WEBVTT NOTE Hard Drugs for Little Kids? 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.000 Should we give hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, metamines to little children? 2 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:12.000 Well, it's kind of a no-brainer, right? 3 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:25.000 Of course we don't want to do something like that, although it happens today with the drug war. 4 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:54.000 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. 5 00:00:55.000 --> 00:01:14.000 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. 6 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:21.760 Very often you have to work at small goals before you can be successful at larger goals. 7 00:01:21.760 --> 00:01:26.800 And some of those projects will pay off for the people involved and some of them will 8 00:01:26.800 --> 00:01:34.040 pay off in the sense that it will provide information to others that freedom and drugs 9 00:01:34.040 --> 00:01:37.240 is not such a horrible thing to begin with. 10 00:01:37.240 --> 00:01:44.960 So that's really the position that I'm going to defend here, that we should have the right, 11 00:01:44.960 --> 00:01:52.580 in essence, to give hard drugs to little kids, or at least that the government should play 12 00:01:52.580 --> 00:02:00.760 no role, and certainly not the role they're currently playing, in that process. 13 00:02:00.760 --> 00:02:04.440 Is the drug war a success or a failure? 14 00:02:04.440 --> 00:02:06.880 Well, it's both. 15 00:02:06.880 --> 00:02:11.760 I'm an economist so I'm always doing on the one hand this and on the other hand that. 16 00:02:11.760 --> 00:02:17.080 And the drug war is a stunning success and a miserable failure depending upon how you 17 00:02:17.080 --> 00:02:18.840 look at it. 18 00:02:18.840 --> 00:02:26.560 It's a success in the sense that the drug warriors have been very successful. 19 00:02:26.560 --> 00:02:33.080 They've arrested just tons and tons of people, hundreds of thousands of people. 20 00:02:33.080 --> 00:02:38.320 They've successfully prosecuted hundreds of thousands of people each year and sent them 21 00:02:38.320 --> 00:02:44.440 to jail for long periods of time, very often for small amounts of drugs. 22 00:02:44.440 --> 00:02:52.440 They've confiscated huge amounts of drugs, tons and tons and tons of marijuana, millions 23 00:02:52.440 --> 00:03:00.720 of doses of heroin, millions of effective vials of crack cocaine or cocaine. 24 00:03:00.720 --> 00:03:06.520 There was just a bust here in, I think, Lee County for meta-amphetamines, and what did 25 00:03:06.520 --> 00:03:07.520 they find? 26 00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:14.520 Like how many, like a million doses of meta-amphetamines right here in Lee County. 27 00:03:14.520 --> 00:03:22.200 So I mean, if you look at the drug war in terms of those statistics, in terms of property 28 00:03:22.200 --> 00:03:28.960 confiscation, drug confiscation, number of people arrested, number of people prosecuted, 29 00:03:28.960 --> 00:03:35.960 The number of years people are being imprisoned for, boy, they've been just an awesome success. 30 00:03:35.960 --> 00:03:42.960 As a matter of fact, I was on a radio program in Birmingham, and it was a rock station, 31 00:03:42.960 --> 00:03:50.960 and I drove up there on Sunday morning one time, and I was supposed to be interviewed. 32 00:03:50.960 --> 00:03:57.960 Well, the guy, they didn't tell me it was a debate, and I was debating the local chief of the drug enforcement agency. 33 00:03:57.960 --> 00:04:03.760 Agency, which is a little intimidating actually. But I said, I mean, you guys are really very 34 00:04:03.760 --> 00:04:09.960 successful at what you do. I can't imagine anybody sort of pushing you to do more than 35 00:04:09.960 --> 00:04:14.640 you already have done. So it's a success on that side, but on the other side, it's 36 00:04:14.640 --> 00:04:24.600 a complete failure. Despite all of those statistical victories, no one, no one would deny the fact 37 00:04:24.600 --> 00:04:31.780 The illegal drugs are readily available just about everywhere, certainly on this campus 38 00:04:31.780 --> 00:04:37.760 and in this city and in this county and in this state. We're a major producer of marijuana, 39 00:04:37.760 --> 00:04:46.600 a major producer of metamphetamines, an entry point for drugs from South America, Mexico, 40 00:04:46.600 --> 00:04:55.680 Columbia, and so on. So I mean, if you look in terms of the local scene, drugs are widely 41 00:04:55.680 --> 00:05:03.540 and readily available and the prices haven't really changed much since prohibition began. 