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Jeff Sessions Misunderstands Drugs and Crime
By David Boaz of Cato.
"Attorney General Jeff Sessions writes in Sunday’s Washington Post:
Drug trafficking is an inherently violent business. If
you want to collect a drug debt, you can’t, and don’t, file a lawsuit in
court. You collect it by the barrel of a gun.
Sessions correctly understands a major source of crime in the drug
distribution business: people with a complaint can’t go to court. But he
jumps to the conclusion that “Drug trafficking is an inherently violent
business.” This is a classic non sequitur. It’s hard to imagine that he
actually doesn’t understand the problem. He is, after all, a law school
graduate. How can he not understand the connection between drugs and
crime? Prohibitionists talk of “drug-related crime” and suggest that
drugs cause people to lose control and commit violence. Sessions gets
closer to the truth in the opening of his op-ed. He goes wrong with the
word “inherently.” Selling marijuana, cocaine, and heroin is not
“inherently” more violent than selling alcohol, tobacco, or potatoes.
Most “drug-related crime” is actually prohibition-related crime. The
drug laws raise the price of drugs and cause addicts to have to commit
crimes to pay for a habit that would be easily affordable if it were
legal. And more dramatically, as Sessions notes, rival drug dealers
murder each other–and innocent bystanders–in order to protect and expand
their markets.
We saw the same phenomenon during the prohibition of alcohol in the
1920s. Alcohol trafficking is not an inherently violent business. But
when you remove legal manufacturers, distributors, and bars from the
picture, and people still want alcohol, then the business becomes
criminal. As the figure at right (drawn from a Cato study of alcohol prohibition
and based on U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the
United States, Colonial Times to 1970 [Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1975], part 1, p. 414) shows, homicide rates climbed during
Prohibition, 1920-33, and fell every year after the repeal of
prohibition.
Tobacco has not (yet) been prohibited in the United States. But as a Cato study of the New York cigarette market showed in 2003, high taxes can have similar effects:
Over the decades, a series of studies by federal, state,
and city officials has found that high taxes have created a thriving
illegal market for cigarettes in the city. That market has diverted
billions of dollars from legitimate businesses and governments to
criminals.
Perhaps worse than the diversion of money has been the crime
associated with the city’s illegal cigarette market. Smalltime crooks
and organized crime have engaged in murder, kidnapping, and armed
robbery to earn and protect their illicit profits. Such crime has
exposed average citizens, such as truck drivers and retail store clerks,
to violence.
Again, to use Sessions’s language, cigarette trafficking is not an
inherently violent business. But drive it underground, and you will get
criminality and violence.
Sessions’s premise is wrong. Drug trafficking (meaning, in this case,
the trafficking of certain drugs made illegal under our controlled
substances laws) is not an inherently violent business. The distribution
of illegal substances tends to produce violence. Because Sessions’s
premise is wrong, his conclusion–a stepped-up drug war, with more
arrests, longer sentences, and more people in jail–is wrong. A better
course is outlined in the Cato Handbook for Policymakers."
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