Remember when you could walk into a pharmacy and buy a decongestant like Sudafed?, Alex Tabarrok asks:
The key ingredient was pseudoephedrine, a precursor to methamphetamine. A series of laws made it more and more difficult to buy or manufacture pseudoephedrine (despite it’s legality). So what did we get for our loss of liberty? A new paper (AEA) (free here) in the March AER says not much:
In mid-1995, a government effort to reduce the supply of methamphetamine precursors successfully disrupted the methamphetamine market and interrupted a trajectory of increasing usage. The price of methamphetamine tripled and purity declined from 90 percent to 20 percent. Simultaneously, amphetamine related hospital and treatment admissions dropped 50 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Methamphetamine use among arrestees declined 55 percent. Although felony methamphetamine arrests fell 50 percent, there is no evidence of substantial reductions in property or violent crime. The impact was largely temporary. The price returned to its original level within four months; purity, hospital admissions, treatment admissions, and arrests approached preintervention levels within eighteen months.
So, the DEA’s greatest success in disrupting the supply of a major illicit substance had no meaningful effect.