The War on Drugs Continues. Is It Time for a Ceasefire?

When I was in college, my father had a ritual.

Every time we ended a phone call, he would give me the same three instructions:

1. Don’t do drugs.

2. Don’t get AIDS.

3. Don’t get anyone pregnant.

That was it.

He barely ever asked about my grades, but he must have told me that thousands of times, so it’s still seared into my brain over 25 years later.

Life is complicated, but a few catastrophic mistakes can derail everything. Avoid those mistakes and you’ll probably turn out fine.

The problem is that telling people not to do drugs and actually preventing them from doing drugs are two very different things. For more than 50 years, the United States has tried to close that gap by waging war against drugs, dealers, and addicts.

The War on Drugs Is Back

The war has heated up again since President Trump retook the White House. He’s designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, targeted alleged drug boats in the Caribbean with airstrikes, captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and most recently, provided intelligence to the Mexican military that led to the death of cartel boss “El Mencho.”

The instinct behind this escalation is easy to understand.

Cartels aren’t just trafficking drugs. They are violent criminal organizations involved in kidnapping, extortion, human trafficking, and murder. They corrupt governments and terrorize communities.

If you’re an American parent who’s watched the fentanyl crisis unfold over the past decade, it’s natural to want to see the cartels destroyed.

But there’s an uncomfortable question sitting underneath the entire debate.

Why has the war on drugs been so hard to win?

The answer has a lot to do with economics.

When people think about drug trafficking, they often imagine criminal masterminds or violent gangs. That’s what we see on the surface, but underneath it all, there’s a market responding to powerful incentives.

I spent time in Colombia this past June. Colombia, of course, is the number one producer of cocaine worldwide. Along with its neighbors Peru and Bolivia, it has the ideal altitude, soil, temperature, and humidity to grow the coca plant.

When you talk to people in Colombia about what can be done, the first thing they’ll point out is the economic incentive that coca farmers face.

Growing coca pays.

Growing legal crops does not.

These farmers aren’t exactly rich. Convincing them to accept a thousand-fold reduction in income by switching from coca to wheat is a losing battle. For someone trying to support a family in rural Colombia, that’s not much of a choice.

Once those crops are processed into cocaine, the supply chain moves north. Colombian trafficking groups transport the drugs through Central America. Mexican cartels act as middlemen, moving the product into the United States, where the real profit is.

Police officers are bribed. Local officials are intimidated. Entire economies are propped up by the drug trade.

This isn’t just corruption around the edges. These are societies built on fundamentally corrupt foundations.

How should someone who wants to “do the right thing” respond when presented with the cartel’s brutally simple offer? Take the money or take the bullet.

In that kind of environment, it’s impossible for normal institutions to function.

It’s a Brave New World

In recent years the economics of the drug trade have shifted because the drugs themselves have changed.

“Plant-based” drugs like cocaine and heroin require large farming and shipment operations. Methamphetamine and fentanyl, on the other hand, are synthesized, eliminating the complex agricultural process. With a much higher potency compared to traditional narcotics, synthetic drugs are also much easier to traffic at scale.

Manufacturing in labs rather than growing in fields means much lower detection risk. Higher potency means higher profits.

This revolution in drug production helps explain why overdose deaths rose so sharply during the past decade. In 2023, fentanyl killed more than 70,000 Americans, accounting for the vast majority of overdose deaths.

Faced with numbers like that, policymakers want to take action to break the supply chain.

Arrest traffickers. Seize shipments. Capture or kill cartel leaders.

But supply side enforcement has its limits.

Remove one leader and another replaces him. Shut down one trafficking route and another opens. Short of a complete surveillance state, you won’t stamp out the drug trade in the continent-spanning nation that is the United States.

This is why, even though I still heed my dad’s warning to this day and I believe that drug use is an unholy desecration of your sacred body, I’ve come to believe that we really should just legalize it all.

Bootleggers and Baptists

The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which came into effect in 1920, was our first nation-wide experiment with drug prohibition. Constitutional amendments require mind-boggling supermajorities of support at multiple levels of government, so it’s safe to assume that banning alcohol was fairly popular at the time.

And yet today, you’d be hard-pressed to find an American who looks back fondly on Prohibition. As we all know, alcohol became federally legal once again with the 21st Amendment, ratified in 1933. So what happened?

During Prohibition, the demand for alcohol didn’t disappear. With legitimate supply chains drying up (pun intended), a massive black market emerged to fill the void.

Bootlegging became one of the most profitable businesses in the country. Figures like Al Capone built criminal empires supplying alcohol to millions of Americans who still wanted to drink.

