Review of Drug War Heresies by MacCoun and Reuter

540 T HE LITERATURE THAT examines public policy toward illicit drugs is littered with ideological polemics of questionable academic merit. With an inflammatory title like Drug War Heresies, one might expect Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter's recent contribution to this debate to be yet another biased, politically motivated harangue. In spite of the title, however, MacCoun and Reuter's book turns out to be first-rate scholarship. It is an incredibly carefully researched, thoughtful book—far and away the best scholarship I have ever encountered on the subject. This is a book I would recommend to economists interested in researching the area, to those just generally interested in the topic, and to cocktail party bores who mindlessly preach either the necessity of legalization or the inevitability of social ruin if legalization were to occur. The primary goal of the book is to understand how current U.S. drug policies can be improved. The authors face two formidable obstacles in achieving that goal. First, many of the changes to policy that are typically discussed (e.g. legalization, needle exchanges, heroin maintenance programs) are not in-cremental changes to the current system, but rather, radical shifts in regime. Thus, one cannot reliably extrapolate empirical estimates of supply and demand elasticities under the current system to what might hold in these new policy regimes. How one could reliably estimate the parameters relevant to a world in which, say, cocaine was legalized raises difficult questions. The best one can hope to do, really, is to offer an informed guess. Second, both the data and the existing research on the topic are spotty and of questionable quality. A recent National Academy of Sciences panel on illicit drugs arrived at an extremely pessimistic conclusion concerning the state of research (National Research Council 2001). In spite of these obstacles, MacCoun and Reuter gamely forge ahead. The authors begin by laying the groundwork for thinking about current drug policy by carefully describing the facts and trends regarding the quantity of drug usage, criminal justice enforcement , and harms of different kinds associated with drug use under the current system. A few of these facts are worth noting. With respect to usage, more than half of Americans have tried illicit drugs at some point in their life, with marijuana by far the most commonly used drug. According to the Monitoring the Future data set, the fraction 1 Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, …