18 February 2013

Another week, another seven snippets of science, philosophy, economics and culture for your consumption.

Today's Daily Quota is on a topic that's undergone huge resistance and revisionism as of late, especially in the wake of it's almost absolute failure - the War on Drugs.

Milton Friedman is arguably one of the top two or three most influential economists of the 20th Century.
He gained prominence as most good economists do - in times of economic hardship. His appeal was that of a Commerce student with a sense of humour - he could apply economics to anything in life.
In this case, he chose to take a contrarian stance to the US-led War on Drugs (it was failing then, and it's still failing now).

Here are of the few points he makes:

• The War on Drugs, as an economic intervention, targets only the supply of drugs, which hopes to lower demand by surging prices upwards.
  What it does instead is surge prices upwards, but of a substance that addicts will pay any price for (price-inelastic). Lo and behold, they commit more crimes for more hits, or people come up with more creative ways to administer the more potent product.
• The incarceration rate has increased ten-fold as a result of Nixon's War on Drugs due to harsher and harsher penalties for offenders, thinking this would act as a deterrent.
  Most offences are minor possession - criminalizing an individual for the smallest of relative crimes.
  Pretty much, this meme.
• With greater demand for potency, output, affordability and transportability, drugs are being synthetically grown - in turn, creating dangerous super drugs like chronic (cannabis), crack cocaine (cocaine), heroin (opium) and ecstasy (amphetamines).
• The War on Drugs has proliferated the violence associated with it and has caused the most (collateral) damage to innocent people in the cross-fire, not rival cartels as is generally believed.
  Friedman estimated an additional 10,000 homicides a year in the US alone.

This interview is only a tiny snippet of the whole interview, and discusses only a handful of arguments for and against the War on Drugs as we know it. Great insight from a titan of knowledge and a man of incredible influence.
Until tomorrow, drugs are bad, mmmkay?

WATCH IT HERE