Today I’d like to ask that you take two and a half minutes out of your day to watch this video I found this weekend from Learn Liberty. It does a great job explaining some of the adverse affects of prohibitions. It’s one of the best videos I’ve seen on this topic.
To summarize:
- Prohibitions do not prevent drug use.
- Prohibitions do not eliminate the market for drugs.
- Prohibitions do increase violence and a risk of overdose.
- Prohibitions do increase homicides.
- Prohibitions do drive markets underground.
- Prohibitions do lead to lower (and more unpredictable) quality.
- Prohibitions do unnecessarily use law enforcement resources.
- Prohibitions do crowd prisons with nonviolent offenders.
There’s a reason the War on Drugs has been an utterly abysmal failure: prohibition doesn’t work. It’s time we understand that legislating social behavior has no impact on the prevention of that social behavior and start adopting policy that will protect consumers and their freedom.
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