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Milton Friedman on Drugs and prohibition

Drug prohibition is one of the most important factors that have combined to reduce our inner cities to their present state. The crowded inner cities have a comparative advantage for selling drugs. Although most customers do not live in the inner cities, most sellers do. Young boys and girls view the swaggering, affluent drug dealers as role models. Compared with the returns from a traditional career of study and hard work, returns from dealing drugs are tempting to young and old alike. … Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one.

Context. From a January 1998 New York Times article, written twenty-five years after President Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” listing the harms he attributes to drug prohibition. Under the heading “Destruction of Inner Cities.” The ellipsis marks one sentence left out: that the young are not deterred by the bullets that fly in disputes between drug dealers, bullets that fly only because dealing drugs is illegal.

It’s Time to End the War on Drugs
Column, 1998, Hoover Digest, 1998, no. 2; first published in The New York Times, January 11, 1998, as “There’s No Justice in the War on Drugs.”
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Milton Friedman, “It’s Time to End the War on Drugs” (Hoover Digest, 1998, no. 2; first published in The New York Times, January 11, 1998, as “There’s No Justice in the War on Drugs.”, 1998). https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/drug-prohibition-destroys-inner-cities-1998

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He also said

  1. Prohibition was repealed in 1933 when I was twenty-one years old, so I was a teenager during most of Prohibition. Alcohol was readily available. Bootlegging was common. Any idea that alcohol prohibition was keeping people from drinking was absurd. There were speakeasies all over the place. But more than that. We had this spectacle of Al Capone, of the hijackings, of the gang wars.

    Context. From a television interview about the war on drugs. Asked what early on shaped his belief that the drug laws may not be working, Friedman has said he does not recall ever favouring the prohibition of either alcohol or drugs.

    America’s Drug Forum interview
    Interview, 1991, With Randy Paige, taped at the International Conference on Drug Policy Reform, Washington, November 1991; reprinted as Ch. 8 “On Liberty and Drugs” in Friedman & Szasz on Liberty and Drugs, ed. Arnold S. Trebach and Kevin B. Zeese (Drug Policy Foundation Press, 1992), p. 68
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  2. I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there’s a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug, being able to get drugs for which they’re sure of the quality.

    Context. The opening exchange of a television interview about the war on drugs. The interviewer has asked how Friedman sees America changing for the better if drugs were legalized.

    America’s Drug Forum interview
    Interview, 1991, With Randy Paige, taped at the International Conference on Drug Policy Reform, Washington, November 1991; reprinted as Ch. 8 “On Liberty and Drugs” in Friedman & Szasz on Liberty and Drugs, ed. Arnold S. Trebach and Kevin B. Zeese (Drug Policy Foundation Press, 1992), p. 65
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  3. Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and improve law enforcement. It is hard to conceive of any other single measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order.

    Context. From Tyranny of the Status Quo (1984), written with Rose D. Friedman, in the chapter on crime, after arguing that marijuana prohibition repeats the pattern of alcohol Prohibition: growers post armed guards and gun battles follow, law enforcement personnel in some areas wink at the growers, and the government sprays the poison paraquat on marijuana fields. The authors conclude that prohibiting drugs does more harm, to users and to everyone else, than the drugs themselves.

    Tyranny of the Status Quo
    Book, 1984, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Ch. 7 “Crime”, pp. 140–141 (with Rose D. Friedman)
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