Legalize All Drugs! Reason Versus City Journal

Reason was joined by City Journal for a lively, thought-provoking discussion. The resolution: “Legalize all drugs.”  

Reason’s Billy Binion and Jacob Sullum argued for the affirmative, while City Journal’s Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual argued for the negative. The debate was moderated by Reason‘s Peter Suderman.

The discussion was recorded in front of a live audience at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C. A full video of the event can be found here.

0:00—Introduction

01:00—Andrew Heaton comedy sketch

9:35—Debate introduction from Peter Suderman

15:20—Jacob Sullum’s opening statement

19:45—Charles Fain Lehman’s opening statement

24:20—Billy Binion’s opening statement

28:16—Rafael Mangual’s opening statement

33:28—Moderator questions about the harmfulness of drugs and the harmfulness of prohibition

42:15—Is alcohol bad?

44:00—Should police be focusing on drug enforcement?

48:28—The failings of the war on drugs

53:30—Game: Legalize, Regulate, Ban

1:02:31—Audience Q&A

1:23:54—Jacob Sullum’s closing statement

1:26:00—Rafael Mangual’s closing statement

1:28:12—Billy Binion’s closing statement

1:30:15—Charles Fain Lehman’s closing statement

1:34:11—Who won the debate?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Peter Suderman: Hello and welcome to Reason Versus. It is so nice to see all of you here tonight. This is the debate series that pits Reason magazine against other publications in a battle of big ideas.

For this installment, Reason is taking on City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute. I’m Peter Suderman, I’ll be your moderator. Full disclosure: I do work at Reason, but my job tonight will be to try to be fair and at least mostly sober-minded. Which I think will probably be appropriate for this debate, because this evening our two sides will be arguing over the proposition: legalize all drugs.

Now, because this is a debate, there will be a winner, and that winner will be decided by you, the audience. The way this is going to work is that there will be two votes. You’re going to vote right now—that is, if you haven’t already—and then you’re going to vote again after the debate. The team that has shifted the most support to their side will win.

So if you have not cast your vote, please follow the instructions that are on the screen right now. And as you vote, I want you to think just a little bit about the resolution before us tonight. What exactly would it mean to legalize all drugs?

It’s a simple statement—just three words: legalize all drugs. But think a little more about those three words, and the complications and the questions begin to arise.

What exactly is a drug? Most people here would probably say that marijuana counts, and so does fentanyl. But what about performance-enhancing substances like steroids? What about birth control or Plan B? What about Sudafed or caffeine? Or what about something like Whippets?

If you don’t know what Whippets are, they’re the nitrous oxide fumes at the tail end of a whipped cream canister that the bartenders at the place where I worked many, many years ago used to like to experiment with. They make your voice high and they make you feel funny, and they are still technically illegal for recreational purposes.

So the word “drugs” covers far more substances than you might initially think. And that leads us to another question: What, practically, would it mean to legalize all drugs? Would it just mean the end of police action—what we think of as the drug war? Would it mean abolishing the FDA?

And finally, what does legalization mean—socially, economically, and practically? After all, Sudafed is legal, but it’s kept behind counters. Marijuana is quite legal in some places, definitely illegal in other places, and in some sort of murky middle ground in other places—all while still being restricted federally. And even fentanyl, the villain of so many of today’s political narratives, is approved for medical use. I may not be the only person in this room who has had fentanyl injected into them legally, by a doctor, in a medical setting.

So legalization might mean many things. For example, it might just mean no jail time for drug offenses. Or it might mean that big beer conglomerates become big pot conglomerates.

What I’m saying is the very terms here are up for debate and so are the social, and legal, and political consequences. Now, I have not conferred with either side about their arguments in advance. But any debate about drug legalization inevitably pits concerns about abuse and addiction and broader social harms against personal freedom, bodily autonomy, and the individual and collective costs of incarceration.

This is a policy debate with ramifications for police procedure and bureaucratic rulemaking. But for so many people—on both sides of this argument, publicly, it is also a deeply, deeply personal issue that has touched their own lives and the lives of their family members.

To discuss all of these issues and the questions that arise from them, we have four top-notch debaters here tonight. From City Journal, arguing against the resolution, we have Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual. And from Reason, arguing for the resolution, we have Billy Binion and Jacob Sullum.

All four of our debaters have written and debated extensively about drug policy and criminal justice in the past. Folks, this is going to be a great debate.

It is now time to close our initial vote and have that debate. So if you haven’t voted, your time is up. It’s over. We will start with opening statements, alternating between Reason and City Journal. Reason, let’s start with you. I believe Jacob Sullum, you’re starting out. 

You have four minutes.

Jacob Sullum: Humans like to get high. Their inclination to seek altered states of consciousness—frequently with the aid of chemical agents—is apparent throughout recorded history and across many cultures.

That urge, like the sex drive and the desire for food, can cause problems. The question is how the government should respond to those problems. In particular, whether the use of force is justified to prevent people from consuming politically disfavored intoxicants.

That sort of intervention contradicts the classical liberal principle that people are sovereign over their own bodies and minds. That’s a tradition that frowns upon paternalistic policies that aim to protect people from the consequences of their own bad choices.

Even if you don’t fully embrace that view, you should be troubled by the practical consequences of drug prohibition, which include violence, rampant official corruption, squandered taxpayer money, diverted law enforcement resources, theft driven by artificially high drug prices, the potentially deadly hazards of consuming iffy black-market drugs, long prison terms for conduct that is not inherently criminal, and the erosion of civil liberties.

