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By the mid-1980s, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and right-wing icon Milton Friedman calculated that it caused an additional ten thousand murders a year in the United States. That’s the equivalent of more than three 9/11s every single year.
Take the drug trade away from criminals, he calculates, and it would reduce the homicide rate in the United States by between 25 and 75 percent.19
The United States now imprisons more people14 for drug offenses than Western European nations imprison for all crimes combined.
I picture the look of judgment on the faces of people who stumble into this neighborhood by mistake. I can see them now. The people from stable families, who glance at addicts and shake their heads and say, “I would never do that to myself.” I feel an urge stop them and wave Gabor’s statistics in their face and say—Don’t you see? You wouldn’t do this to yourself because you don’t have to. You never had to learn to cope with more pain than you could bear. You might as well look at somebody who had their legs amputated in a car crash and declare: “Well, I would never have my legs cut off.” No.
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addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation.
Everyone agrees that cigarette smoking is one of the strongest addictions: it is ranked on pharmaceutical addictiveness scales alongside heroin and cocaine. It is also the deadliest.33 Smoking tobacco kills 65034 out of every hundred thousand people who use it, while using cocaine kills four.35 And
Ethan Nadelmann, one of the leading drug reformers in the United States, had explained: “People overdose because8 [under prohibition] they don’t know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent . . . Just imagine if every time you picked up a bottle of wine, you didn’t know whether it was 8 percent alcohol or 80 percent alcohol [or] if every time you took an aspirin, you didn’t know if it was 5 milligrams or 500 milligrams.”
The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug—and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs.
In the years since heroin was decriminalized in Portugal, its use has been halved there—while in the United States, where the drug war continues, it has doubled.
In the United States alone, legalizing drugs would save $41 billion a year currently spent on arresting, trying, and jailing users and sellers, according to a detailed study by the Cato Institute.
If the drugs were then taxed at a similar rate to alcohol and tobacco, they would raise an additional $46.7 billion32 a year, according to calculations by Professor Jeffrey Miron of the Department of Economics at Harvard University.
Legalization, then, wouldn’t be “adding a vice”—it14 would be “providing adults with a less harmful recreational alternative.” He even argued that, although he is against teenagers using marijuana, if they switch from drinking alcohol to smoking pot, “that’s a net positive.”
They wouldn’t have dreamed of telling parents their kids would be better off using marijuana rather than alcohol. Instead, they would explain: “Street dealers don’t check ID.”
The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.
If you are loved, you have a chance. For a hundred years we have been singing war songs about addicts. All along, we should have been singing love songs to them.
