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Bringing Conservatives and Libertarians Together
Somewhere in a shoe box in my basement, I have a copy of the February 12, 1996, issue of National Review. In that issue, the editors endorsed drug legalization. As far as I know, they have not reversed that position (notably, they republished the 1996 symposium on their website back in July). Despite taking that position nearly 19 years ago the idea still meets with much resistance among conservatives.
That may now change. In light of the votes last week in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, DC to legalize marijuana — on the heels of similar votes two years ago in Colorado and Washington state — Yury Fedotov, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, awoke from his slumber in his weirdo 1970s architectural nightmare Eurocrat office building in Vienna to wag his carefully manicured finger at America and remind us that our pot legalization violates international treaties. Awesome. As if I didn’t hate the UN enough already…
This is truly a chance for conservatives and libertarians to come together, because if there’s one thing that conservatives despise more than pot smoking hippies, it’s do-gooder internationalist bureaucrats.
Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons.
Published in General
Really? None of economic theory is correct unless you have evidence for the specific phenomenon you are currently discussing? Lower prices doesn’t always lead to more consumption? Making something legal isn’t lowing the cost? Making something more available isn’t lowering the cost?
If you show me a triangle, do I need evidence the three angles will add up to 180 degrees for that specific triangle?
Would you extend this to guns? I.e., should the local community be free to say “no guns in the home” if the majority supported it?
Really. Science isn’t about theory, it’s about evidence. Economics, to the extent that it’s a science, needs evidence like every other real science.
“Lower prices doesn’t always lead to more consumption? Making something legal isn’t lowing the cost? Making something more available isn’t lowering the cost?”
Precisely my point.
Colorado didn’t “lower” the cost of pot, they raised it by adding taxes to it. There’s still a thriving black-market in illegal tax-free pot, because it’s cheaper than “legal” pot—with all the risks that existed ante “legalization”. Basically they legalized it for people well-off enough to afford the taxes, and kept it illegal for those who can’t. A perfect Progressive scheme.
Being Progressives, they couldn’t do anything so simple as legalizing it in the way oregano is legal. Instead they did what FDR did after Prohibition ended: the slathered on a ton of regulations and limitations.
As Cato points out, and as anyone who’s been paying attention for their entire life can tell you, pot has been easily available for a very long time. Most people have already made up their minds about it.
There may be some fringe that’s going to say “whoohoo, it’s finally legal; I can toke up!” but it’s not a large group of people, if it exists at all.
If economics teaches anything, it should teach that there are unintended consequences to even the simplest policy changes.
“Pot Use Among Colorado Teens Appears to Drop After Legalization”
“As Colorado Loosened Its Marijuana Laws, Underage Consumption And Traffic Fatalities Fell”
Thanks for the lecture on science, Tuck, but the theory I was quoting was produced from evidence, unless you’re disputing supply/demand curves. Theory, when it works, is a way to explain evidence and apply it to new situations. You agree with what I was saying, you’re just pretending I’m saying something else.
None of which I disputed. All I was saying is that illegality is a type of non-monetary cost. You can just as easily replace non-monetary costs with monetary ones and get the same effect.
Thanks great and all, but there’s not enough data to conclude causal rather than coincidental. And as you showed above, legalization may have actually caused a net increase in cost, which would just as easily explain the above graph.
Wth? I thought this thread was about dry counties.
The theory you were quoting was produced from some other evidence; not evidence about what’s actually happening to pot consumption in Colorado. Your other evidence is not pertinent.
“Thanks great and all, but there’s not enough data to conclude causal rather than coincidental. And as you showed above, legalization may have actually caused a net increase in cost, which would just as easily explain the above graph.”
For another lesson in science, the evidence above can, as you observe, have many causes. One can’t say what those causes are, for sure.