Now, you can avoid some of those costs by avoiding illegal drugs—but not all of them. If you value the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, for instance, you should be alarmed by the long line of Supreme Court cases that have whittled away at the Fourth Amendment to facilitate the War on Drugs. Which is also the main factor driving the system of legalized larceny known as civil asset forfeiture.

The powers blessed by the Supreme Court build on the basic authority granted by prohibition, which legalizes police conduct that otherwise would be readily recognized as criminal. The casualties include people erroneously implicated in drug trafficking, such as Breonna Taylor; innocent bystanders, such as the toddler who was maimed by a flash-bang grenade during a drug raid in Georgia; and people guilty of nothing more than engaging in consensual exchanges, who are periodically killed by police during drug raids.

Prohibition also fosters violence by creating a black market where there is no peaceful way to resolve disputes. Although the resulting bloodshed is often described as “drug-related,” that is true only in the sense that the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was alcohol-related.

Also like alcohol prohibition, the War on Drugs has resulted in widespread official corruption. Such corruption is especially striking in source countries, but it’s also apparent across the United States, ranging from federal drug and border agents to prison guards and local police officers.

The inflated profits that motivate and subsidize bribery also explain why politicians have never delivered on their promise to stop the flow of illegal drugs, despite more than a century of determined effort. That risk premium gives drug traffickers a powerful incentive to find ways around any barriers the government manages to erect.

Instead of reducing drug-related harm, these efforts have magnified it in several ways. By artificially raising prices, prohibition encourages drug injection, which is the most cost-effective method of consumption but also poses special dangers. Prohibition drives traffickers toward more potent substances because they’re easier to smuggle. That phenomenon is reflected in the proliferation of illicit fentanyl and the earlier shift from opium to heroin.

Ramped-up enforcement of prohibition can always make the situation worse. Consider what happened after the crackdown on pain medication, which drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes that were much more dangerous. Even as opioid prescriptions fell dramatically, the upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated.

Prohibition makes life worse—sometimes a lot worse—for people who defy it. Those costs supposedly are justified by benefits to other people, the ones who would have suffered drug-related harm because of bad choices deterred by prohibition. That tradeoff is morally dubious, even if you accept paternalism as a justification for government intervention.

Suderman: All right, City Journal, choose your fighter. Charles Fain Lehman.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, thank you to the kind folks at Reason for having us. Thanks to the Howard Theatre—I’m pleased to see that there are addictive, harmful substances available in the back. You should avail yourselves of them. I’ll be more persuasive.

Myself and my colleague, Rafael, have two jobs tonight. One is to persuade you that drugs are bad, and the other one is to persuade you that prohibition works. The first one is easier, so I’m leaving it to him—although I think that our opponents are probably willing to concede the basic idea that drugs are harmful.

So it falls to me to argue that drug prohibition works and that the arguments against it don’t make a lot of sense.

To set that stage, I want to imagine the world without prohibition—just for a second. It’s a world in which I can walk to my local Walmart and buy fentanyl. Amazon will deliver meth to my door by drone. This sounds very appealing to some of you in the audience, but to others, not so much.

Major firms get to innovate in drug design because recall that all modern, destructive, deadly drugs were first invented by pharmaceutical corporations. They also get to advertise, hand out free samples. In general, the efficiency of modern, capitalistic free enterprise gets applied to the problem of getting people addicted to drugs.

Why don’t we live in that world? Well, the answer is prohibition. Prohibition is an application of the basic libertarian insight that government intervention makes markets less efficient—they work less well. Minimum wage laws make labor markets not clear. Environmental regulations make producers less efficient. And prohibition makes drug markets run worse.

It makes it harder to run a business because drug users lose access to sellers, lose access to  robust capital markets, to third-party businesses, to otherwise talented employees, and to innovation generally. For example, as I think Peter alluded to, many people in this room have probably taken fentanyl in a medical setting—certainly if you’ve had an epidural, you have. And yet it took 50 years between the time when fentanyl was first synthesized and its spread into the illicit market. Why? Prohibition.

The pharmaceutical equivalents of drugs like meth and cocaine—which can be obtained in hospitals or by prescription—are far purer than the product on the street. Why? Prohibition.

Heroin is extraordinarily expensive, even though it’s easy to make and the initial components are quite cheap. Why? Prohibition.

The other side is going to argue that prohibition does not work. This is sort of a totemic belief of the libertarians. It’s not true, but they do believe it.

We can look at real-world legalizations to know that this is not the case. All sorts of goods are successfully prohibited—whether it be raw milk, or fireworks, or endangered species.

More importantly, when you look at recent legalizations of raw milk or marijuana or sports gambling, we get the common-sense result. Which is that when you permit something, it becomes more widely consumed, and as a result, its harms are much more likely to obtain.

The other argument that we’ll hear tonight is that the side effects of prohibition are not worth it. They’ll insist that all prohibition looks like some of the worst excesses of the War on Drugs, or they’ll cherry-pick terrifying stories about children being assaulted by DEA officers. But the broad spectrum of real-world prohibition should challenge this vision.

Nobody is arrested for the sale of raw milk. In the benighted days of 2017, when you could not sports gamble nationwide, there were just 2,000 gambling arrests—most of them not associated with sports betting. Even during high-enforcement periods like the crack era War on Drugs, only between 2 and 6 percent of drug incarcerees were unambiguously low-level, first-time offenders.

The reality is that even the most aggressive prohibition does not look like the boogeyman it’s made out to be. Moreover, enforcement can be refined by policymakers. Legalization and the uncontrolled free market cannot.

