9 ~,~i - National Criminal Justice Reference Service

98 Ethan A. Nadelmann
The great advantage of this model is that it eliminates virtually all
of the direct and indirect costs of drug prohibition: the many billions
of dollars spent each year on arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating
hundreds of thousands of Americans, the diversion of scarce governmental
resources from dealing with other, more immediately harmful,
criminal activities, the tens of billions of dollars earned each year
by organized and unorganized criminals, much of the violence,
corruption and other criminal activity associated with the illicit drug
markets, the distortion of economic incentives for inner-city residents,
the severe problems posed by adulterated and otherwise
unregulated drugs, the inadequate prescription of drugs for the
treatment of pain, the abundant infringements on Americans' civil
liberties, and all the other costs detailed in the extant literature on
drug prohibition and legalization.
The great disadvantage of the supermarket model is its invitation
to substantial increases in both the amount and the diversity of
psychoactive drug consumption. What needs to be determined as best
as possible are the magnitude and nature of that increase and its
consequences. Among the more explicit assumptions of the legalization
analysis is that the vast majority of Americans do not need drug
prohibition laws to prevent them from becoming drug abusers. By
contrast, prohibitionists typically assume that most Americans, and
at the very least a substantial minority, do in fact need such
laws--that but for drug prohibition, tens of millions more Americans
would surely become drug abusers. The supermarket model provides
no immediate insights into which perspective is closer to the truth,
but it does suggest two important approaches on analyzing the
implications of a free market.
First, it is imperative that analysts broaden their horizons to
examine not just potential changes in the consumption of drugs that
are currently illicit but changes in the cumulative consumption of all
psychoactive substances. Virtually all human beings consume psychoactive
substances. Alcohol and caffeine are certainly the two most
common in the United States today, followed by nicotine, marijuana,
and a variety of the more popular prescription drugs used to alleviate
feelings of depression and anxiety. With the notable exception of
alcohol, which has retained its preeminent position throughout the
history of American psychoactive drug consumption, all other drugs
have witnessed substantial changes in their levels of consumption.
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