The economist Bruce Yandle has described this dynamic with one of my favorite economic concepts: Bootleggers and Baptists.

The Bootleggers stood to benefit from the restricted supply created by prohibition.

The Baptists were the moral reformers who supported prohibition out of a sincere belief that drinking was sinful.

And so this accidental coalition formed between the Bootleggers and the Baptists, where they both got what they wanted and the rest of us got it good and hard.

The Baptists weren’t entirely wrong: alcohol is deeply destructive. I have members of my family who have destroyed their lives with it. However, the criminal side effects of bootlegging weren’t worth the payoff and eventually the political system was forced to reverse course.

Once alcohol returned to legal markets, organized crime lost one of its most lucrative industries.

Prohibition, Decriminalization, and Legalization

By definition, drug prohibition turns every dealer into a criminal. Does that necessarily mean that they’ll turn to violence?

Violence isn’t inherently a part of drug manufacturing, transportation, or sale. However, if drugs are illegal, then the market operates outside of the institutions that keep legal markets safe, trustworthy, and competitive.

If you’re involved in the illicit drug trade, you can’t turn to the courts to resolve disputes. You can’t turn to the police to deal with theft if what was stolen is itself illegal. You’re already committing crimes, so why not use a little intimidation here and there to get your way?

When you operate outside of the law, violence, threats, and coercion are now all on the table. “Might makes right” becomes the only law of the land.

Another institution you don’t have access to in a black market is the financial system. You don’t have insurance companies, banks, and investors breathing down your neck making sure that you don’t take on excessive risk.

Your insurance company wouldn’t want you selling drugs to kids, causing deaths, and then getting sued out of existence by their families. As imperfect as the system is, that’s generally what happens when legal pharmaceutical companies misbehave.

This is America and we like to sue each other. Legal legitimacy is what makes that possible.

One popular proposal among drug policy reformers is “decriminalization.” Oregon went down that path in 2021 and the streets of Portland only got worse.

They’ve since repealed their sweeping decriminalization law, but the Portland disaster likely set back the cause of pro-legalization people like myself by decades. So why did it go so wrong?

One thing to note is that the wave of fentanyl deaths that peaked in 2023 had started back in 2016 and really took off in 2019. The 2021 decriminalization law came right in the middle of a massive spike in deaths but didn’t necessarily cause the devastation.

What the law did do was take away police officers’ legal grounds to deal with disorderly drug addicts, often shooting up in public around kids. That’s obviously unacceptable and insane. You won’t hear any excuses from me on that point.

The fundamental flaw of decriminalization is that all of the problems with prohibition I laid out above are just as bad whether or not drug possession for personal use is legal. The product is just as dangerous, the dealers are just as violent, and the cartels get just as rich.

Only legalization can solve these problems. Nobody wants to deal with criminals when they can buy a product legitimately. The cartels would not be long for this world.

Anti-Drug, Pro-Legalization

If you’ve made it this far and you’re still with me, you’re probably in a tiny minority.

If you usually like my point of view but think I’m off the reservation on this issue, I understand.

I’m with you in spirit. I don’t want our kids to use this poison. I don’t want families ripped apart by addiction.

But the reality is that the only durable solutions to drug abuse are individual willpower, family support, and healthier social norms. We as parents have to set better examples ourselves and guide our kids toward healthy habits, especially around drugs and alcohol.

On a brighter note, according to CDC data, the numbers have started to improve along several dimensions. Since the peak in 2022-2023, total drug overdose deaths have fallen rapidly.

This trend predated President Trump’s return to office and crackdown on drug trafficking, so it’s not about ramped-up law enforcement.

It’s also important to remember that we still tolerate alcohol, and that kills a heck of a lot of people. In 2024, there were over 45,000 alcohol-induced deaths, compared to about 80,000 drug overdose deaths.

But even there, since the peak following the lockdown madness of COVID, we’ve seen a steady decline in alcohol deaths.

A silver lining of the lockdowns appears to have been that they disrupted teens’ access to drugs just long enough to reset social norms around substance use. The Monitoring the Future survey has found that alcohol, drug, and nicotine use among high schoolers still hovers around the generational low reached in 2021.

One last thing I need to mention: if you’re a parent, and if you catch your kid with something, it’s because they’ve gotten lazy and sloppy. That means they’re further down the road than you think.

We have to be vigilant as parents, no matter what laws are on the books. I’m anti-helicopter-parenting on almost everything else, but I am all for it on this issue.

Watch them like a hawk.

And maybe share my dad’s wisdom:

1. Don’t do drugs.

2. Don’t get AIDS.

3. Don’t get anyone pregnant.