So prohibition gets a bad rap. It’s maligned as clunky, dumb, pointless. In reality, it’s a simple, elegant tool for using one of government’s worst qualities—the way that it makes markets work badly—to our collective advantage.

So I encourage you to take the negative, and I look forward to a robust conversation.

Suderman: Billy Binion from Reason. You have four minutes.

Billy Binion: I’d like to start by talking about what ending the drug war is not. It is not an endorsement of drug use. It is not letting public spaces decay and turn into shantytowns. And it is not a refusal to enforce other criminal laws.

In a New York Times piece 2 years ago, columnist Bret Stephens summed up his opposition to drug liberalization in a way that I think has come to epitomize why a lot of people oppose drug liberalization. The column is about a thousand words, but I can sum it up in one: Portland.

Over the course of the column, Stephens relied on anecdotes about troubling behavior in Portland—including public drug use, feces on the street, and a couple engaging in oral sex on a block between Target and Nordstrom—all of which he attributed to the city’s lax drug laws.

But what if I told you that those things effectively have nothing to do with each other?

In recent years, we’ve seen a strange conflation between legalizing drugs and legalizing crime, generally. As if one requires the other. In the early 2020s, Multnomah County, where Portland is located, decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs. It also deprioritized prosecuting theft for anything under $1,000.

Now, when I say “legalize drugs,” I do not mean legalize theft—because those things are totally unrelated. There is no reason why ending this failed war, which has cost over $1 trillion, requires abandoning laws that protect public order.

We can and should enforce statutes against public drug use, sidewalk defecation, and public sex—which, for the record, is already illegal virtually everywhere.

But we should also talk about what the drug war is.

In a recent Substack post about housing policy, Charles astutely observed that the purpose of a system is what it does. The idea was coined by a British theorist named Stafford Beer. And the gist is that mission statements and intentions aren’t worth very much. What really matters is what the system actually accomplishes—reliably and repeatedly. That is its true function.

The purpose of a system is what it does. I think that’s wise.

So let’s talk about what this system does.

We’re told the drug war is about saving lives and curbing addiction. Yet what it does is drive users underground, where a total lack of quality control pushes them toward more addictive and deadlier substances like fentanyl.

We’re told the drug war is about helping kids. Yet what it does is break up families—sometimes depriving them of their parents—and expose them to dangerous substances too. 

Stores check ID. Dealers do not.

We’re told the drug war is about public safety. Yet what it actually does is fuel violence, turf wars, organized crime, and cartels by giving them a monopoly on supply.

And we’re told that the drug war is about protecting us. Yet what it actually does is erode civil liberties, militarize the police, lead to sometimes deadly raids on people’s homes—sometimes at the wrong house. And empower the state to steal ungodly amounts of money, cars, and houses from people using something called civil forfeiture, which Jacob mentioned—the practice that allows law enforcement to seize people’s assets, often without even charging them with a crime.

The purpose of a system is what it does. This system, this war, steals, kills, and destroys communities—as wars often do. Thus, that is its purpose. 

And it’s time to end it.

Suderman: Rafael Mangual, opening statement. Four minutes.

Rafael Mangual: Okay. I’m tempted to just say “Portland” and drop the mic, but I’m not going to.

Okay, so I am here to argue that drugs are bad. And I’m going to start by highlighting the fact that somewhere around 77 percent of those who reported using heroin in the last year had a heroin use disorder, while only 33 percent of those who reported using alcohol in the past year had an alcohol use disorder.

Now, our friends on the other side might suggest that these substances are mostly harmless. And I think it’s worth noting that about 92 percent of the more than 100,000 overdose deaths seen in this country every year are unintentional.

What does that mean? It means that the pursuit of the high for addicts is often so intense that it overrides our most basic survival instincts, leading many to tragically roll the dice with their lives.

Now, they might be tempted to argue that the problem of overdoses would be cured by legalization, because that would allow for more transparency with regard to things like purity and dosage. But an important counterpoint to that suggestion is found in the data on overdoses from perfectly legal prescription opioids, which saw overdose rates spike from about 1.5 per 100,000 at the turn of the century to just under 6 per 100,000 by 2024—a timeframe in which the number of emergency room visits related to prescription opioid misuse spiked by more than 150 percent.

So I’d like you all to consider the possibility that making similar and more harmful substances even more widely available than we made prescription opioids isn’t actually a very good idea.

Now, the fatal overdose toll is just one of a number of obvious societal harms that we would see if we legalized drugs. Another one is that we would see more consumption-related crime.

Now in 2016, the Bureau of Justice Statistics published a survey of prisoners in the U.S., and a whopping 39 percent of state prisoners reported being under the influence of drugs at the time they committed the offense that they were serving a sentence for. Inmates serving time primarily for a violent crime, it was 35 percent reported using at the time of the offense. That same survey found that 40 percent of state prisoners met the diagnostic criteria for a substance use disorder. In the general public, that number is only 16.5 percent.

Now, they might say, “But what about all the people who are serving time for drug offenses without any other violence? Surely, there’s little public safety benefit associated with enforcement in their cases.” Well no, not quite.

If you look at recidivism analyses published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, they show that about 75 percent of state prisoners who were released in 2008 after serving time for a drug offense were rearrested for at least one non-drug crime over a 10-year period. Over a third were rearrested for violent crime specifically.

Now again, they say, “Well, that’s because of prohibition because with prohibition come violent black markets.” Now, why are they violent? Because there aren’t any legal dispute resolution mechanisms of which parties can avail themselves. And that’s their story.

