Milton Friedman on the decriminalization of drugs: Did his theories stand the test of time?
By Kathryn Haggart
web posted October 13, 2025
If you turn on the TV to watch the news or walk downtown in your local metropolitan area you will almost certainly see and hear issues related to the drug crisis that permeates our culture and world. It is such a huge issue that international trade wars have erupted, much in part due to drugs. One question that is often debated in the discussion about drugs is whether drugs should be legalized or not. Milton Freidman, a Nobel prize winning economist wrote about the issue in his joint book with Thomas Szasz titled On Liberty and Drugs. The free market enthusiast and freedom warrior strongly argued for less laws surrounding drugs, especially concerning the decriminalization of drugs. In his short book, written at the dawn of the 1990s, he asserted that "Had drugs been decriminalized… Crack would never have been invented… There would be fewer addicts… The lives of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of innocent victims would have been saved… Fewer people would be in jails and fewer jails would have been built…" Friedman wrote this in a time when the decriminalization of drugs was a novel idea, one that hadn't been explored.
Today, this is no longer a novel concept. In British Columbia, Canada we have a perfect example of what happens when a government decriminalizes hard drugs. Marijuana has been decriminalized in places like Colorado, Minnesota and Canada. What happens is not what Friedman believed would happen. To paraphrase the immortal words of Inigo Montoyo, "I do not think that 'idea' means what you think it means." In this case, Frieman's ideas were idealistic and impractical. With the knowledge and experience that comes after seven years of fully legalized marijuana in Canada and hard drugs such as crystal meth and "crack" legalized in British Columbia for close to three years, data clearly shows that decriminalizing drugs is not the answer to solve the drug crisis our world is facing. Friedman's idealized beliefs have not stood the test of time. The decriminalization of drugs has not reduced the number of addicts, instead the number of people addicted to drugs has increased, the number of fatalities due to drugs has increased greatly and governments have spent millions upon millions of dollars providing safe injection sites and even supplying the public with drugs and drug paraphernalia.
Friedman believed that by decriminalizing drugs there will end up being less addicts. He likened the decriminalization of drugs to the end of the prohibition of alcohol, claiming that after the prohibition ended the number of those addicted to alcohol dropped. In Canada, in 2018 (the year that marijuana was legalized) 22% of the population used marijuana. In 2024, in the same graph the number of marijuana users in Canada had jumped to 26%. To have 26% of a population using a drug does not support Friedman's view that drug addictions will decrease after legalization. An estimated 9% of marijuana users will become addicted to marijuana. This may not seem like a large number of addicts, but based on this estimate, about 908 000 people in Canada (a population of 38.8 million) will be addicted to marijuana.
The second claim Friedman made was that the decriminalization of drugs would save lives. Narrowing our focus on British Columbia, a province of about five million people, which three years ago legalized the use of small amounts of hard drugs, it is easily discoverable that Friedman's claim is yet again debunked. In 2019, before the legalization of drugs, the number of people in British Columbia who died from drug toxicity averaged out to about 3 deaths per day. That number more than doubled in 2023 when the British Columbia government reported an average of 6.9 deaths per day due to drug toxicity. This jump in drug toxicity deaths proves that under the decriminalization of drugs, drug toxicity deaths did not fall, yet again refuting Frieman's argument.
What about the costs associated with substances and the decriminalization of drugs? This is a question that is always near the economist's brain. Thinking like an economist we must consider what is the cost right now (or in the past how much it cost) to enforce the prohibition of drugs. We must also consider how much it would cost to legalize drugs and weigh the benefits of legalizing against the negative effects. What is our opportunity cost? Would it be more useful, profitable and helpful if instead of enforcing the prohibition of drugs we allocated our resources elsewhere? This is the concept of scarcity. We only have so many resources, is it really in our best interest for our society as a whole to allocate them to the decriminalization of drugs?
Friedman believed that the decriminalization of drugs would create an effect that lessens the number of criminals in the judicial system and lower the number of jails needed. Unfortunately no data has been released in order to single handedly declare Friedman's theory correct or incorrect, however the number of lives lost should be considered. We have plenty of other information that will help decide whether the decriminalization of drugs is cost effective. Some of the concepts that may not be considered but are factors of the decriminalization of drugs are: the cost to keep other citizens safe from those experiencing drug addictions and violent acts while on drugs, the cost to the medical system to treat those who have overdosed or have developed long term illness from their drug use, the cost of safe injection sites for those using drugs, and thousands of other costs that are directly incurred and related to drug use. For example, in Toronto, Canada, (where hard drugs are not legal) The city spent over $33 000 of tax payer money on branded stickers to place on "safe" drug kits. Note that the aforementioned $33 000 did not include any of the actual drugs or equipment that was also included in the kit, it simply covered the cost of the stickers that went on the kit. Jumping back to British Columbia, in 2020, before drugs were decriminalized, paramedics responded to an average of 74 drug overdose calls per day. That number soared in 2024 when they responded to an average of 111 drug overdose calls each day! It is very costly to respond to these calls! Weighing the opportunity cost to legalize drugs it appears that it would be more valuable to allocate those resources elsewhere in a sector that would be beneficial to more tax payers, rather than just those who choose to use drugs.
Milton Friedman was an economist who was well esteemed for his economic contributions. Many of his theories have withstood the scrutiny of the past decades. The hypothesis Friedman put forth in regards to the decriminalization of drugs however is not such an issue. These hypotheses are idealist and have been proved to be false in the case of British Columbia and Canada as a whole. Friedman made his claim in an era when these theories were a novelty, having never been tested. If we considered the data from the past three to eight years as "experimental", the experiment would have failed. Frieman's theories are no longer novel. They are the reality, but not the whole reality. Friedman's theories are what would ideally happen if drugs were decriminalized. They are not what actually happens when drugs are decriminalized. In this case Friedman's predictions over promised and under delivered. 
Kathryn Haggart is an economics student and this is her first contribution to Enter Stage Right. (c) 2025 Kathryn Haggart
