Should we give hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, metamines to little children?
Well, it's kind of a no-brainer, right?
Of course we don't want to do something like that, although it happens today with the drug war.
But the real libertarian position on drugs, the real hardcore libertarian position on drugs is that our society should be such that the government has no right, no role, no authority in that decision, that they should not be involved in drugs at all.
Now, there's a lot of libertarians out there working against the drug war in various forms, legalizing marijuana, having medical marijuana available to patients, freeing up us and drugs around the edges, and I don't have anything against that.
Very often you have to work at small goals before you can be successful at larger goals.
And some of those projects will pay off for the people involved and some of them will
pay off in the sense that it will provide information to others that freedom and drugs
is not such a horrible thing to begin with.
So that's really the position that I'm going to defend here, that we should have the right,
in essence, to give hard drugs to little kids, or at least that the government should play
no role, and certainly not the role they're currently playing, in that process.
Is the drug war a success or a failure?
Well, it's both.
I'm an economist so I'm always doing on the one hand this and on the other hand that.
And the drug war is a stunning success and a miserable failure depending upon how you
look at it.
It's a success in the sense that the drug warriors have been very successful.
They've arrested just tons and tons of people, hundreds of thousands of people.
They've successfully prosecuted hundreds of thousands of people each year and sent them
to jail for long periods of time, very often for small amounts of drugs.
They've confiscated huge amounts of drugs, tons and tons and tons of marijuana, millions
of doses of heroin, millions of effective vials of crack cocaine or cocaine.
There was just a bust here in, I think, Lee County for meta-amphetamines, and what did
they find?
Like how many, like a million doses of meta-amphetamines right here in Lee County.
So I mean, if you look at the drug war in terms of those statistics, in terms of property
confiscation, drug confiscation, number of people arrested, number of people prosecuted,
The number of years people are being imprisoned for, boy, they've been just an awesome success.
As a matter of fact, I was on a radio program in Birmingham, and it was a rock station,
and I drove up there on Sunday morning one time, and I was supposed to be interviewed.
Well, the guy, they didn't tell me it was a debate, and I was debating the local chief of the drug enforcement agency.
Agency, which is a little intimidating actually. But I said, I mean, you guys are really very
successful at what you do. I can't imagine anybody sort of pushing you to do more than
you already have done. So it's a success on that side, but on the other side, it's
a complete failure. Despite all of those statistical victories, no one, no one would deny the fact
The illegal drugs are readily available just about everywhere, certainly on this campus
and in this city and in this county and in this state. We're a major producer of marijuana,
a major producer of metamphetamines, an entry point for drugs from South America, Mexico,
Columbia, and so on. So I mean, if you look in terms of the local scene, drugs are widely
and readily available and the prices haven't really changed much since prohibition began.
So despite all the efforts, they really haven't pushed drugs out of the market or even pushed
their prices up if you adjust for inflation and you adjust for quality, potency, things
And that same situation is true all over the country. Drugs are available just about everywhere.
They sell drugs on the streets of Washington D.C. right down the corner from the Drug Enforcement
Agency, right out on the streets. They sell, the drugs are available for sale inside Federal
prisons. They're sold inside public schools. There's really nowhere where drugs are, I
mean, it's secret. It's not always out in the open. You do have to pay a price, sometimes
$5 for crack cocaine. That's not going to deter anybody. And if we go beyond that, I
mean harm reduction and availability, one of the things you also see is that if drugs
are a little higher priced, if there is a little bit of restriction of availability,
What do people do? You can always buy booze. Now one of the big tricks. I guess we didn't
have this when I was in college, but now the big trick is, just go to the doctor and have
a prescription written. You get a couple of good prescriptions, I'm not sure exactly,
I can't name them and I wouldn't name them, but you combine a few prescription drugs with
So, they really haven't made any kind of dent whatsoever in overall drug usage, in overall drug abuse, in overall damage that results from misusing, from abusing, or even from accidentally using,
and overall damage that results from misusing, from abusing or even from accidentally using drugs in general.
So on that line, and I think that's the important line, the drug war has been a complete and utter failure.
One of the things you see when the drug war is talked about and somebody says,
What should we do about it?
They start talking in terms of the costs and the benefits.
This is big in my profession, economics.
What are the costs and what are the benefits?
In my particular school of Austrian economics,
we have a very rigid line.
We can't just make things up as we go along.
We can't estimate things and pretend that they're real. We can't come up with proxies and pretend that they're real.
We have a much stricter standard than your average mainstream economist.
Because we always consider people subjective evaluations of things.
Subjective means that you can value something as much as you want.
