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Milton Friedman on Drugs and prohibition

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. That's literally true.
America's Drug Forum interview
Interview, 1991, One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
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  1. You can rigidly enforce only those laws that most people believe to be good laws, that is, laws that proscribe actions that they would avoid even in the absence of laws. When laws render illegal actions that many or most people regard as moral and proper, they can be enforced only by brute force. Speed laws are an obvious example; alcohol prohibition, a more dramatic one.
    Why Government Is the Problem
    Journal article, 1993, Hoover Institution Press, Essays in Public Policy no. 39, p. 2
    Checked against the sourceRead the original
  2. We have as many criminals as we have because we have as many laws to break as we have. You take the situation in the United States. We have two million people in prison, four million people who are under parole or under supervision. Why? Because of our mistaken attempt to control what people put in their bodies. Prohibition of so-called drugs, of illegal drugs, is a major reason for all of those prisons. And those are victimless crimes, which should not be crimes.
    Commanding Heights: Milton Friedman interview
    Interview, 2000, PBS, “Where We Stand Today,” interview conducted October 1, 2000
    Checked against the sourceRead the transcript
  3. Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement.
    An Economist's Protest: Columns in Political Economy
    Book, 1966, p. 161
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