Drug laws are the only reason crack, fentanyl, and “intoxicating hemp derivatives” exist in place of the safer, cleaner natural substances they replace. Since an appeals court long ago ruled that Scheduling is a political not scientific process, DEA is just the hired muscle working to protect cartel profits.
According to Nobel-winning conservative economist Milton Friedman, adviser to both Reagan and Thatcher, it is the government which is being immoral by prosecuting a War on Drugs: “the effect of making drugs criminal is to drive people from mild drugs to strong drugs,” he said.
“It’s a moral problem that the government is going around killing 10,000 people [excess homicides due to prohibition]. It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.”
Thirty-five years ago Friedman said “nothing scares me about the notion of drugs being legal. What scares me is the notion of continuing on the path we’re on now, which will destroy our free society, making it an uncivilized place.”
He was prescient: subsequently the War on Drugs created today’s modern surveillance state with unconstitutionality at every turn, just to stop a safe nontoxic popular plant God gave us to grow easily virtually everywhere.
In addition to winning the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economics, Friedman served as a professor at the University of Chicago (1946–77) and was a Hoover Institution Fellow at Stanford University (1977–2006). He was awarded the National Medal of Science (1988) and he wrote several influential books, including “Capitalism and Freedom, A Monetary History of the United States 1867–1960.”
“If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel,” says Reagan’s economist Milton Friedman. “That’s literally true.”
“What do I mean by that? In an ordinary free market business—let’s take potatoes, beef, anything you want—there are thousands of importers and exporters. Anybody can go into the business.
But it’s very hard for a small person to go into the drug-importing business because our interdiction efforts essentially make it enormously costly.
So, the only people who can survive in that business are these large, Medellin cartel kind of people who have enough money so they can have fleets of airplanes, so they can have sophisticated methods, and so on.
By keeping goods out and by arresting, let’s say, local marijuana growers, the government keeps the price of these products high,” explains Friedman. “What more could a monopolist want? He’s got a government who makes it very hard for all his competitors and who keeps the price of his products high. It’s absolutely heaven.”
If drugs were legalized in the United States, says Friedman, “the one adverse effect that legalization might have is that there very likely would be more people taking drugs. That’s not by any means clear. But if you legalize it, you destroy the black market, the price of drugs will go down drastically.”
He qualifies this point by saying, “The child who’s shot in a slum in a pass-by shooting, in a random shooting, is an innocent victim in every respect of the term. The person who decides to take drugs for himself is not an innocent victim. He has chosen himself to be a victim. And I must say I have very much less sympathy for him. I do not think it is moral to impose such heavy costs on other people to protect people from their own choices.”
Drug use is a “moral problem,” says Friedman. “It’s a problem of the harm which government is doing. Look, I have estimated statistically that the prohibition of drugs produces on the average 10,000 additional homicides a year. It’s a moral problem that the government is going around killing 10,000 people. It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.”
Read much more at: https://www.cato.org/blog/milton-friedman-crack-would-never-have-existed-you-had-not-had-drug-prohibition