Drug Prohibition has introduced millions of Americans to lives of crime and violence. Prohibition has multiplied prices on the black mar­ket a thousand fold or more, leading drug addicts to commit crimes against the rest of us - and each other - to get the money to support their habits. Prohibition has let punks get rich controlling the drug markets, corrupting law enforce­ment agencies in the United States and entire governments overseas in the process.

Are drug laws supposed to help the addicts? As harmful as using drugs may be to someone, being imprisoned makes matters much worse. And drug peddlers can hardly be prevented from selling adulterated and poisoned drugs that kill their customers - sometimes on purpose - leaving addicts at the mercy of unaccountable and unscru­pulous suppliers.

Are drug laws supposed to protect the non-drug-using majority from the addicts? As disheartening as it may be to know that another is harming himself with drugs [or al­cohol or tobacco] it is even worse to be robbed or burgled by an addict who cannot otherwise afford artifi­cially expensive drugs.

Are drug laws supposed to keep drugs away from young people? Black-market prices and profit mar­gins created by drug laws have encouraged sellers to seek customers among the most impressionable and gullible - our children. Indeed, children are the most effective sell­ers to other children. Those seeking the illegal "thrill" of marijuana are driven into contact with some of the most violent criminals our society has ever produced. There is no evidence that marijuana necessarily leads to "harder stuff," there is evidence that becoming involved with drug dealers does.

Drug laws are also responsible for the ever-increasing potency and dangerous of illegal drugs. Making comparatively benign grown drugs - like opiates - artificially scarce creates powerful [black] market in­centives for clandestine chemists to develop alternative "synthetic" drugs - PCP, for example - that can be made more cheaply with less risk of detection by the police. But these drugs can be far more danger­ous than the substances they re­place, both to the user and to others.

Drug laws have helped to turn cities into combat zones, as addicts rob the public for money, dealers rob customers, customers rob deal­ers, and rival gangs shoot it but over control of turf. About half the mur­der cases one of us [Barnett] prose­cuted as an assistant state's attorney for Cook County were "drug-related" in the sense that the victim was killed because it was thought he had either drugs or money from the sale of drugs.

Crimes are also committed against persons who seek out crimi­nals from whom to purchase illegal drugs. In one case three young men who sought to buy marijuana from street gang members were brutally stabbed to death because, in seeking to gain the gang members' trust, they unknowingly aligned them­selves with a rival gang. Strictly speaking, drug laws "worked" in this case. The gang had no mari­juana for sale and the kids didn't get high.

This mess is not just a horrible accident to be solved by more money, better personnel, and tougher penalties. It is an unavoida­ble consequence of prohibiting con­duct that is "victimless" - not in the sense that no one is harmed, but in the narrower sense that there is no victim to report the crime or to testify at the trial. This lack of a complaining victim is important for understanding the effects of drug laws.

Without a complaining victim, enforcement depends entirely on the most intrusive of police techniques - searches, drug tests, criminal informants. Moreover, with no com­plaint, prosecution depends entirely on police initiative and testimony, giving rise to enormous opportuni­ties for corruption by "looking the other way." And drug busts are quite effective in enforcing the ex­tortion of bribes.

When compared with a crime with a complaining victim, like rob­bery, the incentives created by mak­ing drug use illegal are perverse. Laws against robbery reduce the profit that sellers of illegally ob­tained goods receive by forcing rob­bers who take anything but cash to sell their booty at a tremendous discount. Drug laws, however, have the opposite effect. They create an artificial scarcity of a desired prod­uct. Willing buyers pay willing sell­ers grossly higher prices than they would without such laws.

And while the threat of punish­ment makes it more costly to be a drug suppler this cost is more than offset by reducing the risk of cap­ture [payoffs to the police], by increasing the return [higher prices], and by attracting sellers who are less "risk-averse" - people who live only for today with nothing to lose if caught. That is why drug suppliers are typically evil, violent, and dangerous people, while the corner liquor store clerk is not.

With prominent politicians urg­ing that the U.S. Army be deployed to "wipe out" drugs [inevitably re­sulting in the corruption of the Army], that the Air Force shoot down planes "suspected" of carry­ing illegal drugs [inevitably result­ing in the death of innnocents], that everyone's urine be subjected to random compulsory tests [resulting in careers and lives ruined by inevi­table false-positive results], and that the death penalty be imposed for sale of drugs [inevitably resulting in heightened violence against the po­lice and their informants], it is time to question whether the next stage in our costly "war on drugs" is just another "fix," another futile effort to satisfy our insatiable and danger­ous addiction to drug Prohibition