The Drug War Is Bad For Business
Eric Sterling has an interesting piece at Forbes looking at the big picture economic impact of the War on Drugs.
Today, tens of millions of Americans — would-be consumers – because they have been convicted of a drug offense, aren’t earning what they could earn without a record. Our prison population, estimated as high as 2.3 million persons, is out of the car market. Ford and GM should calculate how many cars they could sell in the U.S. if our imprisonment rates were close to those of their European or Japanese competitors (instead of 7-to-10 times higher). How many cars could they sell if tens of millions of Americans did not have a conviction-suppressed income? A reduced average household income and credit capacity suppresses sales of goods and services for almost every American business. While most of those offenses were instances of youthful bad judgment, the consequences for the economy last for decades.
The business community needs a complete economic analysis of the impact of drug policy. In the 1980s, war on drugs policies were not on the radar of business or investors at all. Today, the intensity of global competition and the fragility of our domestic economy require management and investors to fully understand how American drug policy plays with their profits. Every investor should analyze how much the costs of drug policy shrink return on investment. [Forbes]
Other than Eric Sterling, and perhaps occasionally others in the reform movement, I don't hear anyone asking these kinds of questions. It's an entire category of drug war cost that has simply never been measured.
This gets back to a point I've made often here, which is that we've really never had anything approaching a full accounting of all the costs created by our drug laws. I can't imagine how such a thing could even be conceived. Things like the damage to virgin forests caused by illicit marijuana cultivation, the number of crimes that go unsolved because drug-involved witnesses wish to avoid police contact, the extent to which police corruption compromises costly law enforcement expenditures; all these things and many more are horrendous in their effects, incalculable in their scale, and yet rarely even acknowledged outside the realm of reform advocacy, let alone quantified in the course of the raging debate over whether these policies are worth their price-tag.
In other words, however harmful you believe the War on Drugs to be, it is almost certainly considerably worse. And whatever benefits one expects to enjoy following the fall of prohibition, the true and total impact of effective reforms could exceed anyone's expectations by addressing problems that should have been blamed on the drug war but weren't. I suppose there's only one way to find out.
Sterling has unique blend of experience and passion
Eric Sterling's experience as a key legal staff member of a New Jersey Congressman was In Washington to help craft the crack cocaine laws of 1986 & 1988.. Unlike most of his colleagues, Sterling was able to quickly see that this legislation had many unintended consequences and created more problems than it addressed. This experience has been the genesis of Sterling's distinguished career as a leading expert on drug policy as well as one our most effective advocates in the movement.
I would like to see more appearances of Sterling addressing the flaws in the drug war. His arguments for change can be made on many levels and he always provides his audience with thought provoking analysis to illustrates the harms of the drug war. As a speaker for LEAP, anyone can recommend Sterling for a speaking engagement at your college or suggest to a producer that he appear on the media to debate this issue. We need advocates like Eric Sterling to challenge the status quo by appearing in the media and at public events. He is a gem that should be utilized as often as possible.
Drug war ruins families, expands welfare, and is anti-education
How many mothers need public housing and food stamps when their breadwinner husbands go to prison? How much money go to afterschool programs or combating juvenile delinquency when the mother has to be the breadwinner working long irregular hours and can't be home to watch the kids or respond to calls from school?
It's all over the media that fewer men are graduating from college than women, and I am sure that is partly due to our arresting young men at four times the rate of women for drug offenses. Not only that, government data shows that men are more likely to receive harsher sentences than women for the same crime.
A profound disaster
Cost of prohibition
Great analysis!
It seems to me another cost is that of the ubiquitous urine-testing industry. That must cost businesses something.
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