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Milton Friedman on Drugs and prohibition

What business do we have destroying and leading to the killing of thousands of people in Colombia because we cannot enforce our own laws? If we could enforce our laws against drugs, there would be no market for these drugs. You wouldn’t have Colombia in the state it’s in.

Context. From a television interview about the war on drugs. He has been listing the innocent victims of drug prohibition at home (people robbed by addicts, those killed in the drug wars, taxpayers paying for prisons), and ends the list with “the people of Colombia and Peru and so on.”

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), pp. 70–71
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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), pp. 70–71. https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/what-business-killing-thousands-colombia-cannot-enforce-laws-1991

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He also said

  1. I’m an economist, but the economics problem is strictly tertiary. It’s a moral problem. It’s a problem of the harm which government is doing. I have estimated statistically that the prohibition of drugs produces, on the average, ten thousand additional homicides a year. It’s a moral problem that the government is going around killing ten thousand people.

    Context. From a television interview about the war on drugs. The interviewer has asked whether the whole drug problem is not an economic one; Friedman has answered that it is not an economic problem at all but a moral one, and the interviewer has asked “In what way?”

    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. 71
    Checked against the sourceFind the book
  2. 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.

    Context. From the section headed “Lawlessness and Crime.”

    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
  3. In an ordinary free market business—let’s take potatoes, beef, anything you want—there are thousands of importers and exporters. Anybody can go into the business. But it’s very hard for a small person to go into the drug importing business because our interdiction efforts essentially make it enormously costly. So, the only people who can survive in that business are these large Medellin cartel kind of people who have enough money so they can have fleets of airplanes, so they can have sophisticated methods, and so on. … What more could a monopolist want? He’s got a government who makes it very hard for all his competitors and who keeps the price of his products high. It’s absolutely heaven.

    Context. From a television interview about the war on drugs. Friedman has just said that, from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel; asked whether it is doing a good job of it, he answers “Excellent” and explains. The ellipsis leaves out a sentence saying that by keeping goods out and arresting local marijuana growers, the government keeps the price of these products high.

    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. 72
    Checked against the sourceFind the book

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