42 00:05:03.540 --> 00:05:09.760 So despite all the efforts, they really haven't pushed drugs out of the market or even pushed 43 00:05:09.760 --> 00:05:14.880 their prices up if you adjust for inflation and you adjust for quality, potency, things 44 00:05:14.880 --> 00:05:28.920 And that same situation is true all over the country. Drugs are available just about everywhere. 45 00:05:28.920 --> 00:05:35.460 They sell drugs on the streets of Washington D.C. right down the corner from the Drug Enforcement 46 00:05:35.460 --> 00:05:44.620 Agency, right out on the streets. They sell, the drugs are available for sale inside Federal 47 00:05:44.620 --> 00:05:54.700 prisons. They're sold inside public schools. There's really nowhere where drugs are, I 48 00:05:54.700 --> 00:06:01.920 mean, it's secret. It's not always out in the open. You do have to pay a price, sometimes 49 00:06:01.920 --> 00:06:15.720 $5 for crack cocaine. That's not going to deter anybody. And if we go beyond that, I 50 00:06:15.720 --> 00:06:24.240 mean harm reduction and availability, one of the things you also see is that if drugs 51 00:06:24.240 --> 00:06:31.520 are a little higher priced, if there is a little bit of restriction of availability, 52 00:06:31.520 --> 00:06:43.600 What do people do? You can always buy booze. Now one of the big tricks. I guess we didn't 53 00:06:43.600 --> 00:06:47.440 have this when I was in college, but now the big trick is, just go to the doctor and have 54 00:06:47.440 --> 00:06:51.920 a prescription written. You get a couple of good prescriptions, I'm not sure exactly, 55 00:06:51.920 --> 00:06:57.840 I can't name them and I wouldn't name them, but you combine a few prescription drugs with 56 00:06:57.840 --> 00:07:16.840 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, 57 00:07:16.840 --> 00:07:29.840 and overall damage that results from misusing, from abusing or even from accidentally using drugs in general. 58 00:07:29.840 --> 00:07:38.840 So on that line, and I think that's the important line, the drug war has been a complete and utter failure. 59 00:07:38.840 --> 00:07:44.840 One of the things you see when the drug war is talked about and somebody says, 60 00:07:44.840 --> 00:07:48.840 What should we do about it? 61 00:07:48.840 --> 00:07:52.840 They start talking in terms of the costs and the benefits. 62 00:07:52.840 --> 00:07:56.840 This is big in my profession, economics. 63 00:07:56.840 --> 00:08:00.840 What are the costs and what are the benefits? 64 00:08:00.840 --> 00:08:04.840 In my particular school of Austrian economics, 65 00:08:04.840 --> 00:08:08.840 we have a very rigid line. 66 00:08:08.840 --> 00:08:12.840 We can't just make things up as we go along. 67 00:08:12.840 --> 00:08:20.840 We can't estimate things and pretend that they're real. We can't come up with proxies and pretend that they're real. 68 00:08:20.840 --> 00:08:26.840 We have a much stricter standard than your average mainstream economist. 69 00:08:26.840 --> 00:08:33.840 Because we always consider people subjective evaluations of things. 70 00:08:33.840 --> 00:08:39.840 Subjective means that you can value something as much as you want. 71 00:08:39.840 --> 00:08:51.840 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. 72 00:08:51.840 --> 00:08:59.840 And so when I say the costs are greater than the benefits, the Austrians have a very strict standard on all that. 73 00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:19.840 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. 74 00:09:19.840 --> 00:09:26.280 Then I have to, as an Austrian economist, I can't just say, well, you know, one girl 75 00:09:26.280 --> 00:09:34.360 is only worth a million dollars, and 50 billion dollars is much greater than that, so we should 76 00:09:34.360 --> 00:09:36.160 re-engineer society. 77 00:09:36.160 --> 00:09:38.400 I can't do that. 78 00:09:38.400 --> 00:09:45.240 If someone says that little girl is worth more than 50 billion dollars, I can't really 79 00:09:45.240 --> 00:09:46.240 say anything. 80 00:09:46.240 --> 00:09:49.920 and then it's just the political process of people vote one way or the other 81 00:09:49.920 --> 00:09:54.000 representatives vote on the legislation 82 00:09:54.000 --> 00:09:58.000 but what I can say is that prohibition 83 00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:01.420 provides us with no benefits it doesn't 84 00:10:01.420 --> 00:10:04.640 save anybody it doesn't prevent access 85 00:10:04.640 --> 00:10:07.720 to anything it doesn't have 86 00:10:07.720 --> 00:10:11.400 any benefits to offset the cost 87 00:10:11.400 --> 00:10:24.440 It's just an illusion. Most people side with me in the sense that the costs are greater 88 00:10:24.440 --> 00:10:33.200 than the benefits. I've done a study recently of economists and what they think about drug 89 00:10:33.200 --> 00:10:39.480 prohibition and there's almost universal agreement that something needs to be done. 90 00:10:39.480 --> 00:10:46.480 Policy is not working. And almost universally they think we should liberalize drug