Friday, April 25, 2008

Drug Legalization: Neglected Aspects

So you are thinking about legalizing drugs. What would happen?

Legalization makes the prices of drugs lower. The negative legal consequences are a tax that increases the costs to users and increases the costs of suppliers. The new, lower costs means more more people use drugs, and they use more drugs.

Society saves all the money spent on drug criminalization: incarceration, law enforcement, etc.

But what new costs might legalization impose on society?
  • Taking care of the drug addicts' children. The legal system would have many additional children enter the juvenile dependency system, and get placed in foster homes. Children and parents get court appointed lawyers, and the cases move through the expensive, slow, labor intensive juvenile dependency process as mandated by federal law.
  • Housing values go down and slums grow, as the additional addicts stop maintaining homes and apartments and mowing their lawns, and begin to live in squalor eight to a room.
  • The drug induced crime such as violence caused by meth psychosis becomes more common.
  • An increase in Social Security disability payments. Addicts are covered.
  • Health costs go up to pay for the medical problems associated with addiction: sores, malnutrition, overdoses.
  • More drug affected babies, who will also enter the juvenile court system, and have a good chance of later entering the criminal court system.

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