WaPo | Americans from all racial groups pursue narcotic-related leisure
activities, spending an estimated $100 billion a year on their illegal
drugs, according to a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. In this current period of fairly active military engagement, the nation’s defense budget is roughly $600 billion.
In other words, our culture of illegal drug use must be pretty
important to amount to a full sixth of our budget for national defense.
Yet
despite this evidence of far-reaching social acceptance of illegal drug
use, we continue to lock up nonviolent offenders. Ceasing this
hypocritical practice by releasing nonviolent offenders is morally
urgent. Yet this would be only a small step toward rectification of the
problem of mass incarceration. As the Web site FiveThirtyEight
recently reported, such a move would reduce our state and federal
prison populations by only about 14 percent. We would still be the
world’s leading imprisoner.
The further-reaching reason to legalize marijuana and decriminalize
other drugs flows from how the war on drugs drives violent crime, which
in turn pushes up incarceration and generates other negative social
outcomes. You just can’t move $100 billion worth of illegal product
without a lot of assault and homicide. This should not be a hard point
to see or make. Criminologists and law enforcement personnel
alike acknowledge that the most common examples of “criminogenic
trends” that generate increases in murder and other violent crimes are
gang- and drug-related homicides.
But there is also another, more subtle connection between the drug war and violence, pinpointed by economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi
. As they argue, above-average homicide rates will result from low
rates of successful investigation and prosecution of homicide cases. If
you live in an environment where you know that someone can shoot you
with impunity, you are much more likely to be ready to shoot to kill at
the first sign of danger. When murder goes unpunished, it begets more
murder, partly for purposes of retaliation, partly because people are
emboldened by lawlessness, but also as a matter of preemption.
Unpunished murder makes everyone (including police) trigger-happy. Such
places operate according to the dictum that the best defense is a strong
offense.