laws. 91 00:10:47.640 --> 00:10:53.040 We should make them lighter, less intense, less enforcement, less penalties. Make them 92 00:10:53.040 --> 00:11:00.040 more rational. And that's also true of the general population. The general population 93 00:11:02.200 --> 00:11:09.200 thinks that we should have greater freedom, that we should have medical marijuana rights, 94 00:11:09.480 --> 00:11:15.280 Rights. So there's a general agreement that we should change things and that there should 95 00:11:15.280 --> 00:11:21.440 be some liberalization. But there's a lot of different points of view of what we should 96 00:11:21.440 --> 00:11:28.440 do. That book back there, How to Legalize Drugs, is a good example. There's about 40 97 00:11:28.680 --> 00:11:35.680 chapters written by 40 experts on the drug war. All of them agree that we should quote-unquote 98 00:11:35.680 --> 00:11:41.260 that we should, quote-unquote, legalize drugs, but they all have a different idea of what 99 00:11:41.260 --> 00:11:47.760 that means. Some people would only sell you marijuana. Other people would only allow the 100 00:11:47.760 --> 00:11:54.140 government to sell drugs. Or if you wanted heroin, you'd have to register with a doctor 101 00:11:54.140 --> 00:12:00.680 and go to a store that was government regulated. All sorts of different plans. They would move 102 00:12:00.680 --> 00:12:07.280 move them in gradually, only legalize certain drugs, and so on, and they put me at the very 103 00:12:07.280 --> 00:12:13.020 end of the book, I think because I attacked a lot of the people who were in the book, 104 00:12:13.020 --> 00:12:16.400 and they didn't want, they figured it was so big that no one would bother to get to 105 00:12:16.400 --> 00:12:27.320 the end of it, but in that book I really lay out, in my chapter, a lot of the details, 106 00:12:27.320 --> 00:12:34.200 which I'm not going to go into tonight, we'll never make it to the pizza, of why we should 107 00:12:34.200 --> 00:12:42.440 have complete legalization, what I call perfect legalization, the pure libertarian solution 108 00:12:42.440 --> 00:12:52.160 to the problems of drugs. And in that sense, the reform even goes beyond the drug war and 109 00:12:52.160 --> 00:13:04.880 I'm going to get to some of those things right now drug prohibition makes things worse. 110 00:13:04.880 --> 00:13:07.900 It doesn't make things better. 111 00:13:07.900 --> 00:13:17.880 One of the things that I've studied in great detail, well, not directly studying it, the 112 00:13:17.880 --> 00:13:29.160 The Potency of Drugs. I've got to reword that in my notes. The Potency of Drugs, that's 113 00:13:29.160 --> 00:13:38.120 a big issue in medicine and drugs in general. Potency is a very, you know, any kind of prescription 114 00:13:38.120 --> 00:13:42.720 drug, for example, any kind of pharmaceutical, they do a lot of testing to figure out should 115 00:13:42.720 --> 00:13:48.720 We give them three milligrams, four milligrams, six milligrams, those kind of things. Potency, 116 00:13:48.720 --> 00:13:53.920 the amount of deliverable drug in a dose, is very important. It's strictly controlled. 117 00:13:53.920 --> 00:13:58.560 It's one of the things that drug companies are always concerned about is every pill has 118 00:13:58.560 --> 00:14:07.320 to go out of our manufacturing site with pretty much exactly the same dose to have proper 119 00:14:07.320 --> 00:14:13.560 Medical Effect. If it just came out random, where some pills didn't have any potency 120 00:14:13.560 --> 00:14:19.000 and other pills had all of the potency, 100%, you can imagine just about anything, cough 121 00:14:19.000 --> 00:14:25.520 syrup. You know, what if you got the one bottle out of a whole case of 144 that had the active 122 00:14:25.520 --> 00:14:37.160 ingredient in it? It'd be trouble. And in illegal markets, the potency of drugs is not 123 00:14:37.160 --> 00:14:44.160 is not set, it's not determined. Every little dealer, every little farmer produces a different 124 00:14:44.160 --> 00:14:53.160 product, produces a different potency of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, all of those products that 125 00:14:53.160 --> 00:15:00.480 go out onto the street, every little batch comes out differently. And one of the big 126 00:15:00.480 --> 00:15:16.480 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. 127 00:15:16.480 --> 00:15:26.400 So the more the police enforce, the more highly potent drugs become. And the more potent they 128 00:15:26.400 --> 00:15:36.200 become, the more variable they become. It's kind of like getting a bigger bang for your 129 00:15:36.200 --> 00:15:43.400 buck, so to speak. Now I'm not going to try to explain all of the economics rationale 130 00:15:43.400 --> 00:15:50.800 I'm not going to give you any charts, diagrams, equations. There's a few in the book though 131 00:15:50.800 --> 00:15:58.360 that show the potency of marijuana in the United States over time, things of that nature. 