When Smart People Make Mistakes: Economists Wage War On Drug Facts (Hudson Institute)

On February 9, former Secretary of State George Schultz proposed decriminalizing drugs as a strategy superior to prohibition. Specifically, he argued that young peoples’ fear of arrest for using drugs such as marijuana deters them from seeking treatment. The facts are to the contrary.Arrests for drug use are in fact statistically rare (about one arrest for every 34,000 marijuana joints smoked), while incarceration for drug use is even more rare. As the RAND Corporation has argued, “in no Western country is a user at much risk of being criminally penalized for using marijuana.” The argument holds for use of other illicit drugs, as well.In fact, decriminalization decreases the incentives for people to seek and achieve recovery because the criminal justice system, operating through drug courts, is a leading means of getting drug users into treatment as an alternative to incarceration. Decriminalization, perversely, removes the motive and the very instrumentality of achieving sanctioned, supervised drug treatment.

http://www.eurasiareview.com/25022016-when-smart-people-make-mistakes-economists-wage-war-on-drug-facts-analysis/