The Wall Street Journal believes in "free markets." Of course it does! And on February 26, 2026, Roland Fryer made a pitch for applying some "free market" principles to our "War on Drugs." Click that link for a Wikipedia write up, outlining how that "War on Drugs" term is currently understood. Click right here for the Opinion column I'm talking about - but realize that my typical paywall warnings apply. The Wall Street Journal may, or may not, allow non-subscribers to read what Fryer has to say. Fryer, by the way, is an American economist and a professor at Harvard University.
I am not a doctrinaire believer in "free markets." Still, I think Fryer does make a couple of good points in his recent column, the concluding two paragraphs of which are reproduced below (emphasis added):
There is something deeply peculiar about a country that considers itself the global champion of free markets but refuses to apply market logic to drug policy. In November 2025, the Congressional Budget Office’s director testified that he had no evidence the interdiction campaign has affected drug use or prices in the U.S. A classic RAND Corp. study found decades ago that treatment is 23 times as cost-effective as source-country control and 10 times as cost-effective as interdiction. The data aren’t ambiguous. They are ignored.
At some point, a great nation must follow the evidence—even when the evidence leads somewhere politically inconvenient. Every administration for 50 years has exposed its citizens to more violence, more incarceration and more death rather than confront the basic economics of drug markets. The evidence isn’t wrong. Our policy is.
What Fryer is saying is that those addicted to drugs need help, and that helping those who are addicted, as opposed to prosecuting them as criminals, will work out better for everyone - and even when plain old "economics" is concerned.
You can read the economic arguments in Fryer's Opinion column. A law enforcement "War" against drugs (and those who use them) isn't, he says, citing statistics, a winning strategy. For another idea, you might unbottle whatever store of empathy you have available, and find out that taking care of people who have a problem that affects not only them, their family and friends, but all of us, is actually a better and more effective - and a more "cost effective" - way to confront what is a truly serious public problem.
If I were president, or governor (and we all ought to think about ourselves that way, as we think about what it means to be an effective citizen in a system that promotes "self-government"), I believe that Fryer's proposed approach would be worth a really serious try!
https://www.ukatlondonclinic.com/drug-addiction/heroin/
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