FROM CRIMINALIZATION TO REHABILITATION: Abandoning “The War on Drugs” THESIS EDIT | Page 6

illicit drug trafficking. Boaz, from the Cato Institute, claims that “drug prohibition channels over
$40 billion a year into the criminal underworld.” Research shows that supplies in heroin and
cocaine have increased, and “the more our Customs agents interdict, the more smugglers
import.” Also mentioned in Boaz’s article is that on November 12 th , 1996, Janet Crist of the
White House Office of National Drug Policy wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal, in which
she claimed that the “Pentagon’s anti-drug efforts” have had no “direct effect on either the price
or the availability of cocaine on our streets.”
Another, very prominent side-effect of the criminalization of drug use has been the steady
rise in criminal activity. Baltimore’s mayor, Kurt Schmoke, Nobel laureate, Milton Friedman,
“conservative columnist,” William F. Buckley Jr., and the former secretary of state, George
Shultz, all agree: the war on drugs has caused more crimes than it aims to prevent.
While some might argue that “crime rates have fallen in the past few years,” says Boaz,
“today’s crime rates look good only by the standards of the recent past; they remain much higher
than the levels of the 1950s.”
Why do crime rates go up with the criminalization of drug use? When we look at the big
picture, the reasons become apparent. First, since criminalization creates a black-market for the
manufacture and sale of drugs, this naturally drives the price of illicit substances up, way past
what they would actually be worth in a legal, government-regulated market. As a r