Interview granted by Professor Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize for Economics

ABSTRACT: According to the author, the victims of drugs can be divided into three categories: the consumers, the persons assaulted by the drug-addicts, and the rest of society who must pay to fight drugs. These last two categories are not direct victims of drugs, but victims of the measures taken to fight them. As in the case of alcohol, the damage caused by prohibition is greater than the damage of a legalization of drugs. The answer to the objections raised against legalization.

(Paris, "Le Figaro", Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 May 1990)

FIG-ECO - You have taken a stance in favour of the legalization of drugs in the United States. Why?

MILTON FRIEDMAN - First of all, I would like to specify that I do not under-evaluate the evils brought about by the use of drugs. These evils are enormous. I favour the battle against this scourge. But the methods used at present, police repression and even military repression, seem to lead to an effect contrary to the one hoped for. They are more harmful than drugs itself.

The victims of this plague can be divided into three categories: first of all, adult consumers, who are voluntary victims; then involuntary direct victims, the most tragical example of this category being the children who are born from parents that use that lethal drug called "crack". This second category includes all the victims of the assaults committed by drug addicts, including the inhabitants of ghettoes caught in the middle of wars between different gangs. The victims of the second kind, apart from the children of drug-addicts, are not victims of the use of drugs, but of the attempts to stop its use.

As far as the third category of victims is concerned, it is inclusive of society at large: the taxpayers, whose money is squandered in useless repressive actions against the drug traffic instead of being spent for normal police tasks which, it is a fact, are thus neglected.

In this third category we must include foreign societies such as the Colombian society, which the failure of the repressive action in the United States is contributing to destroy. If we were capable of obtaining the respect of the law on our territory, there would be no problems in Colombia, because the impulse to produce would disappear. Instead, our incapacity to obtain the respect of this prohibition stimulates this production we would want to eliminate, and the latter provokes violence and the destruction of society in Colombia.

In this classification only the first category, the children of drug-addicted parents, is made of people who are victims of drugs as such. The other two categories are made of victims of the repressive efforts which are being carried out. The total cost of this failure is by far higher than the advantages coming from the restrictions imposed on the use of drugs.

In the course of American history we have already experienced a similar episode, with the problem of alcohol in the twenties. At the time we had the same effects as drugs: crime, gangs, alcoholics who died, especially owing to the assumption of adulterated alcohol. Exactly like the main part of drug-related deaths today, which in comparison are numerically higher, are caused by the use of poor quality drugs, due to the fact that there is no control on the black market.

FIG-ECO - The main argument against legalization is the fact that it would supposedly encourage the demand of drugs. What is your answer to that?

MILTON FRIEDMAN - The answer consists of two levels. First of all, if there were to be an increase in the demand, it would concern conscientious adults, the voluntary victims, as I called them. I deplore this kind of addiction and I sincerely hope it will be possible to help there people to give it up. However, as far as I am concerned, I do not put the harm that a person who is responsible for his actions inflicts on himself, and the harm that this person or other persons inflict on others, at the same level.

In other words, the first level of the answer is of a fundamentally libertarian nature: the State has no right (or duty) to prevent an adult and responsible person to consume drugs, any more than this state forbids rope-dancing and cigarettes with the pretext that they are dangerous pleasures.

However, it is extremely difficult to make people understand this libertarian perspective in the public debate. For example, there are many conservatives, whose political opinions are often similar to my own, who do not accept the libertarian point of view at all. They acknowledge that the State has a role in the constitution and the protection of individual values. Therefore they do not embrace the libertarian argument in favour of legalization. It is true, nonetheless, that many of them in the end have supported this point of view, having acknowledged the failure of the war against drugs, and this was the second empirical argument that convinced them.

We could of course put an end to the drug traffic if we were willing to use the methods that are used in some countries: death penalty for drug traffickers or even for persons suspected of being involved in the drug traffic. We are obviously not willing to resort to such methods. Nonetheless, the kind of methods we are using leads more and more to actions which are contrary to the fundamental liberties, for example the seizure of goods before a conviction, the violation of the laws on protection of the domicile and searches.

Prohibition had lead to a weakening of the respect of the law, and the war on drugs has the same consequences. The main beneficiaries of a depenalization would be the underprivileged classes of the United States, in that they are at present the main victims of this war. Do people fully realize the reasons for which so many youths from these underprivilged classes are involved in the drug traffic? Because the penal laws are less severe for them as for adults. The drug traffickers use them to cover themselves up.

