it, that it's a really, really horrible thing.
The kids figure out that while sometimes people clearly have bad outcomes from using drugs, that it's not this horrific boogeyman that it's made out to be, and then they stop listening to lots of things that adults tell them.
They figure adults are just, you know, BS-ing them a lot of the time, and so that means you don't have the ability to make nuanced and sort of thoughtful, constructive suggestions to kids like, you shouldn't probably be, as a 16- or 17-year-old, doing lots of drugs and alcohol, but for sure, you shouldn't be driving under the influence.
And if we gave the sort of more nuanced message, I think more kids would say, you know, I'm not necessarily going to listen to you about whether I consume alcohol, but I will try not to drive under the influence of alcohol, and that would be a huge benefit.
Right.
Well, and, you know, you really bring up a point there, maybe I accidentally did, kind of, about prohibition of alcohol, where all of my early experiences with alcohol, maybe this is for the good, actually, where with hard, you know, either liquor or wine, it made me terribly sick, so I never did become a drinker, but none of us kids, we could have gotten a lot worse trouble for it, and stealing and all kinds of things, because we didn't have access to just Budweiser, right?
We didn't get to learn how to drink on Budweiser.
We learned how to drink from, somebody swiped a bottle of Jack from their old man, or something, because that was all we could get.
Right.
So, same kind of, you know, perverse incentives get built into the situation, you know?
And there's a lot of examples from other societies that do use alcohol more generally for, say, teenagers who are 14, 15, 16, where it is a more common social activity for younger kids, you know, younger people in their teens to consume moderate amounts of alcohol, and it takes some of the forbidden fruit out of it, it takes some of the mystique out of it, and those places have no worse outcomes, in some cases, better outcomes for things like traffic fatalities than the United States.
And yes, I was kind of a punk kid.
Not anymore, though.
I'm all grown up now, in every way.
No, so, now here's the thing that really needs focusing on, and we've still got a couple minutes before the first break here, Jeffrey, but, so, can you talk a little bit about maybe what it would look like to have heroin and cocaine for sale legally, and the change, how different that would be from the way it is now for the neighborhood, you know, for the people who are the bystanders of the drug war?
Well, I think the crucial thing is that the violence that occurs in many neighborhoods because of the underground nature of the drug market would be much smaller, would essentially disappear.
It means that people who went to purchase these substances, hey, would be able to know what dosages they were getting, and that what they were purchasing was actually heroin or cocaine or whatever, rather than some adulterants, or rather than being a purity that was very different than what the seller had indicated.
So certain negative effects of drugs, such as overdoses, accidental poisonings, would be less frequent because people would understand what they were getting.
We rarely see those sorts of events, the negative events from use happen with legal substances because the market makes sure the quality control is reasonable.
An extreme case is that because prohibition elevates prices for opiates in particular and makes it more advantageous to want to inject because you get a big bang for your buck, which is important if it's really expensive, people inject and they share dirty needles and that contributes to the spread of HIV, other blood-borne infections.
That should be much less common in a legal market.
We might see heroin packaged with disposable, inexpensive syringes for those people who are going to inject, but a lot more people would simply not inject if it was legal and therefore substantially cheaper.
Now, in terms of exactly where it's sold and all that, libertarians don't really want to take a stand on that.
Their answer is the markets would decide.
So probably it would be sold in pharmacies, but much more like an over-the-counter medication than as a prescription drug.
But there might be multiple ways in which it's available.
The main crucial thing is the negative effects of the black market would be gone.
Right.
Well, and I want to talk more about that on the other side of this break.
What effect the war on drugs has had for especially poorer neighborhoods across America these last decades, really.
The game.
That's what they call it, right?
We'll be right back.
It's Jeff Myron from Cato.org.
Hey, all.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Now, I meant to say there and I kind of screwed it up.
Some of those kids that I knew back when, who made that bad conclusion about all the drug war propaganda they'd ever heard, actually ended up having pretty severe drug problems and screwed up lives after that.
Now that I think about it.
Or actually, I thought about that before.
I meant to say it, but forgot to.
Anyway, so yeah, real consequences to that kind of stuff.