And there's nothing I as the economist can do. I can't just proxy you down or estimate you down or normalize you or average you and come up with some figures.
And so when I say the costs are greater than the benefits, the Austrians have a very strict standard on all that.
Because, if the drug warrior says, well, so what, we only saved one girl this year from drug abuse, from a drug overdose, so what that it cost 50 billion dollars? It was worth it.
Then I have to, as an Austrian economist, I can't just say, well, you know, one girl
is only worth a million dollars, and 50 billion dollars is much greater than that, so we should
re-engineer society.
I can't do that.
If someone says that little girl is worth more than 50 billion dollars, I can't really
say anything.
and then it's just the political process of people vote one way or the other
representatives vote on the legislation
but what I can say is that prohibition
provides us with no benefits it doesn't
save anybody it doesn't prevent access
to anything it doesn't have
any benefits to offset the cost
It's just an illusion. Most people side with me in the sense that the costs are greater
than the benefits. I've done a study recently of economists and what they think about drug
prohibition and there's almost universal agreement that something needs to be done.
Policy is not working. And almost universally they think we should liberalize drug laws.
We should make them lighter, less intense, less enforcement, less penalties. Make them
more rational. And that's also true of the general population. The general population
thinks that we should have greater freedom, that we should have medical marijuana rights,
Rights. So there's a general agreement that we should change things and that there should
be some liberalization. But there's a lot of different points of view of what we should
do. That book back there, How to Legalize Drugs, is a good example. There's about 40
chapters written by 40 experts on the drug war. All of them agree that we should quote-unquote
that we should, quote-unquote, legalize drugs, but they all have a different idea of what
that means. Some people would only sell you marijuana. Other people would only allow the
government to sell drugs. Or if you wanted heroin, you'd have to register with a doctor
and go to a store that was government regulated. All sorts of different plans. They would move
move them in gradually, only legalize certain drugs, and so on, and they put me at the very
end of the book, I think because I attacked a lot of the people who were in the book,
and they didn't want, they figured it was so big that no one would bother to get to
the end of it, but in that book I really lay out, in my chapter, a lot of the details,
which I'm not going to go into tonight, we'll never make it to the pizza, of why we should
have complete legalization, what I call perfect legalization, the pure libertarian solution
to the problems of drugs. And in that sense, the reform even goes beyond the drug war and
I'm going to get to some of those things right now drug prohibition makes things worse.
It doesn't make things better.
One of the things that I've studied in great detail, well, not directly studying it, the
The Potency of Drugs. I've got to reword that in my notes. The Potency of Drugs, that's
a big issue in medicine and drugs in general. Potency is a very, you know, any kind of prescription
drug, for example, any kind of pharmaceutical, they do a lot of testing to figure out should
We give them three milligrams, four milligrams, six milligrams, those kind of things. Potency,
the amount of deliverable drug in a dose, is very important. It's strictly controlled.
It's one of the things that drug companies are always concerned about is every pill has
to go out of our manufacturing site with pretty much exactly the same dose to have proper
Medical Effect. If it just came out random, where some pills didn't have any potency
and other pills had all of the potency, 100%, you can imagine just about anything, cough
syrup. You know, what if you got the one bottle out of a whole case of 144 that had the active
ingredient in it? It'd be trouble. And in illegal markets, the potency of drugs is not
is not set, it's not determined. Every little dealer, every little farmer produces a different
product, produces a different potency of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, all of those products that
go out onto the street, every little batch comes out differently. And one of the big
One of the tendencies that we see in illegal markets is for drugs to become more and more potent as the police make more and more efforts to suppress the drug trade.
So the more the police enforce, the more highly potent drugs become. And the more potent they
become, the more variable they become. It's kind of like getting a bigger bang for your
buck, so to speak. Now I'm not going to try to explain all of the economics rationale
I'm not going to give you any charts, diagrams, equations. There's a few in the book though
that show the potency of marijuana in the United States over time, things of that nature.
But I think you can all understand it. Has anybody been to an Auburn football game here?
Just about everybody, yeah. Put up your hand if you haven't been to one, okay? Well, the
The Auburn football games, at least prior to 9-11, things have changed a little bit
since then. You know, the city of Auburn, by and large, is mostly a beer drinking type
of town. I mean, now there's, you know, margaritas and shots and stuff. It's more common than
football stadium. Have you ever seen anybody drinking beer inside the football stadium?
I never have. But I've seen a lot of people drinking. And what are they drinking? Bourbon,
rum, 151, those kind of things. And the reason they go to that more higher potency, that
higher strength of alcohol product is because they have to go through what is in effect
the prohibition.
It's illegal to have booze of any kind inside the football stadium unless, of course, you're
lucky enough or rich enough to be up in one of those sky boxes.
