Drug-related crime would increase if drugs were legal

The argument

Opponents of legalisation argue that the case rests on an observed association together with a mechanism that explains it. The association is that drug users commit both violent and non-violent crimes at a much higher rate than the general population. The mechanism, on this view, runs along two distinct paths. The first is pharmacological: drug use acts directly on the user's mental state and decision-making, and a person whose inhibitions are lowered, whose motor skills are impaired and whose aggression is heightened is far likelier to behave violently or recklessly than the same person would be otherwise. In the most extreme cases proponents of the position point to psychotic episodes, in which the user's grasp of what is happening around them fails altogether. The second path is economic rather than chemical: addiction generates intense cravings, and an addict who cannot fund those purchases legitimately has a standing motive to steal. Crime here is not a side effect of intoxication but a means of financing the next dose. Supporters of the position then add the step that makes this an argument against legalisation specifically, namely that legalising drugs would mean more people using them than do so now. If the criminal behaviour already described is genuinely produced by drug use — whether through impaired judgement or through the cravings of dependence — then enlarging the population of users enlarges, proportionately, the volume of harmful and criminal acts that follow from use. The expected result is therefore not a reduction in drug-related crime but an increase in it, distributed across both the violent offences that flow from intoxication and the acquisitive offences that flow from addiction. On this reasoning, whatever else legalisation might achieve, it cannot be defended as a means of reducing the criminal harm associated with drugs, and so, proponents of this position conclude, we should not legalise all drugs.

Premises

Counter-arguments

This argument treats the crime that surrounds drugs as a property of the drugs themselves, when much of it is a product of prohibition. Acquisitive crime is driven by price: illegal markets carry a risk premium that pushes the cost of a dependency far above what a regulated supply would cost, and it is that inflated price — not the pharmacology — that makes theft a means of funding use. The violent crime associated with the trade, meanwhile, belongs almost entirely to the illicit market itself, where disputes cannot be settled by contract or courts and are settled by force instead. Removing that market removes the violence attached to it. The inference from legalisation to greater use is also asserted rather than demonstrated. Critics of this argument point out that availability is only one determinant of consumption, and that jurisdictions which have relaxed criminal penalties have not seen the surges predicted. Nor does the correlation between heavy drug use and offending establish the direction of causation: poverty, untreated illness and a criminal record that closes off legal work all raise both. Finally, the argument proves too much — alcohol is legal, is associated with a large share of violent offending, and its prohibition produced precisely the organised criminality this argument fears.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The crimes cited are largely artefacts of prohibition rather than of drug use: illegal pricing drives acquisitive offending, and the violence belongs to an unregulated market that cannot use courts to settle disputes. [Rejecting P2] That legalisation would substantially increase use is asserted, not shown, and criminal penalties are only one influence on consumption; alcohol's history suggests prohibition itself generates the organised criminality being warned against.