ABSTRACT: Lester C. Thurow, Nobel Prizewinner for economics, denounces in an article published in the Italian economic daily "Il Sole 24 Ore", of June 1988 how those who wage war on drugs ignore economic theory and its laws.

("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)

Those who are waging the war against drugs do not understand the economic theory, the history, nor even the culture of foreign peoples.

Their ignorance is colossal in the field of economics. Drug dealers find themselves facing what is known in economists' jargon as "an inelastic curve of demand". In simple words this means that if the suppliers suffer a 10% reduction, prices rise by a higher percentage, guaranteeing the seller higher profits than those on which he relied before the reduction.

If what America is aiming to do is to deprive criminals of the enormous profits they derive from drug dealing, economic theory and history together demonstrate that the only way is legalisation. When, for example, at the end of Prohibition, the sale of alcoholic beverages was legalised, criminals abandoned the clandestine production of this product, because the possibility of generating the profits that the government effort to prevent the sale of such products had made possible in the past, no longer existed.

From the point of view of a foreign country like Pakistan, where I previously worked as a developmental economist, the American anti-drug strategy turns out to be merely arrogant. In many places, native peasant families have been cultivating marijuana, coca or opium for hundreds of years, and now, suddenly, they are ordered not to.

The Americans would never accept this kind of a request. Can we really suppose that a foreign government might ask them to stop cultivating tobacco (perhaps even set fire to the crops of the growers) for the sake of public health?