But one one can say, for sure, is that the prohibitionist argument that the legalization in Colorado would cause an increase in car accidents and pot use amongst teens (who, as people who are most likely to experience pot for the first time, are the most sensitive indicators), is false, to date. Those two phenomenon have not materialized in Colorado.
Which, of course, weakens the entire “chaos” argument substantially.
From the second sentence in your post: “In that issue, the editors endorsed drug legalization.” :)
I think there is an important distinction between banning the possession of something and banning the commercial sale of something.
Dry counties don’t ban the possession of alcohol, they ban the commercial sale of alcohol. They are not preventing anyone from possessing or consuming alcohol, which is very different than the handgun ban.
Every city I’ve ever been in has some zoning restriction on where alcohol can be sold (not in a zoned residential district, not within X feet of schools) and liquor licenses are extremely difficult and expensive to get. I see dry counties as a zoning issue and little more, and I think local communities should get great deference on zoning matters.
I discussed this in my post above, but I’m still undecided on this issue.
I’m generally a big believer in the 10th Amendment and I think incorporation under the 14th Amendment is often a mistake.
I’m opposed to handgun bans because I don’t think they serve their intended purpose (if they did, murders in Chicago would have been miniscule when handguns were banned), but I’m not convinced that municipalities don’t have the right to ban them within their limits.
I think a pragmatic compromise would be to allows guns inside the home but require them to be kept in a locked container when transported within city limits, but I recognize that doesn’t address your question.
I’ve never tried it, and one factor in that is it illegality. I would be more likely to try it if it became completely legal (not just decriminalized).
That’s a tough question to answer, it turns out, as figures on alcohol consumption during Prohibition are somewhat, unreliable.
This page shows some nice charts, one of which shows that spending on alcohol went up during Prohibition, and down when it ended. Which represents the subsidy to organized crime, perhaps, more than accurate information about consumption. You can make of that what you will.
This is more interesting, I think. Murder’s a nice, easily-measured thing, without lots of messy questions about how accurate your data is:
You are forgetting that I support legalization, so I would agree that prohibition a) subsidizes organized crime, and b) has enormous social costs.
FWIW, The only consumption graph I saw when I skimmed the article that showed post repeal dealt with the nature of alcohol consumption, which switched to spirits versus beer and wine. This makes sense given the concentrated form being easier to conceal. I will read the full article later.
What we are discussing is whether legalization will increase usage. I say yes, you say no. I take your point that taxed drugs might be more expensive than illegal drugs. That is a fair point. My point was about the broader social acceptance that legalization encourages. You and Cato are part of that market where the drug is widely available and used, I am not.
I was in the Army where random urine tests were a fact of life. I work in consulting where certain clients still require urinalysis of all contractors and my annual physical provided by my employer contains a urinalysis (one my partners got a nasty gram about tobacco usage). All of these go away with legalization. We will have to disagree that these have zero impact on consumption.
I think “enormous” is dramatically overstating things.
You don’t think prohibition has enormous social costs?
I do. That’s why I support legalization.
I can’t edit for some reason, but I was going to add
Certainly the Cato article argued that alcohol prohibition has enormous social costs.
No, I say, “not necessarily”. As Colorado seems to show, just because you legalize something doesn’t mean people are automatically going to do it.
Take speeding: people who raise speed limits on roads find that people don’t automatically go faster. People tend to drive at a speed that they find comfortable, regardless of the legal limit. So raising the limit from something much lower to something approximating the speed people prefer to drive has no effect on behavior. It’s merely changing the law to reflect safe behavior.
““It just doesn’t seem right to me that we would enforce a law where 90-98 percent of the people are in violation of it,” [Michigan State Police] Lieutenant Megge told the DetNews in 2008. “It’s not the way we should do business in this country.”…”
“…By now there’s more than a decade’s worth of data from those raised speed limits and Megge insists that higher speed limits don’t mean that people drive significantly faster. They drive just as fast as they always did before, and just as safely. They just do so without risking points on their drivers’ licenses. The lieutenant says, “Over the years, I’ve done many follow up studies after we raise or lower a speed limit. Almost every time, the 85th percentile speed doesn’t change, or if it does, it’s by about 2 or 3 mph.””