132 00:15:58.360 --> 00:16:04.600 But I think you can all understand it. Has anybody been to an Auburn football game here? 133 00:16:04.600 --> 00:16:12.600 Just about everybody, yeah. Put up your hand if you haven't been to one, okay? Well, the 134 00:16:12.600 --> 00:16:19.280 The Auburn football games, at least prior to 9-11, things have changed a little bit 135 00:16:19.280 --> 00:16:29.520 since then. You know, the city of Auburn, by and large, is mostly a beer drinking type 136 00:16:29.520 --> 00:16:36.740 of town. I mean, now there's, you know, margaritas and shots and stuff. It's more common than 137 00:17:06.740 --> 00:17:12.060 football stadium. Have you ever seen anybody drinking beer inside the football stadium? 138 00:17:12.060 --> 00:17:23.060 I never have. But I've seen a lot of people drinking. And what are they drinking? Bourbon, 139 00:17:23.060 --> 00:17:32.540 rum, 151, those kind of things. And the reason they go to that more higher potency, that 140 00:17:32.540 --> 00:17:40.640 higher strength of alcohol product is because they have to go through what is in effect 141 00:17:40.640 --> 00:17:41.640 the prohibition. 142 00:17:41.640 --> 00:17:50.580 It's illegal to have booze of any kind inside the football stadium unless, of course, you're 143 00:17:50.580 --> 00:17:55.220 lucky enough or rich enough to be up in one of those sky boxes. 144 00:17:55.220 --> 00:18:01.420 I can tell you, I've been up there and there's plenty of liquor up there and they don't charge 145 00:18:01.420 --> 00:18:08.420 So it's that prohibition, that layer of prohibition that you walk through and you know you can't. 146 00:18:11.020 --> 00:18:15.820 I'm sure some fraternities have thought, you know, if we could only get a keg in there. 147 00:18:15.820 --> 00:18:20.940 But it's not really possible, especially after 9-11 where they're kind of searching people. 148 00:18:20.940 --> 00:18:27.940 You can always get a flask into the stadium. So that's where, that's how prohibition creates 149 00:18:27.940 --> 00:18:34.020 That's how prohibition creates a more highly potent product. The marijuana that was sold 150 00:18:34.020 --> 00:18:39.860 in the United States in the 1960s, when the modern drug war started, averaged a potency 151 00:18:39.860 --> 00:18:47.260 of about 1% of the active ingredient, the tetrahydrocarbanol, number 9, or whatever 152 00:18:47.260 --> 00:18:56.900 it is. By the 1980s, it was over 4%. So the potency of marijuana that people were smoking 153 00:18:56.900 --> 00:19:08.380 had increased by over 300%. Now the average potency is even higher, but when the drug 154 00:19:08.380 --> 00:19:18.180 war got kicked up a notch in the 1980s, they switched drugs. They couldn't make marijuana 155 00:19:18.180 --> 00:19:26.660 potent enough to make it worth going through the more strictly enforced outer boundary 156 00:19:26.660 --> 00:19:32.020 of the United States and the State of Florida. As a matter of fact, George Bush's father, 157 00:19:32.020 --> 00:19:42.780 who was the vice president for Ronald Reagan, was dubbed the first drug czar. And they put 158 00:19:42.780 --> 00:19:48.420 into effect, they brought the military into it, and they spent a lot of money closing 159 00:19:48.420 --> 00:19:55.160 down the borders. And what happened? People, all of a sudden, they stopped smoking marijuana 160 00:20:25.160 --> 00:20:43.160 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. 161 00:20:43.160 --> 00:20:51.000 And then, of course, some of these products can be mixed with impurities that may cause 162 00:20:51.000 --> 00:20:57.240 allergic reactions or overdoses and various other ailments. 163 00:20:57.240 --> 00:20:59.040 Crime and corruption. 164 00:20:59.040 --> 00:21:07.880 Prohibition is supposed to make society better, it's supposed to reduce crime, but it certainly 165 00:21:07.880 --> 00:21:11.980 hasn't done that. 166 00:21:11.980 --> 00:21:16.780 Most of the corruption, most of the political corruption, most of the law enforcement corruption 167 00:21:16.780 --> 00:21:23.060 in the United States, well over half of all the corruption is associated with the drug 168 00:21:23.060 --> 00:21:24.060 war. 169 00:21:24.060 --> 00:21:30.860 I mean, it was supposed to clean things up, but it's actually made things much worse. 170 00:21:30.860 --> 00:21:38.420 In terms of crime, again, the idea was if people didn't have access to these intoxicants, 171 00:21:38.420 --> 00:21:46.820 And they wouldn't go out and commit crimes. And early surveys of prisoners in state prisons 172 00:21:46.820 --> 00:21:50.660 and in federal prisons, they would go in and ask them, you know, why did you commit this 173 00:21:50.660 --> 00:21:56.640 crime? Why did you rob that house? Why did you kill that person? Was it the alcohol? 