MPP Update #22

By Dan Bernath

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s death November 16 at age 94 inspired a deluge of articles and commentaries – largely from conservative circles – celebrating his many achievements, which included helping shape economic policy for both the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

Many stories framed Friedman’s support for regulating marijuana, when it was mentioned at all, as a sort of eccentric departure from his otherwise conservative ideology.

But the idea that Friedman, a lifetime dues-paying MPP member, should have raised any eyebrows by his outspoken criticism of prohibition reveals a misunderstanding of marijuana policy reform as strictly a liberal – or simply hedonist – cause.

To Friedman, political affiliation had nothing to do with it; marijuana policy was a problem in need of an effective, humane solution. And no objective analysis of the social and economic impact of prohibition could deny this simple fact: Prohibition is a failure, and prolonging that failure is destructive, wrongheaded, and immoral.

“I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior,” he said shortly before his death. “Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill; it’s against nature.”

So why would anybody have been surprised when Friedman joined more than 530 other economists endorsing visiting Harvard University professor Jeffrey Miron’s June 2005 report calling for a system of marijuana taxation and regulation to replace prohibition?

After all, Miron’s analysis concluded that taxpayers were flushing away about $7.7 billion a year enforcing laws that do more to upset the lives and families of responsible adults than to curb drug use. Is it a conservative or liberal value to favor forfeiting approximately $6.2 billion in potential marijuana tax and licensing revenue to the criminal market?

The money saved by repealing prohibition would be enough to secure all loose nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union in less than three years, according to Defense Department estimates. Is a Republican more likely than a Democrat to want to make locking up marijuana users a higher priority than stemming a potential nuclear crisis?

While marijuana policy reform does have support from many liberals, Friedman was far from the only conservative or the only Republican to be appalled by prohibition for its wastefulness, its ineffectiveness, and its disregard for individual freedom and dignity. Many of conservatism’s most influential voices find prohibition an affront to their beliefs in limited government, individual freedom, and an unhindered free-market economy.

Conservative author P.J. O’Rourke articulated the values of small-government conservatives when he wrote: “Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. ... Prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.”

Conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. once argued in a National Review column that conservatives should resist their tendency to embrace tradition, and instead embrace marijuana policy reform in the name of self-determination.

Reagan administration Secretary of State George Shultz, like Friedman, has long argued that prohibition does nothing more than foster an environment for a violent, illegal drug market to thrive.

Friedman himself worked to convince fellow Republicans to abandon prohibition as a lost cause that was destroying America.

“Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one,” he once wrote to self-proclaimed moralist and then-drug czar William Bennett in a 1990 letter, “must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.”

Friedman reminds us that replacing prohibition with compassionate, sensible marijuana laws that work is not exclusively a liberal or conservative endeavor. It’s for anyone offended by the U.S. government’s insistence on clinging to a policy that wastes resources, encourages violent crime, and persecutes responsible citizens for what they do in the privacy of their own homes. Some might call those traditional values.


Dan Bernath is MPP’s assistant director of communications. Email him at dbernath@mpp.org.