I can tell you, I've been up there and there's plenty of liquor up there and they don't charge
So it's that prohibition, that layer of prohibition that you walk through and you know you can't.
I'm sure some fraternities have thought, you know, if we could only get a keg in there.
But it's not really possible, especially after 9-11 where they're kind of searching people.
You can always get a flask into the stadium. So that's where, that's how prohibition creates
That's how prohibition creates a more highly potent product. The marijuana that was sold
in the United States in the 1960s, when the modern drug war started, averaged a potency
of about 1% of the active ingredient, the tetrahydrocarbanol, number 9, or whatever
it is. By the 1980s, it was over 4%. So the potency of marijuana that people were smoking
had increased by over 300%. Now the average potency is even higher, but when the drug
war got kicked up a notch in the 1980s, they switched drugs. They couldn't make marijuana
potent enough to make it worth going through the more strictly enforced outer boundary
of the United States and the State of Florida. As a matter of fact, George Bush's father,
who was the vice president for Ronald Reagan, was dubbed the first drug czar. And they put
into effect, they brought the military into it, and they spent a lot of money closing
down the borders. And what happened? People, all of a sudden, they stopped smoking marijuana
If you're a heroin addict and you're just sort of going along with a certain amount of heroin per day, maybe drinking a little alcohol, and then all of a sudden you get pure heroin, it can cause an overdose, overdose death.
And then, of course, some of these products can be mixed with impurities that may cause
allergic reactions or overdoses and various other ailments.
Crime and corruption.
Prohibition is supposed to make society better, it's supposed to reduce crime, but it certainly
hasn't done that.
Most of the corruption, most of the political corruption, most of the law enforcement corruption
in the United States, well over half of all the corruption is associated with the drug
war.
I mean, it was supposed to clean things up, but it's actually made things much worse.
In terms of crime, again, the idea was if people didn't have access to these intoxicants,
And they wouldn't go out and commit crimes. And early surveys of prisoners in state prisons
and in federal prisons, they would go in and ask them, you know, why did you commit this
crime? Why did you rob that house? Why did you kill that person? Was it the alcohol?
Was it the drugs? And they'd say, yeah, it was the alcohol. It was the alcohol's fault.
I wouldn't have done it myself. And so there's been this myth perpetuated that people on
drugs commit a lot of crimes. And that's really not true. That's a really insignificant
amount of crime. It does happen, but it's not a significant source of crime. What is
a significant source of crime is the drug trade itself. It is the secondary effects,
Drive-by Shootings, gangs. Where do gangs come from? Never had gangs until Prohibition.
And gangs basically are economic organizations that are designed to profit from controlling
the retail drug trade in a certain area. And gangs usually fight because they're fighting
fighting for territory. The first gangs in the United States really, the significant
type of gangs started during alcohol prohibition. They were running retail alcohol around urban
areas. And children, of course, with drug prohibition, the penalties on children, those
for those who are 18 and younger, for being in the drug trade as runners or dealers, the
little roles that they play in the drug trade, the reason that they're brought into the drug
trade is because the penalties on them are so much lower than anybody over 18, 17, 18
and above.
If you get caught and you're an adult, you know, it's like 10 years.
But if you're 15 or 14, they might just let you end up letting you go.
So that encourages people to bring children into the drug trade.
So on all those counts and many others, I think, drug prohibition actually makes things
much worse in terms of all of the things that drug prohibition is supposed to help us with.
It's supposed to make us healthier, and it doesn't.
It's supposed to make it safer, and it doesn't.
It's supposed to be good for society, good for the political system, good for the legal
system.
It's killing our legal system.
It's destroying our legal system.
Our legal system now is so geared to stopping the drug trade that we've basically given
away many of our constitutional rights, have been given away to make it easier for drug
law enforcement to track down drug dealers and drug consumers.
So they can get away with things that are not really constitutional.
They allow them to go beyond search and seizure, privacy.
All of those constitutional guarantees that is supposed to be in our legal systems have
been set aside for the drug war.
The fact that the military is involved in the drug war also goes against a long-standing
legal tradition going back before the founding of this country that prohibits the military
from engaging in local police action.
So we have given up a lot and gotten nothing in return.
All that aside, so what?
What's your alternative?
Most people believe that if we legalize drugs, all we would get is more of the same.
We get more drug abuse, we get more drug abuse, we get more drug taking, more drug overdoses,
more drug crime, more corruption of voting, of politicals, of politicians, hard to imagine
that, but it's possible.