174 00:21:56.640 --> 00:22:02.860 Was it the drugs? And they'd say, yeah, it was the alcohol. It was the alcohol's fault. 175 00:22:02.860 --> 00:22:10.500 I wouldn't have done it myself. And so there's been this myth perpetuated that people on 176 00:22:10.500 --> 00:22:18.580 drugs commit a lot of crimes. And that's really not true. That's a really insignificant 177 00:22:18.580 --> 00:22:25.140 amount of crime. It does happen, but it's not a significant source of crime. What is 178 00:22:25.140 --> 00:22:30.900 a significant source of crime is the drug trade itself. It is the secondary effects, 179 00:22:30.900 --> 00:22:37.900 Drive-by Shootings, gangs. Where do gangs come from? Never had gangs until Prohibition. 180 00:22:39.420 --> 00:22:46.420 And gangs basically are economic organizations that are designed to profit from controlling 181 00:22:47.380 --> 00:22:54.380 the retail drug trade in a certain area. And gangs usually fight because they're fighting 182 00:22:54.380 --> 00:23:05.380 fighting for territory. The first gangs in the United States really, the significant 183 00:23:05.380 --> 00:23:13.180 type of gangs started during alcohol prohibition. They were running retail alcohol around urban 184 00:23:13.180 --> 00:23:22.140 areas. And children, of course, with drug prohibition, the penalties on children, those 185 00:23:22.140 --> 00:23:32.700 for those who are 18 and younger, for being in the drug trade as runners or dealers, the 186 00:23:32.700 --> 00:23:37.020 little roles that they play in the drug trade, the reason that they're brought into the drug 187 00:23:37.020 --> 00:23:42.380 trade is because the penalties on them are so much lower than anybody over 18, 17, 18 188 00:23:42.380 --> 00:23:43.380 and above. 189 00:23:43.380 --> 00:23:49.980 If you get caught and you're an adult, you know, it's like 10 years. 190 00:23:49.980 --> 00:23:56.780 But if you're 15 or 14, they might just let you end up letting you go. 191 00:23:56.780 --> 00:24:02.700 So that encourages people to bring children into the drug trade. 192 00:24:02.700 --> 00:24:09.660 So on all those counts and many others, I think, drug prohibition actually makes things 193 00:24:09.660 --> 00:24:16.260 much worse in terms of all of the things that drug prohibition is supposed to help us with. 194 00:24:16.260 --> 00:24:22.060 It's supposed to make us healthier, and it doesn't. 195 00:24:22.060 --> 00:24:25.540 It's supposed to make it safer, and it doesn't. 196 00:24:25.540 --> 00:24:34.780 It's supposed to be good for society, good for the political system, good for the legal 197 00:24:34.780 --> 00:24:37.020 system. 198 00:24:37.020 --> 00:24:38.380 It's killing our legal system. 199 00:24:38.380 --> 00:24:40.560 It's destroying our legal system. 200 00:24:40.560 --> 00:24:46.360 Our legal system now is so geared to stopping the drug trade that we've basically given 201 00:24:46.360 --> 00:24:56.000 away many of our constitutional rights, have been given away to make it easier for drug 202 00:24:56.000 --> 00:25:01.940 law enforcement to track down drug dealers and drug consumers. 203 00:25:01.940 --> 00:25:07.800 So they can get away with things that are not really constitutional. 204 00:25:07.800 --> 00:25:13.760 They allow them to go beyond search and seizure, privacy. 205 00:25:13.760 --> 00:25:19.740 All of those constitutional guarantees that is supposed to be in our legal systems have 206 00:25:19.740 --> 00:25:23.880 been set aside for the drug war. 207 00:25:23.880 --> 00:25:29.340 The fact that the military is involved in the drug war also goes against a long-standing 208 00:25:29.340 --> 00:25:37.240 legal tradition going back before the founding of this country that prohibits the military 209 00:25:37.240 --> 00:25:42.920 from engaging in local police action. 210 00:25:42.920 --> 00:25:50.200 So we have given up a lot and gotten nothing in return. 211 00:25:50.200 --> 00:25:54.880 All that aside, so what? 212 00:25:54.880 --> 00:25:59.960 What's your alternative? 213 00:25:59.960 --> 00:26:09.040 Most people believe that if we legalize drugs, all we would get is more of the same. 214 00:26:09.040 --> 00:26:16.840 We get more drug abuse, we get more drug abuse, we get more drug taking, more drug overdoses, 215 00:26:16.840 --> 00:26:24.120 more drug crime, more corruption of voting, of politicals, of politicians, hard to imagine 216 00:26:24.120 --> 00:26:27.200 that, but it's possible. 217 00:26:27.200 --> 00:26:33.800 And you know what? A lot of people have in their mind the economist tool of supply and 218 00:26:33.800 --> 00:26:42.800 demand. It's funny, you know, despite my best efforts to teach supply and demand, a 219 00:26:42.800 --> 00:26:47.320 lot of people just don't get it, and yet when it comes to something like this, everybody 220 00:26:47.320 --> 00:26:54.680 just intuitively knows it, which is why I often would drop all the graphical analysis 221 00:26:54.680 --> 00:27:09.280 Supply and demand says, if price goes up, quantity goes up along the horizontal axis. 222 00:27:09.280 --> 00:27:23.720 The law of demand simply says that if price is high, quantity will be low, it's almost 223 00:27:23.720 --> 00:27:47.960 If the price is high, like under prohibition, the quantity will be low. Whereas if the price 224 00:27:47.960 --> 00:28:10.960 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. 