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Article: Prohibition and legalization: beyond the false dichotomy.
- Article from:
- Social Research
- Article date:
- September 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 New School for Social Research. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Intoxication and addiction weaken self-control, which leads some drug users to engage in damaging behavior--behavior that would not occur but for their drug use. Government efforts to restrict drug use swell public budgets, restrict liberty, and encourage black markets. So both drugs and drug policy can be harmful to the public good. To my mind, that makes drug policy an optimization problem. The goal is to find a drug policy that maximizes the difference between the benefits of reduced use and the various costs of achieving that reduction.
Drug policy is not currently formulated with this purpose in mind. One reason is that the goal is not universally accepted. ...