Explain How Would Society Benefit From The Legalization Of Drugs

Would Society Benefit From the Legalisation of Drugs?

This essay will look at the topic of drug legalisation. It will attempt to prove that a free market approach to the drugs market is far more beneficial to society than to have one that criminalises and thus restricts the quantity of the good. The essay will make comparisons of a drug market in a free market situation and to one that is in a ‘prohibited’ market situation. Prohibition- alluding to what alcohol was during the prohibition period in US history (1922-30)

The status quo rhetoric surrounding this issue is that; drugs are clearly bad for health and the use possession and distribution of such substances should be banned for the betterment of society and anyone who willingly consumes

This therefore shifts the supply curve of the drugs market inwards from S0 to S1 as shown in figure 1. This would put an upward pressure on price as there is a miss equilibrium from the initial equilibrium of P* and Q* and therefore leads to a rise in the price of the good to P1. This figure also demonstrates how that the Price Elasticity for demand for drugs are inelastic meaning only a little quantity demanded/supplied would change from Q* to Q1 given a greater than proportional change in price from P* to P1. In the real world this leads to prohibition not being an effective method to reduce drug consumption. “In fact, widespread evidence indicates that prices of prohibited goods-be they drugs, alcohol or prostitution- are higher under prohibition. For example, Warburton (1932) estimates that alcohol prices were approximately three times higher during alcohol Prohibition than beforehand, and Morgan (1991) estimates that cocaine currently sells for at least 20 times its free market price. ” (Miron, Jeffrey A., and Jeffrey Zwiebel 1995) Which is also quite clear from the statistics