225 00:28:10.960 --> 00:28:16.960 But that's not necessarily true. 226 00:28:16.960 --> 00:28:21.960 Economists place a major emphasis on prices. 227 00:28:21.960 --> 00:28:26.960 Prices are the information of society, the economic information of society. 228 00:28:26.960 --> 00:28:28.960 They direct resources. 229 00:28:28.960 --> 00:28:34.960 They encourage people into certain professions and out of other professions. 230 00:28:34.960 --> 00:28:44.000 But with prohibition, all of those other things that we hold constant change when you go from 231 00:28:44.000 --> 00:28:45.600 prohibition to legalization. 232 00:28:45.600 --> 00:28:52.920 In other words, everything we know about the market for illegal drugs would not be true 233 00:28:52.920 --> 00:28:55.960 about the legal market for drugs. 234 00:28:55.960 --> 00:29:02.920 And so whereas in most instances, a price change has a lot of meaning. 235 00:29:02.920 --> 00:29:10.280 As a matter of fact, let's just say that the legislature increases the price of gasoline 236 00:29:10.280 --> 00:29:17.420 by 50 cents in order to cover the budget shortfall, so-called budget shortfall in Alabama. 237 00:29:17.420 --> 00:29:21.240 So the price of gasoline goes up 50 percent. 238 00:29:21.240 --> 00:29:23.720 Now what's going to change? 239 00:29:23.720 --> 00:29:29.800 Well, the price is going to go up, the quantity is going to go down, but gasoline is going 240 00:29:29.800 --> 00:29:36.800 Freedom is going to be the same. Gas stations are going to be the same. You're still going to be using pumps. 241 00:29:36.800 --> 00:29:51.800 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. 242 00:29:51.800 --> 00:30:00.800 Freedom is better. The market is better. The free market. When we look at illegal drugs, we're looking at the illegal market. 243 00:30:00.800 --> 00:30:15.800 Now, how would the market control the product? Well, markets control products. They want safe products. They want their products to be competitive. 244 00:30:15.800 --> 00:30:20.800 And what do we see in the legal market for drugs? 245 00:30:20.800 --> 00:30:24.800 Well, we see a lot of stability and we see some change. 246 00:30:24.800 --> 00:30:32.800 If we look at over time, what kind of changes have we seen in the major legal markets? 247 00:30:32.800 --> 00:30:40.800 Alcohol? 50 years ago, just about everybody drank whiskey. 248 00:30:40.800 --> 00:30:50.800 That's changed where a lot more people drink beer. Now people are drinking wine because it's healthy for you. 249 00:30:50.800 --> 00:30:55.800 Well, some people are drinking wine because it's healthy for you. 250 00:30:55.800 --> 00:31:03.800 Now there's light beer. Now most beer is light beer. 251 00:31:03.800 --> 00:31:07.800 I better hurry. 252 00:31:07.800 --> 00:31:12.800 And now there's, of course, no alcohol beer. You can get beer without alcohol in it. 253 00:31:12.800 --> 00:31:20.800 Cigarettes, 50 years ago, everybody smoked. Everybody smoked. And they smoked filterless cigarettes. 254 00:31:20.800 --> 00:31:28.800 They smoked them inside. You could even smoke in the hospital. 255 00:31:28.800 --> 00:31:35.480 Now, of course, fewer people are smoking, almost all cigarettes are filtered, and the 256 00:31:35.480 --> 00:31:38.720 majority of sales are for light cigarettes. 257 00:31:38.720 --> 00:31:45.400 And we can go on and look at other products, and we would see similar things, where the 258 00:31:45.400 --> 00:31:50.880 products have become safer, aspirin, pain relievers, all that kind of stuff, it's gotten 259 00:31:50.880 --> 00:31:56.920 cheaper, it's gotten better, it's gotten safer, more choices, and so on. 260 00:31:56.920 --> 00:32:01.080 That's the kind of thing you see in legal markets. 261 00:32:01.080 --> 00:32:09.440 There's really not a big push to be, to have the Coca-Cola with the most possible caffeine 262 00:32:09.440 --> 00:32:11.880 in it. 263 00:32:11.880 --> 00:32:15.920 There's nobody out there advertising, hey, we've got five times the amount of caffeine 264 00:32:15.920 --> 00:32:17.960 as regular Coca-Cola. 265 00:32:17.960 --> 00:32:21.360 There's a little bit of that, but not that much. 266 00:32:21.360 --> 00:32:43.360 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. 267 00:32:43.360 --> 00:32:50.860 There's no reason to suspect that the market for marijuana, cocaine and heroin wouldn't 268 00:32:50.860 --> 00:32:51.860 be the same thing. 