TY  - JOUR
AU  - Donohue, John J, III
AU  - Ewing, Benjamin
AU  - Peloquin, David
TI  - Rethinking America's Illegal Drug Policy
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16776
PY  - 2011
Y2  - February 2011
DO  - 10.3386/w16776
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16776
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16776.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John J. Donohue
Stanford Law School
Crown Quadrangle
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650/721-6339
E-Mail: donohue@law.stanford.edu

Benjamin Ewing
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511
E-Mail: bewing@princeton.edu

David Peloquin
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Tel: 952.457.3328
E-Mail: no email available
M1  - published as John J. Donohue III, Benjamin Ewing, David Pelopquin. "Rethinking America's Illegal Drug Policy," in Philip Cook, Jens Ludwig, Justin McCrary, editors, "Controlling Crime: Strategies and Tradeoffs" University of Chicago Press (2011)

M3  - presented at "Economical Crime Control Conference", January 15-16, 2010
AB  - This paper provides a critical review of the empirical and theoretical literatures on illegal drug policy, including cross-country comparisons, in order to evaluate three drug policy regimes: criminalization, legalization and "depenalization." Drawing on the experiences of various states, as well as countries such as Portugal and the Netherlands, the paper attempts to identify cost-minimizing policies for marijuana and cocaine by assessing the differing ways in which the various drug regimes would likely change the magnitude and composition of the social costs of each drug. The paper updates and evaluates Jeffrey Miron's 1999 national time series analysis of drug prohibition spending and the homicide rate, which underscores the lack of a solid empirical base for assessing the theoretically anticipated crime drop that would come from drug legalization.  Nonetheless, the authors conclude that given the number of arrests for marijuana possession, and the costs of incarceration and crime systemic to cocaine criminalization, the current regime is unlikely to be cost-minimizing for either marijuana or cocaine.
ER  -