Jeffrey Miron is an economist identified in the excerpts as a senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. His expertise is described as the economics of libertarianism, and he is the author of four books, including Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition and Libertarianism from A to Z. He appeared as a guest on The Bob Zadek Show in an episode devoted to the War on Drugs, and he is also named in a separate episode as one of the lecturers at a Cato University week of discussion and lectures.
Appearance on the drug war episode
Bob Zadek introduced the episode by framing the War on Drugs as a policy on which more money has been spent than on any other flawed policy in American history, and he characterized Attorney General Jeff Sessions as a self-described drug warrior who had complained in a recent op-ed piece that being soft on drug sentencing means more violent crime. Zadek said Sessions had taken an oath to vigorously enforce the drug laws, and he introduced Miron as his guest in response to Sessions’ op-ed piece and policies Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017).
Prohibition and violence
Asked whether Sessions was right that drugs beget violence, Miron said he did not think so and that Sessions had it almost precisely backwards. Miron argued that it is very rare for consumption of drugs to induce anyone to engage in violent acts, and that the correct connection is that drug prohibition induces violence, the same way prohibition of other goods and services can and does create violence. When something is banned, he said, the market is not eliminated but driven underground, where participants cannot resolve disputes over trade, contracts and purchases through courts and lawyers, so the obvious substitute is violence. He gave the example of an employer in the drug trade who wants workers to believe that stealing the merchandise will bring retaliation, and he described fights over drug territories and over enforcing contracts as resolved violently in underground markets.
Zadek restated the point, saying that because commerce in drugs is forced underground its participants do not get the benefits of a civilized system for resolving disputes and are left only with violence. He also said there has been a blurring, going back to the film Reefer Madness, of an assumption that drug users per se commit violence, and that the link between drug use and violence does not exist.
Cost of the War on Drugs
Asked how much the War on Drugs costs, Miron gave estimates in two parts. From a budgetary perspective, he put explicit expenditures for police, judges, prosecutors and prisons at about $50 billion a year, adding together state, federal and local spending. In terms of foregone revenue, he estimated a similar order of magnitude, about $40 to $50 billion a year, for a change in the overall US deficit situation of $100 billion. He added that capturing that sum would not change the fact that the US is currently bankrupt for all practical purposes and that the path of fiscal expenditure is not sustainable, but that it would go in the right direction and would make sense on other grounds because it would improve the welfare of people who use drugs and reduce crime and corruption.
Harm reduction
A caller identified as Nick, a research scientist who works on drug development, asked about harm reduction for alcohol-related disease and about data from regions or countries that had legalized some type of drug. Miron answered that an enormous amount can be done to reduce harm by legalizing drugs, because a huge fraction of the harms come not from use of the substance per se but from using it under prohibition. He gave the example of injecting heroin or other opioids: prohibition raises prices, giving users a strong incentive to consume in a relatively dangerous manner to get a big bang for the buck, while laws in most states make it impossible to buy clean disposable syringes over the counter, making safe injection harder and risking HIV, hepatitis C and other blood-borne diseases. He said the first thing to do is stop creating the harm that prohibition creates.
On the broader question of discouraging harmful consumption, Miron said that figuring out exactly which things to discourage or encourage requires analysis and data that we are never going to have, and he asked whether it is consuming too much alcohol that is on net bad for people, or watching television too late at night, or driving while exhausted. He said he is very skeptical of coercive harm-reduction measures such as sin taxes, though he could live with non-coercive methods such as public service messages and information provided to kids in health education in high school if that was the cost of getting these things legal.
On the experience of other countries, Miron said there are fewer such countries to examine than one would like, because not too many have gone from prohibition to legalization, partly because of US pressure in the direction of maintaining prohibition throughout the world and partly because of UN treaties that the US supports. He named Portugal, to some degree the Netherlands, and several US states that have legalized marijuana, along with cases where countries have at least de-escalated their wars on drugs. He said the evidence is incredibly consistent across those observations and consistent with the libertarian view: none of the horror stories painted by drug warriors—booms in drug use or crime—have come true, and to the extent changes have appeared they have almost always been beneficial, with use rates staying the same or going down and crime and HIV infection rates going down.
Prison guard unions and outlook
A caller identified as Steve asked Miron to comment on the influence of prison guard unions on drug laws. Miron said he had not thought specifically about the role of prison guard unions, but that many people have commented on the private prison movement as a factor in the high incarceration rate in the United States and in continuing the War on Drugs, which made sense to him, although the escalation of the War on Drugs and the confused thinking about it long predates the private prison boom. Zadek added that in California the prison guards union is the strongest public service union in the state and vigorously and successfully fought the decriminalization of marijuana when it was on the ballot a number of years ago, making it a strong opponent of decriminalization because it is bad for business.
Asked at the end of the show whether the future of drug policy looks bleak, bright or unknown, Miron said honesty compels one to say who knows, but that he would spin it positively: a number of positive things have been happening from the libertarian view for decades, the US and many other countries still have broad protections of individual liberty and freedom, and he did not see the bad things happening under the Trump administration and under Attorney General Sessions as necessarily a sea change in how the population will vote and what it will support going forward. He described it as more a perfect storm of the particular politician in question, the frustrations of the moment, and the politician Trump was running against, and said he is guardedly optimistic that the pendulum will swing back and that we will have reasonable policy—certainly not perfect from the libertarian view—but can get back to some of the relatively positive things that were happening before the election of Donald Trump.
Across episodes
Miron appears in two episodes in the excerpts. In the 2014 episode on innovation, he is named only in Bob Zadek’s opening monologue as one of the lecturers at a Cato University week of discussion and lectures, described as an economics professor rockstar at Harvard University; he does not speak and no position of his is reported. In the 2017 episode, he is the guest and develops the argument against drug prohibition at length. The excerpts show no development in his views between the two appearances, because the earlier episode contains no treatment of the topic beyond the mention of his name.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Miron’s educational background, the date or place of his birth, or the full list of his publications beyond the two books named. They do not report the content of Drug War Crimes or Libertarianism from A to Z, nor any specific empirical findings from them. They do not state whether Miron held any government or advisory position, and they do not cover his views on topics other than drug prohibition, harm reduction and the cost of enforcement. The excerpts also do not state the outcome of any legalization ballot measure or the provisions of any statute or treaty beyond what the speakers describe.
Episodes
1 appearance, 2017–2017.
- Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017) — Economic failures and violence of drug prohibition. Harvard economist and Cato Senior Fellow