Methamphetamine use in Hawaii

The drug war has made Americans more vulnerable to attacks by police. Police corruption is an inevitable consequence of black markets, where so much wealth is at stake. In addition, courts, under intense prodding from drug enforcement officials, have relaxed search-and-seizure standards to facilitate the “war” on drugs. Similar reasons lie behind legislation that has undermined property rights by encouraging civil confiscations, which do not require proof of guilt (Mast, 214).

The 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act contains a section on asset forfeitures that allows local police to keep assets seized during drug investigations conducted with the cooperation of federal agencies, in contrast to many state laws directing such assets into general or special funds. The Department of Justice has gone even further, “adopting” seizures even if a local agency was not involved in a drug raid and passing the seized assets back to the local agency, less a “handling charge.” This policy has had a dramatic impact on how police allocate their efforts. Civil seizures (many apparently from innocent citizens), as well as drug arrests and convictions, have risen sharply in light of these policies. A state law allowing police to keep seizures also has led to an increase in drug arrest rates by at least 18%, thus providing strong support for the hypothesis that the upsurge in drug enforcement after 1984 is a direct consequence of the federal seizure legislation (Coase, 44).

For drug prohibition to prove a success, the laws of economics would have to be repealed. Large-scale interdiction of marijuana during the early 1980s had the predictable effect of increasing the price. Because the law of demand dictates that consumers will buy less when prices rise, it follows that they are more likely to turn to substitutes. One study found that young users drank more beer when the price of marijuana increased, which, in turn, led to more traffic fatalities. Another reported a precipitous increase in crystal methamphetamine use after a crop destruction program decimated Hawaii's marijuana supply (Benson, 205).

Similarly, states that had decriminalized marijuana during the 1970s had fewer hospital emergencies involving hard drugs. Sellers, looking for an alternative product to sell at the low-priced end of the drug market during the early 1980s, also turned to more easily concealed cocaine and introduced crack, adopting a technology in use in the Bahamas. Yet a further study shows that—when interdiction efforts are successful—marijuana farmers ...