I'm talking with Jeff Myron from Cato and Harvard, and we're talking about the economics of the war on drugs and all the different ways that it has screwed up our society and why we need to legalize, yes, even the hardest, scariest drugs.
You know, I had a science teacher, Jeff, in high school who would go out secretly at night and give clean needles to the drug addicts downtown at great, you know, legal and personal risk to himself because that was a crime in Austin, Texas, to go give needles to aid in a bet, heroin abuse.
And he was going down there and saying, listen, I'm a scientist.
Let me teach you about HIV.
Please use these clean needles, you know.
But no, he was a felon.
I don't know.
I guess he got away with it.
But it was a big deal.
He like told us like in whispers that this is what he was doing.
A big crime in Austin, at least then.
So a little bit of just how screwed up the mindset gets to try to make these magical wishes about the effects of prohibition come true.
You know, we just have to we can't ever admit we're wrong.
We just have to keep doubling down on bad policies like it's a crime to give away a clean needle to somebody, you know, it's crazy anyway.
So I also I wanted to ask you about, you know, generations of of crime.
And I guess, you know, everybody's seen the wire, but everybody's seen cops, too.
And, you know, we have a giant welfare state and giant underclasses in most of the major cities in America of people who have no real opportunity, no real opportunity even for education to have any real opportunity in the market.
And so and they're they're completely outlawed, really, for being on 10 kinds of probation from Sunday for every little thing because they don't have any good legal representation and that kind of thing.
They're low hanging fruit for the state for other reasons.
So they really have no other business to be in other than drug black markets.
And it ends up becoming a vicious and bloody and depending on where you are, but it can be a brutal trade for people to be involved in a right in the middle of town where people have no other alternative.
We kind of made it this way over decades.
We think of that.
Well, there's certainly many reasons why people in some towns, neighborhoods, et cetera, face a lot of difficulties.
It's not just drug policy.
It's also education policy and housing policy that are not well-designed.
But the drug wars play certainly play a big role.
The violence, of course, you know, directly harms large numbers of young people, mainly especially African-American and Hispanic.
But it also creates the wrong incentives for people to try to get rich in the drug trade as opposed to staying in school.
It makes those neighborhoods less pleasant, which harms housing values.
So it's a significant contributor to the dysfunction in either cities in particular and amongst the sort of least advanced population in particular.
Yeah.
Now, when it comes to the two million people in prison, the seven million people on in some kind of jail or on parole or probation, if you include them as well.
Do you know what, you know, roughly what percentage of that is strictly drug war and drug war collateral damage compared to, I don't know, I guess, just husbands beating their wives or whatever?
Well, it's hard to know exactly how much of the collateral damage.
The direct amount, if you look at federal prisoners, is quite substantial.
Something in excess of a half of federal prisoners are there on drug charges.
For state and local prisoners, which is a much, much bigger amount than federal prisoners, it's maybe 20 to 23 percent in recent years.
So it's not, if you only look at the direct cases, a huge fraction, it's a large fraction.
But then there's a lot of indirect effects.
Some of the theft, people arrested for theft, for robberies, were doing that to support drug habits in part.
Some of the people arrested for violence was violence that was generated by the drug trade.
Some people who are in jail have been sent back for failing a urine test after they got out and were on parole, probation, whatever their initial crime may have been.
So I wouldn't be surprised if a fairly substantial fraction you would attribute indirectly to the drug trade over and above the part that's the direct effect of locking people up on drug charges.
You know, I had a friend that I knew when I was real young, I didn't know him for a long time.
I talked to him again.
He was a cop in Washington, D.C.
I only got to talk to him briefly, but he said basically his job consisted of chasing crackheads around all night.
And I told him, well, you know, it's your fault.
You know, they'd be standing, they'd be sitting at home doing cocaine.
The only reason they're running and doing crack is because you're chasing them, you know, kind of thing.
And he had no idea what I was talking about.
He couldn't possibly fathom how that could be the case at all.
But it occurred to me that as well as his mind, that really the entire theory of American policing has been completely destroyed by the war on drugs, where anyone who is an outlaw drug user is assumed by the cops to be basically subhuman, the lowest scum on the earth.