But it’s got some holes, right. First, it’s not at all clear that the black market would disappear if we legalized drugs. Consider the fact that 60 percent of the pot sold in the United States is sold on the black market, despite the fact that the majority of Americans live in jurisdictions in which pot is legal.

Second, they pretend that the only drug-related crime that matters is organized crime, which is why you heard about cartels. That’s why they point to figures like Al Capone during the Prohibition era to make their case. But while organized crime did increase during alcohol prohibition, psychopharmacological crime decreased enough to actually outweigh the increase in organized crime—which is why we saw the results from Prohibition see no net change in overall crime rates.

Now, I also want to highlight—because I only have a few seconds—the potential harms to children. What we see is consistent and significantly higher risks of things like sudden infant death syndrome for babies who are exposed to parental drug use while in utero. After birth, we see that children who survive infancy despite parental drug use see a range of life problems with respect to a whole host of outcomes. They have more behavioral problems, depression, anxiety, aggression, impulsivity, hyperactivity. They had reduced supervision levels, increased levels of family breakdown, lower parent-child attachment, poor relationship development with their peers, right. So I think that’s important.

And finally, I think it’s worth considering what we’ve already seen in the jurisdictions in which we moved toward legalization by reducing penalties for drug crimes and decriminalizing certain offenses.

So yes, Portland. Portland, which by the way is in the state of Oregon, which decriminalized all drugs in 2020 via ballot initiative, and in 2024, recriminalized them. We’ve already done small versions of the massive social experiment that our opponents want us to do. And every time we’ve done it, it has gone badly.

Please vote no. Portland.

Suderman: Okay, so very broadly speaking, I think we can sort of summarize the two sides and their arguments here. There’s a bunch of arguments that were made, but I think we can summarize this argument. The strongest points that I heard were, on the one side: drugs are harmful. And on the other side: prohibition is harmful.

And I want, in this next segment, I want our debaters to talk to each other and ask questions and press each other on these points. But I am going to start by taking my prerogative as moderator and asking a question or two—in particular about the question, the idea that drugs are harmful. Because this is something that, Charles, you said. You said that the other side would agree that drugs are harmful.

And so just respond to that—do you agree with Charles’s characterization that drugs are harmful? And if so, how does that change your argument? Billy and Jacob?

You need to hold your microphone, sir.

Sullum: Yeah, so drugs are not inherently harmful or inherently beneficial. They can be either one, depending upon context. They’re obviously beneficial to a lot of people, or otherwise they wouldn’t use them. People clearly are deriving benefit from drug use—so it would be inexplicable that they use drugs.

They also have hazards—no question about it. And I think part of our argument is that prohibition actually enhances those hazards. So if you look at overdoses among people who use pharmaceutical opioids—legally produced opioids that are reliably dosed—you know what you’re getting. Very, very small rates of fatal overdose among people who use those legally produced drugs, compared to what you see with black-market substances.

And as I mentioned, you can see that pretty clearly in what happened after the crackdown on prescription painkillers. It was cut by about half. So that was a pretty big accomplishment. But at the same time, opioid-related deaths not only continued to go up, but the upward trend actually accelerated.

And I think that’s a reflection of the fact that people are moving from reliably dosed substances—where they know what they’re getting—into a market where they have no— it’s highly variable and unpredictable. And that’s—it could be accidental—but you know, prohibition promotes accidents by creating all this uncertainty.

Mangual: But couldn’t it also be that the prescription opioids were just addictive enough that it created a problem that didn’t go away once the prescription opioids were more heavily regulated? I mean, we did see a nearly fourfold increase in overdoses on prescription opioids—which, as you said, were perfectly legal—between the turn of the century, where the rate was 1.5 per 100,000, and 2024, where the rates had jumped to 5.9 per 100,000.

Sullum: Yeah, I mean, typically those deaths involve mixtures of opioids—or mixtures of drugs. Sorry, mixtures of drugs, not just opioids.

Suderman: So when you say mixtures, just clarify exactly what you mean here.

Sullum: Mixtures of drugs. Well, for example, it might be with alcohol, it might be other depressants. In any case, I reject the premise that those drugs are powerfully addictive and irresistible or anything like that.

How many people here have taken legally produced opioids? Raise your hand. And I won’t ask you exactly why you took them, but did it end up destroying your life? Or did you find that you could take or leave them?

How many people did have their lives destroyed?

Suderman: I do think that most of the people in the audience, by definition… 

Sullum: My point is that these are very widely used substances, and addiction is a relatively rare outcome among people, for both medical and nonmedical purposes.

Lehman: That’s actually also true of the use of fentanyl, right? Indeed, my risk associated with the use of heroin—that’s true. But I don’t know if I’m going to get bogged down in this question, but it seems to me like the relevant fact is not that today the OD death rate associated with opioids is much higher than it was at the peak of the prescription phase of the crisis, but that the 15,000 to 20,000 OD deaths from prescription opioids at the peak of that phase is way higher than the rate of OD deaths from heroin in the ’90s, the ’80s, the ’70s, and the ’60s.

I tend to think that the explanation for that increase in deaths is largely unrelated to prohibition and control. But also, you’re not proposing making drugs like controlled substances—like oxycodone—you want them legalized. So I am skeptical of the claim that we should look at something like controlled medical substances and go, “This should tell us a lot about what the black market does as compared to the white market, the Wilson market, the retail market.”

Sullum: I mean, so look at the alcohol market, right?

