Drug War Heresies Post #3

One more post and I'm done. Under the heading "Weighing the Alternatives," MacCoun and Reuter write, "[h]ow should the consequences of these regime changes be assessed? Such assessment is not simply a matter of adding up the gains and losses for three reasons." I'll skip to the second reason.

2. The advantages and disadvantages of regime changes will be unevenly distributed across segments of society. Changes that promise substantial reduction in illegal sales confer large net benefits on urban minority communities that suffer so much from black markets and their accompanying crime and disorder, even if the changes may also increase the level of drug use and addiction in those communities. For the middle class, the benefits of eliminating the black market may look very small in comparison to the costs of increased risk of drug involvement of other family members, particularly adolescent children.

I said something to this effect last week in my talk on the "hidden costs of drug prohibition." I noted that there were various things in place which made moving from our current regime difficult. For one, there are the unseen costs, which one can document. But two, there's the fact that enforcement has driven up prison populations and therefore disenfranchised voters who incur most of the costs associated with enforcement - like urban Blacks. In states where ex-cons cannot vote, this means a shift - most likely towards White, middle class - in the median voter and thus an enhanced preference for the current policy of zero tolerance. White middle class voters do not have to witness or endure the social costs created through extensive black markets and their accompanying violent ways, which are necessary ways of doing business in that context. And insofar as it deters usage, even marginally, it has the appearance of working and therefore acceptable.

Of course, it's also true that the men imprisoned may have already been people who weren't going to vote. Imprisonment has selected on men who are of low quality generally, measured in terms of education. The imprisonment risk selects upon Blacks males, who are young, and who don't have substantive education achievement (ie, high school dropouts). Those tend to be less likely to vote, so maybe one can overstate the magnitude of the shift. Nonetheless, it is a constraint for erecting change.