Michael Gerson argues that drugs “damage and undermine families and communities and ultimately deprive the nation of competent, self-governing citizens.” Balko sees prohibition as the larger problem:
In 2012, the economist David Henderson wrote a piece for the right-leaning Hoover Institution about the “bottom one percent.”
By that, he was referring to the incarcerated, who of course have little to no annual income. There are currently well over a half million people in prison for non-violent drug offenses. There are about a million more on probation or parole. According to a study by Students for Sensible Drug Policy, about 200,000 young people have lost access to financial aid due to some sort of drug offense, although since that figure was from 2006, it’s probably much larger today. In 2012 alone, 1.5 million people were arrested for some sort of consensual drug crime. Of those, 1.2 million were arrested for possession, not distribution. On average, taxpayers pay $25,000 per year to house each prisoner. In some states, the figure can approach $50,000. As Henderson writes, we’re paying that money “so that the government can put poor people in prison and keep them poor,” and to “put non-poor people in prison and make them poor.”
If conservatives like Gerson and Frum are truly concerned about income inequality, income immobility, social disorder, erosion of the rule of law, disrespect for for public institutions, and the dissolution of the family, it seems they should at least address the drug war’s contribution to these problems. Instead, when contemplating solutions to these problems, reforming or ending the drug war is usually the first option they take off the table.
The Dish 