Lehman: Which kills more people every year than all illicit substances combined.

Sullum: We can get into the alcohol thing. I just want to illustrate this one point about predictability and certainty versus uncertainty. When was the last time you went to a liquor store and you bought a bottle that said it was 80 proof, and it turned out it was 160 proof?

Lehman: Yeah, but that’s not actually the reason that people overdose, right? It’s not that they don’t know what they’re dosing. This is a thing that people believed for about 3 years in the middle of the 2010s. But if you look at, for example, the expansion of fentanyl on the West Coast, people switched to fentanyl because fentanyl is a better product. And you can tell this because you ask people and they’ll tell you, “Oh yeah, I like to use fentanyl.” It shows up in surveys.

Sullum: Yeah, I think the research is at least mixed on that. Because in people who were initially getting fentanyl as a booster or as a substitute… Look, this isn’t a systematic panel, but it’s interviews by researchers asking people in these markets where fentanyl was emerging: “Is this something you prefer? Is this something you wanted?” And most of them did not. They did not prefer it.

Suderman: So, it sounds like we have a quite strong disagreement about whether prohibition makes drugs less safe. And obviously Jacob thinks that prohibition just inherently makes drugs less safe. And you guys don’t really buy that argument, if I understand correctly.

Lehman: I think legalization makes drugs more potent. And we know this is true because we can look at the experience of legalization of marijuana, of sports gambling, to some extent psychedelics.

Any potency effect that comes from criminalization is swamped by the potency effect that comes when you’re allowed to innovate on the quality of an addictive product. Because the major thing that consumers of the addictive product want is potency.

Sullum: I’m going to push back on that a bit. Because if you look at the legal pot markets, it’s true—you see super-potent strains. One puff is enough, kids. One puff.

Suderman: It’s a debate and an advice column.

Sullum: But you also do see a range of potencies, both among the flower and among the food products, the beverages. You know, there was one company that was selling beverages—like a single serving of a soft drink was 5 milligrams, which is a relatively low dose. Sometimes they have little mints with like 2.5 milligrams, of course.

So in other words, you have a much wider range of choice. And it’s not simply all about potency; it’s about satisfying people’s demands.

Lehman: But the people who actually do the lion’s share of the consuming demand more potency over all other things.

For example, there’s a RAND survey of legalized users—I think in Washington—where they say, “How much more would you be willing to pay for pot that had been checked for safety, lack of heavy metals, et cetera?” And the answer is like $2 a gram. I think a third of users—I’m going to get the number wrong—but a third of users said they wouldn’t pay any more.

The overwhelming prioritization of people who are heavy users is that they want to consume more of the substance they’re addicted to.

Suderman: Okay, so I want to bring Billy in here—just try and get your perspective on some of this. Because you started your opening remark by talking about what ending the drug war is not. And you said, I believe, it’s not an endorsement of using drugs.

So how does your idea about not using drugs—this isn’t an endorsement of definitely using drugs, it’s much more about the practical consequences—how does that play into the potency argument here? The argument they are making—that if you legalize drugs, they will become much more potent and much more dangerous?

Binion: Well, I’ll just start off by saying—maybe Jacob and I diverge a little here—but I think there’s a nuance when you ask the question, “Are drugs inherently bad?” I mean, I guess it depends on the drug.

I mean, you acknowledge right away that alcohol is a drug. Say again? 

Lehman: It’s bad. Kills a lot of people.

Binion: I like wine. Also, I’ll be having some of that later. I’m going to be having something after this.

I think that, as a human race, we are always looking at the negatives. We see that with things like AI, we talk about any of these things—we’re always looking at the downsides.

I think alcohol is not necessarily a negative force—we might disagree on that. I’ve had a lot of great times drinking my wine with my friends, and I think that counts for something.

In terms of other drugs, I’m actually not really a drug user—with the exception of one: I like a shroom. But I don’t—

Suderman: That’s a Mario Brothers reference, just in case there are any DEA agents. I know we’ve got ATF not very far from here.

Binion: But I don’t even really use weed anymore. I mean, I’ve never tried cocaine, I’ve never smoked a cigarette.

So for me, I think this conversation—as many public policy conversations do become—it’s become extremely binary between people who kind of run these cartoonishly progressive jurisdictions. And I don’t mean to say that rudely, but there’s a reason, at least in part, why places like Portland look the way they do. And it is because they do refuse to enforce public order.

And I actually agree with you all in some sense that I am fine with enforcing a standard in public spaces. I think that is necessary, and I think that it’s good.

Mangual: Here’s the thing, though. There have been efforts to enforce in places like Portland and San Francisco—and sometimes they’re temporary. And what we see is, yeah they can clean the street up, like when Xi Jinping’s coming to town, but it doesn’t take very long for the problem to reappear.

And when you expand use rates, and addiction rates, and abuse rates the way that I think they’ll be expanded if you go full throttle on legalization, what you’re going to end up with is a much bigger public disorder problem that’s going to need to consume many more police resources. And soon enough, you’re going to be in a world in which that’s almost everything that the police are doing.

Now, in the country right now, we have a massive shortage in our police—in terms of resources available for enforcement—which is why you’re seeing curtailment in all sorts of areas. 

You’re just going to get more of that.

We don’t want to live in a world in which police officers are literally spending 80 percent of their time clearing up the people who are doing heroin leans between parked cars on Kensington Avenue.

