Milton Friedman on Drugs and prohibition
Prohibition was repealed in 1933 when I was twenty-one years old, so I was a teenager during most of Prohibition.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.
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Milton Friedman, “America’s Drug Forum 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. https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/teenager-during-prohibition-speakeasies-al-capone-gang-wars-1991
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He also said
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 DrugsColumn, 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.”Checked against the sourceRead the sourceYou know, the same thing happened under prohibition of alcohol as is happening now. Under prohibition of alcohol, deaths from alcohol poisoning, from poisoning by things that were mixed in with the bootleg alcohol, went up sharply. Similarly, under drug prohibition, deaths from overdose, from adulterations, from adulterated substances have gone up.
Context. From the opening exchange of a television interview about the war on drugs. Asked how he sees America changing for the better if drugs were legalized, Friedman has described fewer prisons and homicides, and addicts no longer turned into criminals, able to get drugs whose quality they can be sure of.
America’s Drug Forum interviewInterview, 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. 65Checked against the sourceFind the bookOn ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.
Context. From his Newsweek column of May 1, 1972, on President Nixon’s “war on drugs.” He quoted this passage himself in 1998, saying he had criticized that policy “on both moral and expediential grounds.”
Prohibition and DrugsColumn, 1972, Newsweek, May 1, 1972; quoted by Friedman himself in “It’s Time to End the War on Drugs,” Hoover Digest, 1998, no. 2 (first published in The New York Times, January 11, 1998).Checked against the sourceRead the source
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