Winning the War on Drugs

As Federal spending towards drug-use prevention increases, more and more people are using illicit drugs.  It is becoming blatantly obvious that higher Federal spending will not solve the drug “problem”.  This is because the Federal Government has been trying to tackle the wrong player.  This should not be a war against drugs, but a war against the drug cartels in Mexico, which are spreading violence and targeting innocent people during their campaigns of terror.  Once we understand what the real threat is, we can begin to deduct methods of successfully fighting this “war”.  The objective is, logically, to break the backs of the cartels, to restore peace to the affected areas of Mexico, Central America and South America.  The only way of doing this is by putting them out of business, and the only way to put them out of business is to take away their monopoly on the production and distribution of illicit drugs.

So, how do you disallow them from monopolizing the drug market?  Well, the drug market was handed to them on a silver platter by the illegalization of drugs.  Competition finds it difficult to exist because of the punitive drug laws which make it very costly to operate.  As a result, competing drug operations are oftentimes small, and most of the time ultimately found and stopped.  Mexican drug cartels are heavily favored by the increasingly draconian anti-drug laws within the United States, making the cartels the sole suppliers of the drugs people are looking for.  And, that demand is not withering away.  Despite a huge decrease in aggregate demand for drugs in the early 1980s, that demand has slowly been on the rise again—despite a rapid increase in federal spending on the drug war.  It is, in other words, becoming increasingly apparent that it is impossible to extinguish demand (and, arguably, morally unviable, given that the government is restricting people’s abilities to choose what they want to consume and what they don’t want to consume).

Coming to the conclusion that extinguishing demand is impossible, and that there will always be drugs—including drug producers and drug consumers—we can see why the true enemy are the cartels and not the drugs.  When it comes to the cartels, we are no longer just talking about the drug market, but also about violence, death and destruction.  We are talking about the destabilization of an entire country and the guarantee of “money-politics” (corruption) in the federal jurisdiction that is left.  The level of decentralization of power in Mexico has allowed drug cartels to carve little states for themselves.  To that extent, the true objective of the drug cartels is not to supply drugs as efficiently as possible for the sake of just accumulating wealth, but to supply drugs to fund their political machinations.  That is why these drug cartels are the danger, and not the drugs they produce and sell.

Mexico has been playing with the idea of drug legalization, but unfortunately it would most likely be largely ineffectual.  There is no protection of property rights in Mexico.  There is no reason to assume that the drug cartels would not protect their monopoly by cajoling competitors to enter another market.  In other words, there is nothing stopping the drug cartels from using force (or violence) to guarantee their cartelization of the market.  If the federal and state police were strong enough, or clean enough, to protect private property rights then there wouldn’t be so much rampant crime in areas of Mexico politically dominated by the drug cartels.  To be fair, drug legalization in Mexico would perhaps open up small drug markets to competition, where the use of violence is more difficult because the amount of suppliers would outstrip the volume of force available to protect a monopoly—this would include easily produced drugs such as marijuana.  But, in general, the cartel would only be ended after drugs were legalized in the United States.

Private property is protected by a very strong law enforcement agency in the United States.  It is difficult for the cartels to cross the border and enforce their monopoly through violence north of the Mexican border.  As a result, it is easier and cheaper for American suppliers to produce in the United States.  The immediate effect would be an increase in the supply of drugs, causing a decrease in price, which would drive Mexican cartelized suppliers out of business.  And, without a source of money, these cartels—which are in essence mafias—lose a lot of their power (because they can no longer fund the force they need to maintain it).

This is the purely economic aspect of the drug war, the Mexican drug cartels and the political instability in Mexico.  There are many other arguments against drug illegalization, including the ethics and morals of choice.  But, it is becoming more and more obvious to all that increasing federal spending is not doing what it was purported to do, and that the solution does not lie in prohibition.  Indeed, history has shown that prohibition has only made the situation worse (such as with the prohibition of alcohol).  The only sensible solution is the free market, the economics of choice and liberty.