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Smartest Drug Story of the YearRolling Stone on the war on drugs.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Nov. 30, 2007, at 6:39 PM ET

If I were maximum dictator, I would force every newspaper editor, every magazine editor, and every television producer in the land to read Ben Wallace-Wells' 15,000-word article in the new (Dec. 13) issue of Rolling Stone, titled "How America Lost the War on Drugs."

Wallace-Wells captures the complete costs of the drug war better than any journalist I've read in a long time. He documents how the federal government has dropped about $500 billion combating illicit drugs over the past 35 years. Nearly 500,000 people sit in jail or prison for drug crimes, "a twelvefold increase since 1980," Wallace-Wells writes. For all the money the government has spent and all the people it's jailed, it's still failed to make a long-term impact on the availability of drugs. The militarized drug-control techniques favored by the Bush administration, he reports, have increased violence and political corruption abroad, violated human rights, and destabilized several Latin American nations.

Wallace-Wells' accomplishment, while formidable, didn't require the back-channel confidential sources that Bob Woodward relies on or the mildewed library stacks of obscure documents that made up I.F. Stone's arsenal. Wallace-Wells gets the story and gets it well by approaching the much pawed-over topic with an open mind and a smart set of questions. Like an auditor called in to assess the wreck of a Fortune 500 company, he asks what the government has gotten for the half-trillion dollars it has spent on the drug war and takes the question to the limits.

There is no reason that this project couldn't have been conceived and executed by any newspaper in America. No reason except that too many editors, most of whom have indulged in illicit substances, fear the consequences of telling their readers the truth about drugs (canceled subscriptions, invective from Limbaugh and O'Reilly, loss of respect at the country club or university club).

Wallace-Wells believes that a heavily subsidized drug-treatment program, think-tanked to the top of the Clinton administration's policy pile, could have reduced crime and drug use if Newt Gingrich and the Republicans hadn't taken complete control of Congress. We'll never know. He writes that Clinton acquiesced to the Republicans because he didn't want to appear soft on crime or drugs, letting Clinton off too easy in the process unless, of course, Newt put a gun to Clinton's head and forced him to appoint the tyrannical Barry McCaffrey to the drug czar throne in 1996.

Wallace-Wells' skillful illustration of the international repercussions of the repressive Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush war on drugs, which threatens to turn Peru and Mexico into narco-states, inspired me to revisit economist David R. Henderson's findings on the effects of stringent drug control. In a working paper circulated in the late 1970s and finally in a 1991 paper published in the University of California-Davis Law Review (1991. 24: 655-676) titled "A Humane Economist's Case for Drug Legalization," Henderson shows how increased penalties never have the effects on drug markets predicted by governments.

Henderson looks at drug markets as rational, which they are, and writes that increased drug penalties tend to drive "more civilized dealers" out of the market and reduce supply. "Competition by buyers for a lessened supply must cause the price to rise," he writes, and as "the price rises, profits will increase and in the long run eventually will return to their precriminalization levels." As the civilized dealers exit, the most vicious dealers rise. He continues:

Profits of dealers will look higher than normal because the cost of imprisonment, fines, and bribes is not subtracted. Also, profits of successful dealers who are never caught will be higher than normal, just as profits of lottery winners are higher than normal. Looking only at the profits of dealers who successfully avoid capture, however, and concluding on that basis that the illegal drug business is abnormally profitable is like looking at the fortunes of only lottery winners and concluding that buying a lottery ticket is abnormally profitable.

Henderson's insights help explain the phenomenal violence of the cocaine trade described by the Rolling Stone piece. A DEA veteran explains that in the 1970s, "swashbuckling entrepreneurs" with small planes smuggled drugs into the United States through the Caribbean—"guys who wouldn't have looked out of place at a Jimmy Buffett concert." Increased militarization of drug interdiction by the United States failed to eliminate drugs—it only moved their staging grounds to other Latin countries and enlisted more ruthless drug entrepreneurs, such as Pablo Escobar.

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
Image of the Rolling Stone article © 2007 Rolling Stone. Photograph of a joint on Slate's home page by Photodisc.
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