The use, purchase, and sale of narcotics is a global problem, and in this part of the world it grew sharply after General Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law years and the war in Afghanistan, spreading widely enough to become a genuine national crisis. Newspaper reports have put the number of drug users in Pakistan at roughly one million. Many addicts have taken their own lives, killed others, or turned to theft, robbery, and armed robbery to sustain their habit – the wreckage of full-blown addiction has driven a generation of young people into genuinely desperate circumstances.
At the same time, the drug trade has become a thriving illegal business, and it isn’t confined to the margins of society – lawmakers and politicians have been implicated in it too. Recent press reports have named members of parliament and, remarkably, officers of the law-enforcement agencies meant to be stopping this trade, along with members of the air force. And every incident that becomes public is generally understood to represent perhaps one case out of fifty that never do – which gives some sense of how large the real problem actually is.
Governments have tried, and largely failed, to bring this under control. Treatment centers exist in name, but plenty operate as little more than a legal racket preying on addicts and their families – advertising freely in the daily papers while quietly and systematically supplying the very drugs they claim to be treating.
The Case for Legalizing Drugs
The drug policy researcher Ethan Nadelmann has made an argument that runs directly against the instinct to simply enforce harder: that crime could actually fall if the ban on drugs were lifted. His reasoning starts from a simple observation – prohibition is what makes drugs expensive, and addicts turn to crime specifically to afford drugs at prohibition prices. That dynamic is what feeds organized crime in the first place. The government agencies tasked with enforcing the ban, meanwhile, become vulnerable to corruption and bribery themselves, turning enforcement into a technical, self-perpetuating apparatus that treats nothing and cures no one. If the laws were simply repealed, Nadelmann argues, a great deal of this crime would disappear along with them.
Drugs and crime are certainly linked, and most people assume crime is simply the automatic byproduct of drug use. Historically, though, laws written around drugs have generated more crime than drug use itself ever did. Nadelmann identifies four distinct ways drugs and crime connect – and argues that three of them would largely vanish the moment prohibition ended.
The first connection is to violence and related offenses – the one most visible to the public, and the one that would survive legalization regardless. It’s true that drug use can weaken a person’s natural restraint and sense of responsibility, feeding aggression and a greater tendency toward crime. But this isn’t unique to illegal drugs. Alcohol is more strongly linked to violent crime than any illegal drug, and alcohol is barely restricted anywhere. A 1982 survey in the United States found that 54 percent of violent offenders had committed their crime under the influence of alcohol.
The second connection is the crime addicts commit specifically to fund their habit – theft, robbery, burglary, prostitution – driven by the fact that heroin and cocaine, at prohibition prices, cost users thousands of dollars a week. Make the drugs themselves cheap, Nadelmann argues, and this category of offending should shrink substantially.
The third connection is the violence between rival trafficking organizations – groups that threaten, corrupt, and prey on each other because an illegal market has no court to settle its disputes, so it settles them with guns instead, carving up territory by force. This is exactly the pattern seen during America’s alcohol Prohibition, when illegal distilling, smuggling, and sale of liquor gave rise to gangs that raided each other’s operations the same way today’s drug traffickers do.
Illegal alcohol production remains widespread across this region and India, where partial bans on alcohol are in effect – and unregulated home-distilled liquor kills thousands of people every year along the riverbanks where it’s made and sold. In Pakistan, alcohol is fully banned for minority communities, but locally distilled liquor still kills members of those communities regularly, and it is bought, sold at inflated prices, and smuggled just the same – with staff at foreign embassies in Islamabad, customers, and excise officials all implicated in the trade at various points. A law that is, in theory, absolute, but is in practice unenforceable – much like restrictions on dowry and wedding spending that lawmakers themselves routinely ignore – doesn’t eliminate the underlying problem. It simply adds a black market and a culture of quiet lawbreaking on top of it, which is itself one more reason Pakistan’s legal system struggles with public respect for the law.