FIG-ECO - The opponents of the legalization base their objections first of all on the fear of an explosion in demand. Are you not underestimating this possibility?

MILTON FRIEDMAN - There are no doubts that legalization, causing the prices to drop, would engender an increase in the demand, but the main question here is: to what extent? In this field the estimates are very vague. Both those of the opposers and mine. Holland, which completely legalized the use of marijuana, seems to have experienced a drop in the demand, instead of an increase, in people below twenty. On the opposers' part, the most documented article I read was an article by Professor James Wilson in the Commentary magazine: the article states that the increase in the demand will be enormous. But I do not think this goes beyond mere suppositions. The opposers' position restricts itself to the simple acceptance of the evident damage created by prohibition, in the fear that legalization could create an even greater damage. If this fear were based on solid elements of application, it could be convincing.

The cost of prohibition

For the time being, however, these are statements and not evidence. In any case, before 1914, drugs were free in the United States. It is this way, among other things, that the world-known Coca-Cola owed its name to the fact that in the beginning it contained cocaine. But the drug addiction rate at the time was, according to the estimates, the same as today's. On the other hand, the most dangerous substance for the people consuming it is tobacco, and not drugs. In the United States tobacco-related deaths are estimated to be over 300,000 each year.

Tobacco, unlike alcohol, creates a danger for the consumer and not for other people. And we saw how an increased awareness of these damages has lead to a consistent drop in its use. Why should the same thing not happen for drugs? The uncertainty as to the effects legalization would have on the demand therefore remains an open question. But if it is hard to foresee the cost of legalization, we all known about the enormous cost of the failure of repression. I cannot conceive of justifying the latter by evoking the risk of another, hypothetical risk.

FIG-ECO - Doesn't legalizing drugs also mean authorizing the producers to make a fortune by manufacturing and selling poison?

MILTON FRIEDMAN - Judging by the number of deaths they cause, alcohol and tobacco deserve to be called poisons far more than drugs do. But does this obsevation lead to consider French wine producers as criminals? Moreover, it does not seem that marijuana has ever killed anyone. On the contrary, it is a highly effective medicine for the treatment of glaucoma, for example, or to prevent the side effects of chemotherapy. But the use of drugs makes any use of marijuana illegal. In this case, the question is: who is committing a criminal act? The persons who are dealing the marijuana or the people who are banning its use?

FIG-ECO - What do you think about a much more damgerous drug such as crack?

MILTON FRIEDMAN - According to me, the diffusion of this drug is directly linked to prohibition itself. Prohibition has made cocaine extremely expensive. So they mixed it with other poor-quality products to be able to lower the price; this is the origin of "crack". In a more general sense, prohibition has created a permanent stimulus to produce surrogate chemical products which are not included in the list of banned products.

If a complete access of drugs to the United States were achieved, the country would be submerged with substitute products produced within our borders, and since these products would be of a lower quality, the problem would be aggravated instead of reduced. Marijuana is another fitting example. Marijuana is such a heavy product that it was quite easy to prevent its entering the United States. Prices raised, and this led drug addicts to buy other drugs, and at the same time lead to an increase in the production of marijuana in the country. We have undoubtedly become the most important marijuana producers of the world, and this plant is certainly the second or the third most diffused cultivation in California, according to the seasons and the harvests.

I was told that its quality is inferior to the old import product.

FIG-ECO - Consumers are putting other people's lives at stake too. Which, then, are the effects of a legalization?

MILTON FRIEDMAN - It is the case, above all, of children born from parents that consume crack. The situation is particularly tragical because there seems to be no effective solution. But this is the situation we are all well acquainted to now. If drugs were legalized, there could be other effects on third parties, in that the consumers would probably proselytize. We are thus confronted with a well-known argument of the debate on freedom of expression. Marx's "Capital" has brought to death many more people than drugs could ever kill. But this does not imply that the diffusion of this work should be banned.

As far as other effects on third parties are concerned, it includes all the violences committed against them, ranging from drunk behaviours to crimes committed to get the money to purchase drugs, and these actions are already punished by the existing penal laws.

Interview reported by Robert Lozada