I think we’ll find the same thing is true with drugs, especially pot. Many people already use it. Aligning the law with citizens’ behavior doesn’t automatically mean more people will smoke pot.
“I work in consulting where certain clients still require urinalysis of all contractors and my annual physical provided by my employer contains a urinalysis (one my partners got a nasty gram about tobacco usage). All of these go away with legalization.”
Again, not necessarily. Unless you’re telling me that you’d consider a drunk acceptable for these positions, since alcohol is legal, but not a pothead. I suspect you’d continue to exclude both…
I never said people will “automatically” do it. I said more people will do it. That seems obvious to me, but apparently it doesn’t to you. Your comment is like saying if I lower the price of my product by 25% people will automatically buy it. They won’t, but at the margins, more people will buy it.
I view legalizing as lowering a significant cost and the laws of economics imply that if you lower the cost of something, at the margins more people will use it. I still support legalization because I think the benefits outweigh the costs, but I recognize that legalizing comes with costs, costs that you seem to argue don’t exist. I find people that argue that their preferred policy is universally positive with no losers to be not very thoughtful.
Personally, I thought this quote from you summed up my entire argument.
As for speed limits, I’m not sure the analogy works, but I do often say that artificially low speed limits are a cancer on our society because they breed disrespect for the law. I have no problem putting prohibition in the same category.
Sorry, I’ve never made that argument. :)
I think that pot legalization will not have a noticeable negative impact on society, just as the SP in Michigan have found that raising speed limits did not have a noticeable negative impact. That’s not “don’t exist”, that’s “not worth worrying about”.
“I have no problem putting prohibition in the same category.”
Good, then it sounds like we agree 100%. :)
Again, saying the benefits outweigh the costs (my position) is very different than saying there are only benefits and no costs (which seems to be the substance of your argument (you say the costs won’t be “noticeable”).
I support legalization, but I do with my eyes open.
this looks like a very poor study, as the data sample must necessarily be extremely small. Come to me in 5 years with similar results and I think it will be a bit more interesting.
I think it’s the situation with marijuana that it’s already so widely accepted and widely available, that most people who want to smoke already do. Whatever society costs it imposes are already there.
So marijuana prohibition means we get all of the downsides of legalization and all of the downsides of prohibition, but none of the upsides that come with legalization. It’s the worst of both worlds.
It’s a pretty similar situation with LSD, cocaine and heroin. However in the case of those three drugs, there are also issues of supply and cost.
And ditto for dry counties, except that they actually make some problems worse.
Fred – I’m not as sanguine about conservatives, let alone establishment Democrats, joining ranks with libertarians on this issue. Too many conservatives hold the view – shared by the estimable Charles Krauthammer – that there should be only one legal, non-prescription drug and that that drug should be alcohol. Congress’ approach to the just-passed referendum in D.C. should be revealing. Enjoyed your post!
Really! I never knew Krauthammer opposed aspirin being available over the counter. I have to say, that surprises me. But if someone says it on the internet, it must be true.
Democracies are allowed to pass bad laws. They all inevitably do.
And the tyranny of the minority is no better than the tyranny of the majority. It’s worse is many ways.
But we are not likely to agree on that issue.
The whole point of a republican form of government is to protect the minority.
I think you’re conflating “republican government” with our form of republican government. Yes, the Constitution was written to protect the rights of the minority. Is that true of all republics? I don’t think so.
Our constitutionally-limited republic was designed to protect SOME rights of the minority, not allow the minority to impose their view on the majority.
Again, you and I will disagree on that.
I think you misunderstand the concept of imposition. The imposition is the dry county. An absence of something is not an imposition.
I think you misunderstand the concept of imposition.
But you are right, the absence of bars is not an imposition.