Conservative commentator Brandon Brice notes the economic cost of the war on drugs

Conservative commentator Brandon Brice, writing in the Common Sense Conservative community pages of The Washington Times, notes the economic cost of the war on drugs:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently stated that the nation’s unemployment fluctuated between 7.8 and 7.9 percent in the last quarter, but rather than releasing resources and liberating the economy, Washington fights a war at home against Americans, leaving a swath of devastation through an already fragile economy. The question for most Americans becomes, where are our priorities? The million black men in prison don’t count as unemployed. Is the drug war a clever way of keeping black unemployment down?

It does not make sense to think the drug policy is being carried forward to enable the government to publish more favorable unemployment numbers. (The political benefit of reducing black unemployment numbers doesn't seem to be worth the dollar cost in local, state and corrections expenditures that politicians have to account for.) After all, the millions with drug convictions who are not in prison may still be trying to find work, and when they can't, they are counted among the unemployed. Prisoners serving sentences for drug offenses (or incarcerated for having violated probation or parole by relapsing and using drugs), number about 400- to 500,000 on any given day. They don't contribute that much to the unemployment rate. 

But the underlying point is critical: people with drug convictions are unable to fully participate in the economy of the nation. If you have a pension fund, a 401(k), a mutual fund, or any other kind of investment, the investment is worth less than it could be because of our drug policy's effect on automobile sales, housing sales, retail sales, and reduction of property values in "drug-infested" neighborhoods.

Ending drug prohibition is a wonderful issue in a political sense -- it is neither conservative nor liberal nor libertarian -- it is common sense.

Economists worried that people are dropping out of the work force -- Can't understand why!!

At the top of page A3 in the Sunday Washington Post (prime journalistic real estate), the report, "Vanishing workforce weighs on growth: Trend puts nation's economy at risk, experts say" gets half the story.

"Millions of Americans have gone missing from the workforce. Every month that those would be worker are gone raises the odds that they might never come back, dimming the prospects for future economic growth."

"...some aspects of the vanishing trend remain a mystery. Economists are struggling to explain why a large number of prime-aged African American men aren't working...declining participation to be 'disproportionately concentrated among the less educated and younger groups within the male and female populations..."

Black males are consistently arrested, punished and imprisoned for drug offenses at rates that range from three times to eleven times the white rates.

There are more than 1.5 million drug arrests each year.

“Crucifying” the “Other”

On April 1^st, Business Council Director Eric E. Sterling was published in the Huffington Post. Sterling draws parallels between the attitudes of policymakers that targeted the societal outcasts of a generation ago (e.g. gays and lesbians) and contemporary targets – marijuana users. Thirty years ago gays and lesbians were consigned to punishment, disease and exclusion.

In testimony before the Maryland House of Delegates last week, Sterling was debating Delegates who opposed reducing criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana to a civil offense. One delegate wanted to punish marijuana users with loss of jobs and college eligibility because he had concluded marijuana users no longer feared being jailed. These criminal convictions have no positive effect on reducing the rate of drug use, but they devastate the lives of millions of Americans who can’t get good paying jobs, becoming a drag on the entire economy.

The economic consequences of copious criminal convictions for drug offenses include decimating family earnings, obstructing economic mobility, and reducing corporate profits and expansion. With one conviction, one marijuana user is hurt with a lifetime of economic challenge. With almost a million marijuana convictions every year, our entire economy faces depressed earnings, lost consumption and lost profits in the hundreds of billions, and almost every investor and retiree suffers.

Read the entire article here.