And you know what? A lot of people have in their mind the economist tool of supply and
demand. It's funny, you know, despite my best efforts to teach supply and demand, a
lot of people just don't get it, and yet when it comes to something like this, everybody
just intuitively knows it, which is why I often would drop all the graphical analysis
Supply and demand says, if price goes up, quantity goes up along the horizontal axis.
The law of demand simply says that if price is high, quantity will be low, it's almost
If the price is high, like under prohibition, the quantity will be low. Whereas if the price
If the price is low, quantity will be high. That's all it says. And so people, politicians, debaters, and so on and so forth, think, well, if we legalize drugs, the price will fall, the quantity will increase, and all our problems will get much worse.
But that's not necessarily true.
Economists place a major emphasis on prices.
Prices are the information of society, the economic information of society.
They direct resources.
They encourage people into certain professions and out of other professions.
But with prohibition, all of those other things that we hold constant change when you go from
prohibition to legalization.
In other words, everything we know about the market for illegal drugs would not be true
about the legal market for drugs.
And so whereas in most instances, a price change has a lot of meaning.
As a matter of fact, let's just say that the legislature increases the price of gasoline
by 50 cents in order to cover the budget shortfall, so-called budget shortfall in Alabama.
So the price of gasoline goes up 50 percent.
Now what's going to change?
Well, the price is going to go up, the quantity is going to go down, but gasoline is going
Freedom is going to be the same. Gas stations are going to be the same. You're still going to be using pumps.
You know, nothing else is going to change. But with legalization, everything is going to change and price becomes the least important aspect of the change.
Freedom is better. The market is better. The free market. When we look at illegal drugs, we're looking at the illegal market.
Now, how would the market control the product? Well, markets control products. They want safe products. They want their products to be competitive.
And what do we see in the legal market for drugs?
Well, we see a lot of stability and we see some change.
If we look at over time, what kind of changes have we seen in the major legal markets?
Alcohol? 50 years ago, just about everybody drank whiskey.
That's changed where a lot more people drink beer. Now people are drinking wine because it's healthy for you.
Well, some people are drinking wine because it's healthy for you.
Now there's light beer. Now most beer is light beer.
I better hurry.
And now there's, of course, no alcohol beer. You can get beer without alcohol in it.
Cigarettes, 50 years ago, everybody smoked. Everybody smoked. And they smoked filterless cigarettes.
They smoked them inside. You could even smoke in the hospital.
Now, of course, fewer people are smoking, almost all cigarettes are filtered, and the
majority of sales are for light cigarettes.
And we can go on and look at other products, and we would see similar things, where the
products have become safer, aspirin, pain relievers, all that kind of stuff, it's gotten
cheaper, it's gotten better, it's gotten safer, more choices, and so on.
That's the kind of thing you see in legal markets.
There's really not a big push to be, to have the Coca-Cola with the most possible caffeine
in it.
There's nobody out there advertising, hey, we've got five times the amount of caffeine
as regular Coca-Cola.
There's a little bit of that, but not that much.
In fact, now the biggest trend in the soda market is for decaffeinated. Decaffeinated coffee, decaffeinated teas, where they're taking the drug, and caffeine is a very addictive drug, they're taking it out of the product or they're lowering it.
There's no reason to suspect that the market for marijuana, cocaine and heroin wouldn't
be the same thing.
As a matter of fact, if we went back in time to when all those products were legally available,
where a 9-year-old girl could walk into a pharmacy and pick up a bottle of heroin pills,
The Bayer Pharmaceutical Company produced heroin pills that were sold over the counter.
You didn't even need a prescription.
And they were very useful products.
They were even given to little babies, little babies in the crib, because they were very
very low potency, and women used them as well. But they were very effective and they also
worked here for dysentery. So the market has ways of controlling products. Competition is
one of them. And of course, the legal system backs that up. Controlling the consumer. How
does the market control consumers? Well, the market does a pretty good job of controlling
on Consumers. People who use drugs don't necessarily have any problem in the marketplace, but people
who abuse drugs do. People who abuse drugs don't get ahead in life unless you're making
like Cheech and Chong movies or something like that. Not a whole lot of really successful
people out there just blowing it out night after night. After college, you've got to
The market has a way of doing this. There are lots and lots of studies out there of people who drink too much and take too many drugs. They don't get anywhere in the labor force. They end up staying at low-paying jobs, having a hard time keeping a job, whereas those people who control the labor force,
themselves, not necessarily that they don't do any drugs, but they don't get out of control,
those are the people that get ahead. The unemployment rate for drug users is much higher, wage levels
are much lower, all of those sorts of things that drug users are more likely to lose their
Job. So the market has a way of controlling for that. Unfortunately, it's kind of watered
down because the government has welfare programs, unemployment insurance, things of that nature.
