Osler's Razor

In a week-and-a-half, I will be in Washington DC to present a paper at this intriguing conference, where I will be speaking on the plenary panel on the evening of Thursday, March 24.

I'm going to argue for a fundamentally conservative change to our drug control policy. Instead of the current big-government tactics of mass incarceration with no sense of the business elements of drug trafficking, I think we need to solve the problem by treating narcotics as a business-- and make that business fail. Obviously, the tactic of sweeping up low-wage laborers and incarcerating them hasn't worked, which should be no surpise in an economy awash in unskilled labor. Instead of trying to deprive the drug networks of labor, we should deny them capital.

Here is the intro to my piece, which is titled "What If We Really Cared About Narcotics?":


I. Introduction

Law enforcement actions should be judged on one simple measure: Are they solving a problem? After all, we Americans loath the loss of freedom and the spending of tax dollars, and we should never take away citizens’ freedom and money unless there actually is a problem being solved.

Is narcotics trafficking a problem? Of course it is. Narcotics trafficking and use (like alcohol) leads to violence, it undermines productivity, and it rips apart the social fabric of families and communities.

Has law enforcement solved that problem? Of course not. Drugs use in this country continues at high levels, and a primary indicator of the success of narcotics interdiction, the price of drugs, has gone down, not up.

This article argues that the failure of law enforcement to (even in part) solve the problem of narcotics trafficking is rooted in a failure to discern the basic nature of drug trafficking. Drug trafficking is a business. If we really cared about stopping drug trafficking, we would think hard about how to shut down that business—not about how many people we arrest, not about the heaps of marijuana we might seize and photograph for the news shows, but about how to make that business fail.

In short, our mistake has been to try to make narcotics businesses fail by creating a shortage of labor through massive incarceration. This is an impossible task at a time when markets are flooded with cheap, unskilled labor, and it should be no surprise that we have failed. Arresting all the greeters at Wal-Mart will not shut down that corporation. Instead, we should have focused on what really makes a business fail—a lack of cash flow and credit.

In other words, we have been following our urge to punish, when we should have been following the money. Spending vast sums of money trying to stop drugs from coming into the country is not the answer—instead, we should stop the money from going out of the U.S. to source countries, because this disruption of cash flow will make that business fail.

Part II of this article will describe the failure of the war on drugs as a failure of our primary tool—incarcerating low-wage workers. Part III will move on to describe what a “business failure” model of narcotics restriction would look like, including the laws that would need to change. Finally, Part IV will argue for this shift from a focus on labor to a focus on capital in narcotics control at this moment in our history, as we move forward as a nation with at least some narcotics remaining illegal.