News sources in Atlanta recently reported that a 16-year-old boy died from consuming what is known as “synthetic marijuana,” a combination of plants and chemicals intended to produce a high similar to the kind experienced by users of regular marijuana. Like clockwork, legislators have sprung into action, determined to draft legislation that will close every existing loophole related to the production and sale of synthetic cannabis, despite the inconvenient fact that Georgia already has such a ban in place. Yet many remain dumbfounded that “even though it’s banned in Georgia, state officials say drug manufacturers and sellers are doing whatever they can to skirt the law.” The presumption here is that additional legislative and police efforts targeting the drug market can prevent similar tragedies from happening in the future.
But the reality is that substance prohibition usually fails to solve the problems it seeks to address and actually only makes matters worse. This particular case serves as a good example of the substitution problems associated with prohibition: when a substance is pushed into the black market, producers and dealers tend to either lace the substance in question with substitutes or replace it with these alternative substances altogether. Because black markets don’t have legitimate legal status and thus lack the openness of other legal markets, the enforcement of quality standards is much more difficult. It should come as no surprise, then, when the substitutes introduced in the black market are even more dangerous than the substances they replace. Rather than using marijuana, a substance which does not cause death, users turn to riskier substitutes in an effort to circumvent prohibition.
And this dangerous substitution is not the only adverse effect of the drug war—substance prohibition also tends to create an unholy, unintended, and wholly uncoordinated alliance between moral do-gooders and the gangsters who thrive on this illegal trade. The increased gang power that comes from prohibition is on full display in Mexico, where large-scale violence has occured for the past half-decade.
Such is the reality of the War on Drugs, a policy with a long history of massive state expenditure with little to show for it. Yet the solution is not, as its proponents claim, simply a matter of pouring even more money and innocent lives into this hopeless adventure. There has been no better time to consider alternative policies, and Portugal’s highly successful mass-decriminalization effort is a proven model. Even if not every success of the Portuguese experience could be replicated in the United States (such as a decline even in the usage rate of some substances), at least the resources currently dedicated to drug policing could be reallocated to remedial medical or educational efforts that might also, conveniently, result in fewer deaths.
Finding a reasonable solution to the drug problem requires not more brute force, legislation, and policing, but a much smarter and more realistic approach that bears in mind what exactly drives the drug problem. Policy makers need to think carefully, not merely instinctively, about how a rational drug policy can actually save lives.
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