Lehman: It is somewhat remarkable that the Reason Magazine position here is: there should be more policing of otherwise benign activity. We should have more cops out doing more enforcement in public for the benefit of it won’t be criminalized to possess hard drugs. I don’t really think this is the…

Binion: That assumes, though, that there isn’t already enormous resources—enormous law enforcement resources—poured into our current apparatus. I mean, the 2023 statistic: there were almost a million arrests for drugs.

And as Rafael mentioned—not all, just let me finish first—as Rafael mentioned, not all those are just drugs, but some of them are.

I mean, you could look at my good friend, Keri Blakinger, who works at the Houston Chronicle now. She was arrested because she was found walking around campus with heroin. She went to prison for years for that.

These people matter too. The choice should not be Portland—where, I mean, ostensibly we’re not enforcing much of anything. And some law enforcement officers will tell you that was a choice, because they feel like the legislators there hamstrung them.

And I’m not a progressive. I’m certainly not a Portland progressive. I’m not going to get on board with some of the, like I said, cartoonish ways that they have chosen to roll this out. But I don’t think there’s any evidence to say that would be 80 percent of what they were doing.

Lehman: I mean, so we do know that from the experience of marijuana legalization—research from the Kansas City Federal Reserve shows that arrests increase. I think it’s 11 percent following the total arrests not marijuana arrests. Those go down. The total number of arrests increase following legalization.

We know from the experiences of Portland and Washington—in forthcoming research that looks at the effects on crime—that a variety of kinds of crime increased in both Portland and Seattle, compared to 23 other control states at the daily level. Which means more aggressive policing was required.

It is certainly the case—you allocate a lot of police resources to drugs, or at least a lot of arrests are labeled as being for drugs. There are harms to that. There are harms to all government policy.

But my argument is: if you get rid of the thing that controls the source of the problems—i.e., prohibition—and you enhance the source of the problem, which is addiction to drugs and the sale of addictive drugs, then you will have to do more policing of the results. And that seems bad.

Binion: The difference is that prohibition is not getting rid of the problem, though. That assumes that it’s getting rid of it, and it’s not.

Mangual: So this is where they play this game where they sort of make the argument that prohibition doesn’t work because it doesn’t work perfectly.

The question is not whether prohibition completely eliminates drug use and abuse. The question is: would legalization lead to more drug use and abuse?

Right? We are not debating a proposition of whether or not we have the perfect drug regulation apparatus in place. We’re debating whether we should get rid of it entirely and do a massive social experiment in which all prohibitions and all restrictions on drug use go away—and that would be insanity.

Binion: So this is where—I’ll just say one thing to that, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to monopolize it—this is where the idea… I mean, I think it is important for people to know, Jacob pointed out in the beginning, the vast majority of the people who try drugs do not get addicted.

Do I concede that legalization will increase drug use? Of course it will. That’s just life. But you know, there’s a difference between doing cocaine at a party and becoming a coke addict.

Suderman: So, I want to move on just a little bit here. I think we’ve talked about some of the policing consequences. But these guys both, on the legalization side, they both offered a long list of practical consequences that went way beyond sort of the policing-incarceration effect, including very specifically consequences for corruption, increases in corruption, civil liberties, asset forfeiture—right? Enabling some of these policies that they said were a direct result of waging the drug war.

So how do you guys respond to this argument that, very practically, the drug war incentivizes having just sort of a much worse, much more corrupt public policy space?

Mangual: Well again, I mean, this is one of those times where I think it’s important to point out that our position is not to defend the current prohibition system as perfect.

I, myself, have written pretty extensively—although I think Charles and I part ways on this—that I don’t think civil asset forfeiture is good. I don’t think it should be done.

Right? So just as Billy says that drug legalization—thank you, nice, I wasn’t expecting an applause line at a Reason debate. But just as Billy says that drug legalization doesn’t necessarily mean you have to co-sign on all the disorder that we know is going to attend drug legalization, I would say that drug prohibition doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to sign off on the most problematic enforcement mechanisms. And I would say that civil asset forfeiture is absolutely one of those. I think if you want to take somebody’s property, you ought to charge them with a crime.

Lehman: I just think it’s a bizarre theory that public corruption on the part of the state is downstream of the War on Drugs—as opposed to it being the state.

My response—I don’t know if I’m talking about civil asset forfeiture, because it’s far afield, we can get into the nitty-gritty—I mostly, I sort of agree with Ralph. But the institution of civil asset forfeiture still exists if we legalize drugs.

The cartels still exist if we legalize drugs. They’re actually quite diverse businesses at this point. They do a variety of things.

Foreign corruption still exists if we legalize drugs. And indeed, part of the experience of legalization—to Ralph’s point—is that you can end up in an equilibrium where illicit distributors are better off, as they are in many pot-legalization states, than they were under prohibition. That isn’t guaranteed, but it is a thing that happens with some routine frequency.

Suderman: So do you guys buy any of this? I mean, do you think that there’s any merit to any of this?

Sullum: Yeah, look, obviously, you’re still going to have official corruption even if you legalize drugs. But it is a driver, as was noted during alcohol prohibition—of police corruption. I mean, it creates opportunities that would not exist but for prohibition.

Mangual: But every law has that.

Sullum: And also, in terms of civil asset forfeiture—actually, with that, this is really the main driver of the use of civil asset forfeiture. The excuses that police use—they bring in a drug-sniffing dog, it supposedly reacts to your car, now they’ve searched your car. Now maybe they find some cash, and they’re going to take it. And the burden’s on you to get it back, and so forth.

That’s very routinely driven by drug law enforcement. Same with all these Fourth Amendment cases.

