Are The Consequences of Drug Prohibition Worse Than The Drugs Themselves?

A great read over at Bad Science. I love the last paragraph.

Drugs instantiate the classic problem for evidence based social policy. It may well be that prohibition, and the inevitable distribution of drugs by criminals, gives worse results for all the outcomes we think are important, like harm to the user, harm to our communities through crime, and so on. But equally, it may well be that we will tolerate these worse outcomes, because we decide it is somehow more important that we publicly declare ourselves, as a culture, to be disapproving of drug use, and enshrine that principle in law. It’s okay to do that. You can have policies that go against your stated outcomes, for moral or political reasons: but that doesn’t mean you can hide the evidence, it simply means you must be clear that you don’t care about it.

So much of what government does follows blindly in the face of not caring about the evidence. For example the evidence suggests we are 99 trillion dollars in the hole, and yet we want to keep spending more. That's because the role of today's government has far exceeded its original necessity and it establishes laws often times solely to justify its own existence and to guarantee its own survival.

The amount of destructive pathology I see as a hospitalist physician due to alcohol and tobacco easily outnumbers the patients I see for illegal narcotic complications by 100 to one. And that's being generous. It's time for change and hope we hear so much about. It's time for less talk and more action. It's time for evidence to guide your policy, or at least admit you don't care about the evidence.