Legalize Drugs Now

The exercise in public morality has failed.  Criminalizing drugs breeds a superclass of criminals and puts money in their hands.  Legalization would remove the incentive to deal, and the incentive to draw in new customers.  It would save $44 billion in enforcement costs.  Taxing would put an as yet unknown amount of money into the public coffers and out of the hands of criminals.

More importantly, it would free up law enforcement for more important things.  Two Washington policemen write about a new benefit (why haven’t I seen this before?) in de-criminalizing drugs.  Here Peter Moskos and Stanford Franklin talk about the policemen who are injured or killed while enforcing laws in a war in which they are outgunned and will never win.

There are better ways to deal with the societal ills that drug use engenders.  We may actually learn something about our society.  It can only be less expensive.