So you could say, “Well yes, police will still be tempted to violate the Fourth Amendment. Police will still be tempted to take bribes, and they still might want to use civil asset forfeiture.” But the point is that the incentive for doing these things—and the opportunity—is much less in the absence of prohibition.

Mangual: I’m not sure I would say that it’s much less. But I also think it’s worth pointing out that—especially with respect to civil asset forfeiture—we have seen changes over the last decade in terms of that practice.

I mean, one of the most problematic aspects of civil asset forfeiture is what’s called the equitable sharing program, where state law enforcement agencies are encouraged—they’re given a federal incentive—to act as federal officers and engage in asset forfeitures. And then they get a kickback from the federal government with respect to what they take.

Now, the equitable sharing program was killed under Obama and was reinstituted in 2016 when President Trump took office—and that was when I wrote in opposition to that move. But the fact is that it did go away for a number of years, irrespective of the fact that drugs were still prohibited.

Binion: I just want to say one thing about asset forfeiture. I remember on Twitter—or X, or whatever you’re supposed to call it—Charles, you said something along the lines that asset forfeiture is just a libertarian obsession, but they’re mostly just stealing guns and drugs.

Which is simply not true and is belied by all the data. The vast majority of stuff seized via asset forfeiture is cash—usually under $1,000. But for certain people, I mean, they can also seize cars, they can seize homes.

There’s a woman right now in Oklahoma who allegedly made meth in her home, and she’s trying to make sure she’s not homeless now. And I think what often is not injected enough into this conversation is that for some people, losing your car, losing your home, losing your cash—your life savings—even just $1,000, it makes life really hard. To support yourself. To get to work. 

And you know what people who are homeless and can’t work and don’t have any money do? A lot of times they’re driven to drugs.

‘Legalize, Regulate, Ban’ Game and Audience Q&A

Suderman: All right, we’re going to finish out our debate here with some closing statements. They are going to be two minutes each—just two minutes. Please keep to your time. And once again, we are going to start with Reason. Pick your fighter.

Sullum: Okay, that last question was a good setup, because I think we should return to this notion, which I believe, but my opponents may not—that people should be sovereign over their own bodies and minds. That they should be able to control what goes into their bodies. As long as they respect other people’s rights, the government shouldn’t be violently interfering with them.

And we have to think seriously about what sort of problem is required to justify the use of force by the government—which regularly leads to horrifying results. Like people being shot dead by police because they were awakened in the middle of the night and they went and got their gun because they thought they were burglars. Or little kids, in this horrifying case I mentioned, being maimed by a flashbang over a $50 meth sale.

What kinds of problems are appropriately solved by violence in this way, and what kinds are not?

And I would argue that the sorts of problems that result from your own decisions with respect to your own body—that don’t violate anyone’s rights—are not the government’s business. And certainly not something that justifies the use of force or the threat of violence or the use of violence.

And that’s the bottom line for me. I do also think there are all sorts of bad practical consequences that flow from using violence in that way. But that’s the basic moral issue. And it’s the same with respect to alcohol as it is with any other psychoactive substance.

If you have moral objections to banning alcohol, you ought to have moral objections to banning other drugs as well.

Suderman: Okay, City Journal, two minutes for a final statement.

Mangual: So I think it’s important to just recognize that this idea of bodily autonomy really shouldn’t extend to a problem like addiction. Because at the end of the day, an addict really doesn’t have the capacity to make rational decisions about what he or she does or doesn’t put into their own bodies.

It’s why over 100,000 people overdose in this country. It’s why a 62-year-old retiree might—on an occasion when his wife is out of town—experiment with a level of OxyContin that he’s been taking for 20 or 30 years to the point that he overdoses in his sleep and passes away, despite being a functioning addict. The way that I had a family member pass away relatively recently.

The idea that enforcement of prohibition automatically means the most heinous uses of force is just nonsense. We prohibit all sorts of conduct in the United States. Very few people go to prison or jail for the vast majority of offenses that are criminally enforceable in this country.

The police use deadly force in about 0.003 percent of all arrests that they effect. They use physical force of any kind—deadly and non-deadly—in about 1 to 3 percent of all the arrests that they effect, depending on what jurisdiction you’re looking at.

The idea that the choice is between armed men with guns kicking in your door—which almost never happens and, you know, the sort of thing that we see in Portland, the latter is significantly more likely to come to pass.

As I said in my opening statement, we’ve already done this experiment. We’ve done it at smaller scales, and several times, in very different parts of this world. It has never, ever, ever gone the way our opponents say it will. Thank you.

Suderman: Billy.

Binion: I would like to start by saying that we actually have never tried this experiment. Because Portland was decriminalization, which is in some ways the worst of both worlds. You are giving people access to a supply that is still not regulated, and just kind of turning a blind eye to people who have small amounts of drugs. It’s not the same thing. I don’t want people to tell you that it is.

But one thing I believe very deeply comes from one of my favorite economists, Thomas Sowell, who said something that has come to define the way I view the world, which was: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Nothing could be more relevant to this debate than that.

I don’t disagree that there are downsides to legalizing drugs. You will see increases in use. The smell in some cities is a nuisance. But those things are vastly outweighed by the cons of prohibition—much of which the public never sees.

It understandably inspires a visceral and emotional response to see people on the sidewalk on drugs. But what you don’t see is the violence and crime from monopoly control or by cartels and organized criminals. You don’t see the families broken up by what is sometimes violent and disparate enforcement—including people whose sole crime is putting something in their body, which I believe they have the right to do, even if it’s a bad choice.