The social safety net means that you can behave irresponsibly and get away with it. You can
go to the hospital, you can get welfare checks, you can get unemployment benefits from the
The Market's ability to control people is greatly reduced because of the social safety
net where it doesn't matter how abhorrent your behavior is, how ridiculously irresponsible
it is, you're still going to get free medical care, you're still going to get food, clothing
and shelter. You can even get social security benefits, all sorts of things nowadays. Paid
So that's an area where the market actually does a very good job of controlling people's
behavior within acceptable levels but where the government has sort of subverted that process.
Controlling the marketplace itself.
Controlling the marketplace itself, we have legal institutions, not the congressional
type laws, but just the basic laws of society, like negligence. If a business owner is negligent
in dealing with a consumer, they can be sued. If a business is fraudulent with a consumer,
they can be sued. Not that you just get your money back, but you get penalized on top of
So there's a lot of ways through the legal process that would prevent firms, companies
producing products from hurting people, from harming people, from lying to frauding people.
All of those things would remain in place even if we legalized drugs.
And just because I said the government has no role in this doesn't mean there wouldn't
be regulating behavior.
You know, if you go to Kroger's, you have to have shoes on.
If you go to the bank, you're not allowed to smoke cigarettes. If you're driving a truck
for the city of Auburn, or if you're driving a bus for the city of Auburn, if you're driving
a truck for a transporting company, if you're driving a ship for commercial fishing purposes,
you're not allowed to drink. The company tells you you're not allowed to drink. If you're
If you fly an airplane for Delta, you're not allowed to drink or take drugs or anything.
And they'll fire you if you do.
There's nothing in what I've said that's going to suggest that if we legalize drugs,
it would be perfectly alright to come into class and light up a joint.
Auburn University would still have the authority to say, you can't smoke marijuana in class.
You couldn't smoke marijuana in Kroger's. So institutions, private organizations can
put all sorts of requirements on that you do obey and that you would obey. They don't
put up with anything like that. There's not just like, you know, in Kroger's it's not
Not like a lot of people go in there without shoes and they only catch a few of them. They
catch everyone. They kick everyone out. Everything they do is 100% enforcement. It's not like
the drug war where, you know, you could smoke marijuana for two or three years. And as doped
up as you are, you may never have had any chance of really getting caught. In the marketplace,
100% all the time, basically. Not 100% but pretty darn close.
Would kids actually be sold drugs in the marketplace? Well, possibly. It's unlikely that Winn-Dixie
Pharmacy is going to be selling hard drugs to little kids. It may have been at one time
It may have been, at one time, it would be okay to send your little kid down to the pharmacy,
the drug store, actually, back then, and pick up the prescriptions.
But everybody knew everybody else in that situation.
Nowadays, when that isn't the case, it's unlikely that a corporate pharmacy like CVS
or Walgreens, something like that, is actually going to sell illegal hard drugs to little
of Kids. Why is that the case? Why wouldn't they? If they were allowed to, why wouldn't
they? No, it would increase their sales. You get sued for negligence. Now, if I walked
into Winn-Dixie Pharmacy or CVS, let's say, and I went and bought, you know, an ounce
A bottle of marijuana, a vial full of cocaine, and a bottle of heroin pills, let's say.
And I used them, and I hurt myself trying to open a bottle of whiskey.
I dropped it on my foot and cut it open.
And so I sue for negligence.
Well, I might not get, I might not have a great chance of winning that one, right?
And if I did win, I wouldn't, it wouldn't be a big penalty put on CVS.
But if a nine-year-old girl walks in and buys those things and goes out and hurts herself real bad,
The type of negligence and the type of penalties that the legal system would impose, especially in Alabama, would be tremendous.
That's gross negligence. It's actually illegal to engage in valid contracts between an adult and a minor.
That's why minors can't buy a lot of things.
You can buy candy bars, things like that. You know, miners aren't allowed to rent cars, for example, and there's good reasons for that.
Companies, corporations do not want to put themselves at tremendous legal and financial risks, especially in today's climate,
where lawsuits amounts can be in the billions of dollars for something that the company wasn't really negligent for, if they were convicted of gross negligence, where they obviously did some really stupid things, they could put their entire corporate value at risk.
So, yeah, little kids would be sold hard drugs in the market, but it would be very, very
limited. And it still exists today, so it's not that much. We're not talking about a lot
of kids being sold illegal drugs, but you have to admit that it's going to happen, but
But it would be a lot less than we see today.
And so it's kind of a trick question or a trick lecture where I say little kids should
be sold hard drugs, but in reality the market would do a great deal to prevent all that.
Thank you very much.