Name: The Economics of . . . Illegal Drugs
Uploaded: 2026-02-25T21:44:00Z
Duration: 3 min 9 s
Description: Harvard economist Roland Fryer draws on a deeply personal experience to examine what economics reveals about drugs, addiction, and the laws meant to contain them.

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Harvard economist Roland Fryer draws on a deeply personal experience to examine what economics reveals about drugs, addiction, and the laws meant to contain them. Photo: Free to Choose Network

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260225/35bb9ab8-c9bb-4f3c-8ee1-4d85edf3e77a/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Harvard economist Roland Fryer draws on a deeply personal experience to examine what economics reveals about drugs, addiction, and the laws meant to contain them.

The Economics of . . . Illegal Drugs

There is no topic where economics doesn't have some unique twist on the subject. My great-grandaunt and her husband, Lacey, ran one of the largest crack distribution rings in all of Central Florida. I can remember learning to count to 1,000 by 20 because my cousin didn't trust a lot of people, but he trusted me, and he wanted me to count his money for him. My grandmother would always chide them about the fact that there was no easy money, this is illegal. Their view was this was a rational decision. They understood the chances of getting caught. On the other hand, they made a lot of money doing it in a neighborhood where that kind of money would've been non-existent otherwise. They had a very different extracurricular activities, but they were family. It all came to an end when I was about 12 years old and I was going over my aunt's house to eat dinner with them. As we turned onto their street, I had a sense it wasn't good because of all the flashing lights, and they arrested my aunt, my uncle, and the siblings, and collectively, they got 100 years in prison. I had shied away from this part of my life, and then I saw Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy give a seminar on the economics of illegal drugs. And once I heard them talk about the conditions under which you'd wanna legalize even really tough drugs, like cocaine, or crack, or heroin, I was fascinated. There really is rationality in addiction, meaning people who are addicted to illegal drugs still respond to incentives. If you take cigarettes, for example, they are much more expensive now than they used to be because we have levied taxes on them. That has led consumption to go down. But if you're hooked on heroin, if the price goes up a little bit, you're not gonna change your behavior. But, who gets those revenues? Is it the government? In which case, we can think about how to optimally use those proceeds to prevent heroin use in the first place? Or is it the cartels or local drug dealers, in which case, you create a whole shadow economy full of violence that has no interest in curbing the use of these drugs. Prohibition has created a set of incentives that makes the drugs more potent, more dangerous. If my grandmother was still here, you asked her, "Should we legalize drugs?" She would go crazy. No way. She wouldn't want to hear any arguments. That's the beauty of this discipline, is it allows us to think through these incredibly important policy questions in a way that is rational and objective. Maybe it's better to admit that drug use is going to happen, but to apply taxes and regulation, so that over time, you can actually change addiction to these hard drugs through the artful use of incentives.

WSJ Opinion: The Economics of . . . Illegal Drugs

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