OPEN MEDICINE: ….Law enforcement has a critical role to play in community safety. However, as was observed with the emergence of a violent illegal market under alcohol prohibition in the United States in the 1920s, the vast illegal market that has emerged under drug prohibition has proven remarkably resistant to law enforcement efforts, while unintended consequences have similarly emerged.4,7
Given its well-funded drug surveillance systems, the United States has generated excellent data for assessing the impact of drug law enforcement. Remarkably, despite an estimated US$1 trillion spent since former US president Richard Nixon first declared his country’s “war on drugs,” the effort to reduce drug supply and drive up drug prices through aggressive drug law enforcement appears to have been ineffective.8–10 Instead, in recent decades, the prices of the more commonly used illegal drugs (e.g., cannabis and cocaine) have actually gone down, while potency has risen dramatically.11,12 To highlight the limited ability of drug law enforcement to constrain cannabis supply, Figure 1 shows that the estimated potency of US cannabis (in terms of its active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol) has increased by more than 170%, from approximately 2.3% in 1981 to 6.3% in 2002, despite an increase in US federal anti-drug expenditures from US$1.5 billion in 1981 to more than US$18 billion in 2002.8,13
Opponents of drug policy reform commonly argue that drug use would increase if health-based models were emphasized over drug law enforcement,14 but we are unaware of any research to support this position. In fact, a recent World Health Organization study demonstrated that international rates of drug use were unrelated to how vigorously drug laws were enforced, concluding that “countries with stringent user-level illegal drug policies did not have lower levels of use than countries with liberal ones.”15 In addition, although reducing the availability of cannabis has been a central focus of drug law enforcement efforts, over the past 30 years of cannabis prohibition the drug has remained “almost universally available to American 12th graders,” according to US drug use surveillance systems funded by the US National Institutes of Health, with 80%–90% of survey respondents saying that the drug is “very easy” or “fairly easy” to obtain. … (more)
