Opinion: Prohibition fails every time it's tried

Drug abuse is stupid, but prohibition is evil.

The surest way to guarantee a market will become dominated by criminals who are willing to steal, kidnap, and murder to protect their market share is to criminalize a product.

You saw what happened with toilet paper and eggs when they became harder to buy. Why would you imagine the same economic factors don’t apply to substances you don’t want people to have access to?

Yet, toilet paper and eggs were temporary shortages, not permanent government-imposed shortages. No one believed toilet paper and eggs were going to have to become black-market items.

What do you think would have happened if everyone did believe this, or if government had actually banned those products? Soon the market for those items would have looked exactly like the market for politically incorrect chemicals -- it would have been violent and dangerous to the customers and innocent bystanders.

I understand -- you don’t think people should be “allowed” to abuse drugs. Maybe you don’t believe people should even have access to them at all, regardless of whether they will use them responsibly or abuse them. You might even be under the illusion that it’s not possible to responsibly use the drugs you want banned. You’d be demonstrably wrong, but it doesn’t matter.

Plus, in the case of drugs, prohibition guarantees the product gets smaller and easier to hide over time -- this means it is stronger.

It’s easier to transport a soda can-sized package containing thousands of doses of fentanyl than to hide the same number of doses of cocaine. So guess which one is safer to ship into enemy territory where your customers live? Guess which one it is then easier to fatally overdose on?

Drug prohibition has been the excuse used for most of the worst violations of our liberty since the end of the most violent parts of alcohol prohibition. Liberty isn’t a decorative trinket to be ripped off and thrown away just because it tolerates some things you don’t like. It is the foundation of any worthwhile civilization, to be protected from all who would chip away at it, no matter what you think it costs.

Do I want people to abuse drugs? No. I lost a daughter to someone who did. My personal pain doesn’t change reality. Prohibition not only fails every time it is tried, it makes things worse.

Prohibition is evil.

Farwell’s Kent McManigal champions liberty. Contact him at:

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