269 00:32:51.860 --> 00:32:57.000 As a matter of fact, if we went back in time to when all those products were legally available, 270 00:32:57.000 --> 00:33:04.920 where a 9-year-old girl could walk into a pharmacy and pick up a bottle of heroin pills, 271 00:33:04.920 --> 00:33:15.580 The Bayer Pharmaceutical Company produced heroin pills that were sold over the counter. 272 00:33:15.580 --> 00:33:19.160 You didn't even need a prescription. 273 00:33:19.160 --> 00:33:21.840 And they were very useful products. 274 00:33:21.840 --> 00:33:28.680 They were even given to little babies, little babies in the crib, because they were very 275 00:33:28.680 --> 00:33:37.080 very low potency, and women used them as well. But they were very effective and they also 276 00:33:37.080 --> 00:33:46.480 worked here for dysentery. So the market has ways of controlling products. Competition is 277 00:33:46.480 --> 00:33:54.080 one of them. And of course, the legal system backs that up. Controlling the consumer. How 278 00:33:54.080 --> 00:33:58.180 does the market control consumers? Well, the market does a pretty good job of controlling 279 00:33:58.180 --> 00:34:04.580 on Consumers. People who use drugs don't necessarily have any problem in the marketplace, but people 280 00:34:04.580 --> 00:34:12.220 who abuse drugs do. People who abuse drugs don't get ahead in life unless you're making 281 00:34:12.220 --> 00:34:18.300 like Cheech and Chong movies or something like that. Not a whole lot of really successful 282 00:34:18.300 --> 00:34:25.340 people out there just blowing it out night after night. After college, you've got to 283 00:34:25.340 --> 00:34:55.340 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, 284 00:34:55.340 --> 00:35:02.900 themselves, not necessarily that they don't do any drugs, but they don't get out of control, 285 00:35:02.900 --> 00:35:10.760 those are the people that get ahead. The unemployment rate for drug users is much higher, wage levels 286 00:35:10.760 --> 00:35:17.820 are much lower, all of those sorts of things that drug users are more likely to lose their 287 00:35:17.820 --> 00:35:27.900 Job. So the market has a way of controlling for that. Unfortunately, it's kind of watered 288 00:35:27.900 --> 00:35:35.180 down because the government has welfare programs, unemployment insurance, things of that nature. 289 00:35:35.180 --> 00:35:43.020 The social safety net means that you can behave irresponsibly and get away with it. You can 290 00:35:43.020 --> 00:35:47.780 go to the hospital, you can get welfare checks, you can get unemployment benefits from the 291 00:35:47.780 --> 00:35:56.660 The Market's ability to control people is greatly reduced because of the social safety 292 00:35:56.660 --> 00:36:03.500 net where it doesn't matter how abhorrent your behavior is, how ridiculously irresponsible 293 00:36:03.500 --> 00:36:07.900 it is, you're still going to get free medical care, you're still going to get food, clothing 294 00:36:07.900 --> 00:36:17.580 and shelter. You can even get social security benefits, all sorts of things nowadays. Paid 295 00:36:17.580 --> 00:36:26.060 So that's an area where the market actually does a very good job of controlling people's 296 00:36:26.060 --> 00:36:38.780 behavior within acceptable levels but where the government has sort of subverted that process. 297 00:36:38.780 --> 00:36:41.540 Controlling the marketplace itself. 298 00:36:41.540 --> 00:36:46.820 Controlling the marketplace itself, we have legal institutions, not the congressional 299 00:36:46.820 --> 00:36:58.020 type laws, but just the basic laws of society, like negligence. If a business owner is negligent 300 00:36:58.020 --> 00:37:05.860 in dealing with a consumer, they can be sued. If a business is fraudulent with a consumer, 301 00:37:05.860 --> 00:37:10.260 they can be sued. Not that you just get your money back, but you get penalized on top of 302 00:37:10.260 --> 00:37:25.580 So there's a lot of ways through the legal process that would prevent firms, companies 303 00:37:25.580 --> 00:37:33.940 producing products from hurting people, from harming people, from lying to frauding people. 304 00:37:33.940 --> 00:37:43.580 All of those things would remain in place even if we legalized drugs. 305 00:37:43.580 --> 00:37:48.980 And just because I said the government has no role in this doesn't mean there wouldn't 306 00:37:48.980 --> 00:37:51.580 be regulating behavior. 307 00:37:51.580 --> 00:37:58.140 You know, if you go to Kroger's, you have to have shoes on. 308 00:37:58.140 --> 00:38:08.380 If you go to the bank, you're not allowed to smoke cigarettes. If you're driving a truck 309 00:38:08.380 --> 00:38:12.920 for the city of Auburn, or if you're driving a bus for the city of Auburn, if you're driving 310 00:38:12.920 --> 00:38:22.820 a truck for a transporting company, if you're driving a ship for commercial fishing purposes, 311 00:38:22.820 --> 00:38:26.620 you're not allowed to drink. The company tells you you're not allowed to drink. If you're 312 00:38:26.620 --> 00:38:32.700 If you fly an airplane for Delta, you're not allowed to drink or take drugs or anything. 