They might as well be rapists and murderers and organized crime rings, even if really that just they're harmless drug addicts at worst drug abusers at worst, maybe just users.
And it's basically turned the mentality of the police against the entire population of the American people.
It's us and them.
And if it wasn't for them, they think we would all just tear each other apart because of what animals we all are, because they've been, you know, from from their soda straw point of view of the world.
That's the way it seems to them.
You know, if he wasn't chasing crackheads around D.C. all night, they'd overrun the place.
Yeah, that is a certain that is an assumption many people make.
Of course, it's completely belied by experience from when we didn't have prohibit drug prohibition laws from experience with alcohol, from experiences with countries that have much, much laxer drug laws than we do bordering on legalization, such as the Netherlands or Portugal.
But it's a common assertion, unfortunately, based on not based on the evidence.
Yeah.
Well, now, so maybe part of the problem is that this requires thinking about too much and that really an opinion in America is a thing that you think the government ought to do to people.
So if you don't like drugs, you think drugs should be illegal.
It's just as simple as that.
There's no economic questions that need to be brought into discussion.
That's just how it is.
Right.
Well, I think that there is a tendency for, excuse me, many people to have a view about what is the right way to run your life and to think other people shouldn't run their lives the same way.
And I think that cuts across party lines to a huge degree.
The people who think of themselves as liberal, some people think of themselves as liberal, some as conservative, have particular views and tend to want to impose those views on rather than just saying, I have a way I would like to do things, but I'm going to let other people do things differently.
It's basically none of my business.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
I guess it does seem, though, on this subject, particularly because pot has been legalized in Washington, Colorado, now that at least people are paying attention to whether, you know, a nightmare breaks out or not.
And it seems like the conversation is is getting more mainstream about whether, you know, something more reasonable can be done about this.
So, you know, and I think it's important for, like, dialectical type purposes that you are staking out the position, yes, heroin and cocaine, too, because, you know, if we're mealy mouthed about that, then basically we are ceding, you know, our economic argument about about why we're right, you know, that that none of this works on on any of these drugs.
And so I think it's important to talk about those as well as marijuana, partially because many of the people who are advocating for legalizing marijuana have a certain self-interest.
They would like to be able to consume marijuana and be left alone by the law.
And that's great, but that's not the only reason.
We shouldn't just legalize things that lots of people want to do.
We should legalize everything unless it's really harming innocent third parties, such as driving drunk or something like that.
And so people who are heroin users are a very, very small fraction of population, but their rights to do what they want to do, as long as they're not harming someone else, are just as important as those of people who like to drink red wine on Saturday nights or people who like to smoke marijuana.
So it's important from that perspective, but also a lot of the expenditure that governments are making, a lot of the violence that's still occurring in drug markets from government driving it underground is not occurring in the marijuana market anymore, partially because marijuana market has become much closer to being legal.
And so if we're going to reduce the violence and reduce the overdoses and reduce the spread of HIV and all those things, we have to be talking about legalizing those other drugs in addition to marijuana.
Right.
Yeah, I about laughed out loud when I read a Mexican pot farmer saying, well, I guess I'm just going to have to grow alfalfa or whatever it was because I forgot what it was, but it was something, you know, a basic staple because there's just no money in the pot market anymore.
Yeah, well, that's the thing about competition.
Competition isn't good for the competitors.
It's good for the consumers because the consumers get lower prices.
So, yeah, marijuana is just another commodity like everything else.
Some people are not going to be quite so interested in growing it.
Right.
And that much money stolen right out of the pocket of the local drug distribution warlord in Mexico, too.
So nice benefits.
Exactly.
All right.
Thank you so much for your time.
It's great to make your acquaintance, have you on the show, Jeff.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody.
That is Jeffrey Myron.
He is the director of economic studies at Cato.
Find him at Cato dot org.
And he teaches at Harvard.
And you can find his book, Drug War Crimes, the Consequences of Prohibition at Independent dot org.
We'll be right back in a sec with Raymond Gov.
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Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
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