And you don’t see people like Regina Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle—who Charles will say I’m cherry-picking—but who were killed in their home during a no-knock raid after a crooked cop lied about a heroin purchase that never happened. You don’t see that many people who’ve had their home, their car, or their cash seized on suspicion of a drug crime—which can ruin their ability to support themselves, and drive them to use more drugs.

A lot of people don’t realize that heroin was legal in the early 1900s. Banning it was a well-intentioned—and what I would argue, progressive—response to what lawmakers saw as an addiction problem, most of which was among middle- and upper-class women who were getting their dose at the pharmacy. We banned it, and the result has been entirely predictable and catastrophic, as we saw with alcohol prohibition.

I’ll end with this. William Wilberforce was a member of Parliament in the 18th century, a devout Christian, and by today’s standards, a drug addict. He used opium daily. But he was also the man who helped bring down the transatlantic slave trade.

Under modern drug laws, it’s quite possible he would have been arrested, jailed, and written off as a common criminal.Thank you.

Suderman: Charles Lehman you have two minutes for the final closing statement.

Lehman: The reason that we banned drugs in the early 20th century was not because of benign addiction among middle-aged women—mostly in the South, by the way. It was because of that population. It was far from benign.

First of all, it was that population—people who returned from the Civil War, people across the West Coast, including many recent Chinese immigrants—who were suffering from profound and debilitating and often dysfunctional addiction.

We did the same thing for cocaine. We did the same thing for heroin. And when we did that, the problem dramatically diminished. Indeed, drug overdose deaths, by reasonable measures, declined more or less continuously from initial prohibition through the 1950s.

It was a success.

What we see everywhere that we have tried the liberalization of substances is that not only does use grow, but the harms of substances grow. It happened in Portland when we decriminalized—I’ve been there, it was not pleasant. It happened in Seattle. It happened in British Columbia—which is why all three jurisdictions have recriminalized possession.

It happens when we legalize relatively benign substances—marijuana, alcohol, tobacco—the harms grow.

And for every story that you can tell about somebody who did not deserve to be hurt by the police, who should not have been hurt by police—for every story that we can tell about those people—I can tell you 10 of the people whose families were destroyed, whose lives were wrecked, who lost their lives to drugs.

Drugs destroy the societies that they touch. We learned this lesson 100 years ago. Every 50 years or so, we have to relearn it. I think we are relearning it now a little bit faster than last time. But it doesn’t make it any less true.

That’s what drugs do.

Suderman: All right, folks, that is our debate. That’s right, let’s give a hand to our debaters: Charles Fain Lehman from the Manhattan Institute, Rafael Mangual, Jacob Sullum, Billy Binion.

All right. So it is now time to vote again. Get out your phones. We’re gonna bring up some instructions on the screen here. You are going to get to decide who is the winner.

And while you are voting, we’re going to go over something really important here—because your vote won’t just determine the winner of this important and serious and wonky policy debate. It’s also going to determine who gets the prizes.

Because we have prizes here.

Okay, let’s go through these while we figure out who’s going to get them. Again, you should be voting now if you have not voted yet.

All right, we have a bag here, and it does have—we’re trying to, you know, it’s Reason, we have our position—but we’re trying to take both sides. We have our “Dare to Keep Kids Off of Drugs” shirt. All right, great, if that’s your thing.

We also have—oh my goodness—this looks like an evidence bag. I am told, I’m promised, this is absolutely not full of drugs. Absolutely not full of drugs. What is this?

That definitely looks like drugs in yet another evidence—there are so many evidence bags. All full of drugs, and—

Lehman: I have to drive home across state lines.

Suderman: My favorite here—yeah, we’re going to find out if Charles is going to get these here. So I don’t even know how we got these, because my recollection was that they were illegal—but we have candy cigarettes, and I’m told they’re the good kind. I don’t know what that means, but whoever bought these for us was like…

Maybe they’re not candy. I don’t know, folks.

In any case, if you have not voted the second time, you now have about 10 seconds. And then we are going to close the voting a second time.

Please finish your second vote right now. Okay?

We are closing the vote.

While we tabulate and determine who the winner is and figure that out, we are going to watch a music video from Reason’s very own comedy singer, Remy.

Suderman: All right, are we ready? Are we ready with our results?

I think that’s a thumbs-up in the back, which means we are going to see the results of the first vote first. So let’s see what the very first vote was.

We had, let’s see, 38 percent for legalization, 43 percent against legalization, and 19 percent undecided.

All right, so remember, the winner here is not the team that ends up with the most votes, but the team that has moved the most votes toward their side.

So let’s see the winning results now.

Okay, so—legalization plus 13 percent. That means that Reason—Billy Binion, Jacob Sullum—have won this debate!

All right, folks, they get the prizes—definitely not drugs—here you go.

Thank you all so much.

We now have an afterparty. It is at Right Proper Brewery, which does sell alcohol. It is right next door. If you go out, it is to your left. That’s—just go right out the door and it is the first building to your left. You can get a beer or a club soda, whatever it is you like here.

I just want to thank our sponsors here: the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, the Foundation for Responsible Television, the estate of William K. Gordon III.

And also, thank you so, so much for coming and making this a great debate.

Have a great night, everyone.

• Video editor: Cody Huff
• Camera: Justin Zuckerman
• Camera: César Báez
• Camera: Kevin P. Alexander

The post Legalize All Drugs! Reason Versus City Journal appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/video/2025/06/27/legalize-all-drugs-reason-versus-city-journal/