I don't know if I've made it clear enough in the past, but I will make it undeniably clear now. The government should not be in the business of telling people what they should or should not be doing so long as the actions individuals take do not negatively impact others without their prior consent. This means that I am of the opinion that if someone wants to inject into their blood stream a dose of methamphetamine, then by all means do so. We currently allow people to drink alcohol and smoke tobacco without much concern. While it may extremely personally detrimental for a person to take meth, that is their choice. It is again the "conservatives" that push "big government" in this area of our lives.
Let's start by discussing what would happen if we immediately decriminalized narcotics. The amount of money that would be saved simply from not having to house the amount of people in our prisons would be outrageous. The United States currently has 2.3 million people in prisons. This is almost 1/4th of the world's total number of incarcerations. We see that 20% of people in state prisons are there for drug related offenses and over 50% in federal prisons. This means that on day one of decriminalizing drugs would immediately release at least 400,000 people. These are people who can work and pay taxes and contribute to society. This also means 400,000 people who we as tax payers do not need to spend money on to house and feed. It costs nearly $50,000 to house a prisoner for a year. Some quick math here, $50,000 * 400,000 people = $20,000,000,000. If you count the zeros, thats 20 billion dollars. This is just for not having to house these people in the prisons.
If we then turn to the other costs related to this the savings begins to balloon. How much time and money is spent in courts dealing with these people every year? We require administrative time spent having to deal with paperwork, paying for public defense attorneys, wasting judicial resources. So surely I have convinced you that ending criminalization of drugs would save the taxpayers a lot of money. But let me remind you, this isn't money that is being saved, this is money not being spent. This is actually spending a spending cut.
Now let's talk about the money the government can actually earn based on the legalization of drugs. States make about 19 billion dollars a year in taxes on tobacco and the federal government another 7 billion dollars. That is a large amount of money that the government makes by taxing a legal drug.
What are the social implications of legalizing drugs? Drugs can be regulated. That means that they can be made safer. The largest implication is that drug cartels can no longer make money selling drugs. The great number of people who have been killed near the Mexican border is a result of the war on drugs in America. The money that the government makes from the taxes on the sale of drugs can be used on education programs in the same way that anti-tobacco campaigns were done.
Let's stop spending billions of dollars on needlessly arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating people for doing with their body as they please. This is not liberty, but tyranny. Let's not give incentive for illegal activity with a prohibition that isn't working. This is exactly history repeating itself with the prohibition of the early 20th century. How long do we have to wait to learn from our own mistakes.
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