Doctor Tony Beatton
Visiting Fellow, Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

There is insufficient evidence to say that decriminalising drug helps wellbeing, because this has occurred in few jurisdictions. Across most countries, we first have to make a choice as a society whether drug use is a crime or a health malady. If a crime, then I suppose nothing will change. If a health malady then we need to treat drug use much as we treat alcohol dependence; apply health services to help the people and increase their wellbeing, instead of the justice system which punishes them and makes them unhappy. Given the drug decriminalization evidence I have seen (which is not a lot) I would argue that far more harm is done to wellbeing by alcohol: reduced life expectancy; absence from work; reduced work performance; higher health costs; domestic violence, and; broken families. All this makes us unhappy. