“No other single policy or law has results that are this terrible.”

Don’t miss this excellent piece on the drug war. A practical argument and not a moral harangue:

Let me start by setting one issue aside. This is the fundamental moral argument. You might think drugs ought to be legalized because there is a principled moral case against prohibition. It’s not hard to imagine such arguments. Anti-drug laws seem clearly paternalistic, for example.

But such moral arguments are unlikely to persuade many people. They will inevitably have just enough cracks and crevices that a really determined opponent can exploit, allowing them to construct stories that, at least to them, seem just about satisfying enough.

So in this post I will not be making a straightforwardly moral argument. I will be making a prudential argument. I will show that even if you think drug prohibition is not necessarily wrong, you should still want to end the war on drugs. The reason is simple: drug prohibition is a disaster of enormous proportions, playing out right under our own noses.

Well worth the read.

Nice chart too:

According to DOJ statistics, “nearly half (48%) of inmates in federal prison were serving time for drug offenses in 2011.” State numbers of course vary, but according to a recent WSJ article (“Have We Lost the War on Drugs?”) by two leading University of Chicago economists, the state figure averages 20%.

It also needs to be remembered that drug war enforcement artificially raises the price of drugs to ridiculous levels far above their actual value. This fuels crimes committed simply to obtain the money to buy them. If heroin and cocaine were for sale over the counter at pharmacies like they were before 1914, the rate of such drug related crimes would plummet dramatically.

A lot of people like to cite public opinion statistics, and if the Wall Street Journal’s poll is any indication, I would say the war on drugs is not especially popular:

Not that public opinion alone ought to be dispositive of government policy, but as M. Simon pointed out in an email, it might help people who are running for office to get elected.

If I was a Democrat I’d be running on legalization. I’d start on that in late summer to take peoples minds off ObamaCare. It has already started.