The Cost of Drug Prohibition in Australia
(2005) The Cost of Drug Prohibition in Australia. In Proceedings Social Change in the 21st Century, QUT Carseldine, Brisbane.
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Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to measure the costs of drug prohibition in Australia and to examine the effects of prohibitionist drugs policy on the cannabis and heroin markets. The key argument will be that prohibition, rather than being a hinderance to the drugs black market, acts as an economic multiplier for the black market. Prohibition is a subsidy for the corrupt. This economic history was heavily influenced by Drugs, Crime & Society, the Report by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Crime Authority, hereafter referred to as the Cleeland Report (after its Chairman Peter Cleeland MP) which was the first government report to approach drugs as a commodity and to understand the drug trade as a market.1 It was a wonderfully numerate report: the first government report to estimate the size of drug markets, just as it was the first to estimate the cost of drug law enforcement. Because of their pioneering nature, Cleeland’s estimations were often rudimentary, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and later investigators, like Marks2 and Clement and Daryal,3 have refined these estimates. This paper continues the tradition of Cleeland revisionism, developing methods for calculating the value of the cannabis market and for estimating the cost of drug law enforcement, over a 25 year period. By comparing the value of the marijuana market and the cost of drug law enforcement over this period, this paper argues that the value of the cannabis black market has increased as a multiple of the cost of drug law enforcement.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper |
|---|---|
| RM Number: | 2006001786 |
| Status: | Published |
| Keywords: | Drug prohibition, economics; cannabis market, economics; drug law enforcement, cost of; heroin drought; marijuana drought; cannabis plague; heroin plague |
| Subjects: | 370000 Studies in Human Society > 370100 Sociology > 370107 Social Change 360000 Policy and Political Science > 360200 Policy and Administration > 360201 Public Policy |
| ID Code: | 3442 |
| Deposited By: | Bradbury, Stephanie J |
| Deposited On: | 03 February 2006 |
| Copyright Owner: | Copyright 2005 John L. Jiggens |