In the United States, drugs remain an enormous problem, and it is disproportionately poor and minority neighborhoods that bear the weight of drug laws without those laws actually stopping use. Ordinary users, compared to the trafficking organizations supplying them, are the ones bearing the brunt of enforcement, while in the neighborhoods where dealers operate, those same dealers are often treated as local heroes – models that children in the area grow up admiring and imitating, absorbed into the neighborhood’s idea of what success looks like well before those children are old enough to understand what they’re actually seeing.
Lift the prohibition on drugs, the argument goes, and the crime generated specifically by the trafficking trade should end largely on its own – just as it did when America repealed its ban on alcohol, taking with it much of the police corruption and organized violence the ban itself had created. The economist Milton Friedman made this case forcefully in the magazine Reason: “Lifting the ban on drugs won’t help the countless young people already trapped in addiction – those who’ve fallen into the hands of dishonest traffickers who exploit them. But it would end the corruption that drug enforcement breeds within the very institutions meant to enforce it, and it would free up the enormous sums currently spent on enforcement for other, more useful public purposes. The number of people using drugs is already in the millions, and these laws are simply losing the fight against that reality.”
There is a broader point buried in all of this: laws that are genuinely difficult or impossible to enforce erode public respect for the law itself, and spread a general culture of illegality through society. That dynamic is visibly at work in Pakistan today, not just around drugs.
The Case Against Legalizing Drugs
Opposition to lifting drug bans comes in two distinct flavors. An older school of thought, associated with the drug culture of the 1960s and 70s, argued: that drug use is a matter of personal freedom; that people have the right to decide for themselves what to use and what not to; that drugs aren’t as dangerous as they’re made out to be; that society badly needs them regardless; and that prohibition is essentially a conspiracy by the powerful against the powerless. That strand of argument has largely faded.
A newer, more pragmatic school makes a narrower case: that every method tried so far to stop drug use has failed, and that continuing to enforce prohibition costs society enormously with little to show for it. Critics of this newer argument say it is essentially born of exhaustion and pessimism rather than evidence – understandable as a reaction to decades of failed enforcement, but not actually supported once weighed against historical experience, social reality, and the genuine psychological and biological effects drugs have on the people who use them.
One argument for lifting the ban is that the war on drugs simply cannot be won, so the sensible move is to retreat before losses mount further. Critics respond that history and experience actually point the other way: what’s needed is tougher, more sustained action – genuine warnings about the consequences of addiction, paired with real rehabilitation programs for people already addicted. Lifting the ban, in their view, would only let both problems grow larger and drive crime higher still. They do concede one thing: law enforcement alone cannot win this fight. Education, prevention, and rehabilitation have to be part of the answer regardless of where the legal line is drawn.
Experience has also pushed back hard against the claim that legalization would simply make drugs cheap and therefore reduce crime. In England, a policy of legally supplying heroin to a small number of registered addicts nonetheless left a robust black market intact alongside it. The theory that cheaper drugs mean less crime doesn’t hold up either – if anything, cheap, freely available drugs tend to expand the population of users and, with it, the crime that follows addiction.
Amsterdam is offered as the clearest example: relaxed enforcement and easy, inexpensive access to drugs there is credited with increasing crime rather than reducing it, as addicts who once had to save up to buy drugs turned instead to theft and shoplifting once their habits grew alongside the easier supply. Critics argue that the criminal mindset and social attitudes this produces are themselves a consequence of drug use – a genuinely corrosive effect on how people think and behave, independent of price.
Finally, critics reject the comparison to alcohol Prohibition outright. Alcohol Prohibition failed, in their reading, because alcohol was already a popular, deeply established drink with a long cultural history behind it, and the ban itself was imposed in America without any real public consensus behind it in the first place – a very different situation from drugs that never had that kind of broad, longstanding social acceptance to begin with. Much of the pro-legalization argument, critics note, tends to come from legal and policy commentators rather than from criminologists who actually study the on-the-ground effects of drug policy – a gap worth keeping in mind when weighing either side of this debate.
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