Another vote for Milton. I have watched several of his talks on the subject and it is amazing how clear and rational his thinking is. It is a real pleasure to watch. Amazing how this subject has become dominated by misinformation and hype.
Nobel economist Milton Friedman said, "The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill Said in the middle of the 19th century in 'On Liberty.' is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual’s own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it’s in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they’ll do you harm, why isn’t it all right to say you must not eat too much because you’ll do harm? Why isn’t it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you’re likely to die? Why isn’t it all right to say, “Oh, skiing, that’s no good, that’s a very dangerous sport, you’ll hurt yourself”? Where do you draw the line? If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.”
Milton Friedman interview from 1991 on America’s War on Drugs
Meanwhile, don't look to closely at what has happened with the cartels in Mexico.
It's nothing more than "something must be done; this is something; this must be done." The wave of open drug use in the 1960s was pretty scary to a great many people.
High prices are reducing drug usage. That's basic economics. Food is cheap, so people eat a lot and get fat. Alcohol is cheap, so people drink a lot and destroy themselves. It's not hard to deduce what cheap heroin would do.
OD deaths are up by a factor of three since the feds cracked down on cheap vicodin and oxy. The drug war has also killed huge numbers of people in other countries, harmed civil liberties at home, and cost a lot of actual dollars.
I think it doesn't look like agood deal unless you omit some of those costs.
Friedman addresses this point better than I can. You might enjoy this debate on drug criminalization between Friedman and the former governer Pete Wilson of CA:
I think you have that backwards, and most people go the other direction.
Here's a pretty good documentary in which users describe their experiences: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chasing-heroin/
It seems to be quite common to become addicted to legally perscribed opiod analgesics, and move to black market drugs when access is limited.
Also, pills are cheap when you get them from a doctor. Heroin is cheap compared to black market pills. Which comparison are we making?
I think demand for opiods from addicts is somewhat inelastic; this is why so many people start by getting addicted to inexpensive legally perscribed pills, and then end up doing crime to pay for herion, which I believe costs $200/gram or something similar (depending on location, dilution, etc.), where a serious user can easily do a gram a day. If simply making the price go up was going to help that person, we wouldn't have this problem.
If anything, this is an argument for making people who aren't addicts yet pay a huge amount out of pocket for legally perscribed pain killers, which is an interesting, but probably infeasible idea.
Returning to the big picture though, we're making black market opiods expensive as hard as we can, and OD deaths have still trippled in the last few years. It's not working, and even if it were, I don't think the external costs are this are morally acceptable.
People eat or drink to compensate for other things. Happens with heroine, too, sure. But for some the right drug at the right time is medicine, to get their life back in balance. If you have more options than just overeating or overdrinking, then your chances are higher that you find, what you need to get on with your life ...
Suposing that it doesn't, doing nothing would be a hell of lot cheaper and easier than what we are doing now.
Opiodes are derived from cheap agricultural products. A tablet of herion needn't cost more than asprin. The explicit goal of federal enforcment agencies is to raise prices by restrict supply. You and I are spending a fortune on that project, and it's not helping anyone except the sprawling profession of drug-warriors, and the black market gangsters. Ok, maybe it helped HSBC a little. Kind of ironic, isn't it?
This is one of those things that makes me wonder why we even have economists if no one will listen to them.
Go get a cup of coffee, fire up youtube, and listen Milton Friedman's talk "Socialism & The War On Drugs."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIQ5_4tOx0U
If you don't like that one, pick one from any decade since the Nixon administration. :)