313 00:38:32.700 --> 00:38:38.500 And they'll fire you if you do. 314 00:38:38.500 --> 00:38:43.460 There's nothing in what I've said that's going to suggest that if we legalize drugs, 315 00:38:43.460 --> 00:38:49.380 it would be perfectly alright to come into class and light up a joint. 316 00:38:49.380 --> 00:38:55.480 Auburn University would still have the authority to say, you can't smoke marijuana in class. 317 00:38:55.480 --> 00:39:06.280 You couldn't smoke marijuana in Kroger's. So institutions, private organizations can 318 00:39:06.280 --> 00:39:14.680 put all sorts of requirements on that you do obey and that you would obey. They don't 319 00:39:14.680 --> 00:39:20.520 put up with anything like that. There's not just like, you know, in Kroger's it's not 320 00:39:20.520 --> 00:39:26.240 Not like a lot of people go in there without shoes and they only catch a few of them. They 321 00:39:26.240 --> 00:39:32.820 catch everyone. They kick everyone out. Everything they do is 100% enforcement. It's not like 322 00:39:32.820 --> 00:39:38.680 the drug war where, you know, you could smoke marijuana for two or three years. And as doped 323 00:39:38.680 --> 00:39:47.680 up as you are, you may never have had any chance of really getting caught. In the marketplace, 324 00:39:47.680 --> 00:39:54.680 100% all the time, basically. Not 100% but pretty darn close. 325 00:39:55.240 --> 00:40:02.240 Would kids actually be sold drugs in the marketplace? Well, possibly. It's unlikely that Winn-Dixie 326 00:40:04.300 --> 00:40:11.300 Pharmacy is going to be selling hard drugs to little kids. It may have been at one time 327 00:40:11.300 --> 00:40:18.540 It may have been, at one time, it would be okay to send your little kid down to the pharmacy, 328 00:40:18.540 --> 00:40:23.860 the drug store, actually, back then, and pick up the prescriptions. 329 00:40:23.860 --> 00:40:27.420 But everybody knew everybody else in that situation. 330 00:40:27.420 --> 00:40:32.780 Nowadays, when that isn't the case, it's unlikely that a corporate pharmacy like CVS 331 00:40:32.780 --> 00:40:40.580 or Walgreens, something like that, is actually going to sell illegal hard drugs to little 332 00:40:40.580 --> 00:40:47.340 of Kids. Why is that the case? Why wouldn't they? If they were allowed to, why wouldn't 333 00:40:47.340 --> 00:40:54.340 they? No, it would increase their sales. You get sued for negligence. Now, if I walked 334 00:41:01.220 --> 00:41:08.220 into Winn-Dixie Pharmacy or CVS, let's say, and I went and bought, you know, an ounce 335 00:41:10.580 --> 00:41:19.500 A bottle of marijuana, a vial full of cocaine, and a bottle of heroin pills, let's say. 336 00:41:19.500 --> 00:41:28.220 And I used them, and I hurt myself trying to open a bottle of whiskey. 337 00:41:28.220 --> 00:41:32.220 I dropped it on my foot and cut it open. 338 00:41:32.220 --> 00:41:34.220 And so I sue for negligence. 339 00:41:34.220 --> 00:41:42.220 Well, I might not get, I might not have a great chance of winning that one, right? 340 00:41:42.220 --> 00:41:48.220 And if I did win, I wouldn't, it wouldn't be a big penalty put on CVS. 341 00:41:48.220 --> 00:41:59.220 But if a nine-year-old girl walks in and buys those things and goes out and hurts herself real bad, 342 00:41:59.220 --> 00:42:10.220 The type of negligence and the type of penalties that the legal system would impose, especially in Alabama, would be tremendous. 343 00:42:10.220 --> 00:42:19.220 That's gross negligence. It's actually illegal to engage in valid contracts between an adult and a minor. 344 00:42:19.220 --> 00:42:23.220 That's why minors can't buy a lot of things. 345 00:42:23.220 --> 00:42:40.220 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. 346 00:42:40.220 --> 00:42:48.220 Companies, corporations do not want to put themselves at tremendous legal and financial risks, especially in today's climate, 347 00:42:48.220 --> 00:43:11.220 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. 348 00:43:11.220 --> 00:43:18.460 So, yeah, little kids would be sold hard drugs in the market, but it would be very, very 349 00:43:18.460 --> 00:43:27.440 limited. And it still exists today, so it's not that much. We're not talking about a lot 350 00:43:27.440 --> 00:43:34.900 of kids being sold illegal drugs, but you have to admit that it's going to happen, but 351 00:43:34.900 --> 00:43:38.540 But it would be a lot less than we see today. 352 00:43:38.540 --> 00:43:45.740 And so it's kind of a trick question or a trick lecture where I say little kids should 353 00:43:45.740 --> 00:43:54.740 be sold hard drugs, but in reality the market would do a great deal to prevent all that. 354 00:43:54.740 --> 00:43:55.240 Thank you very much.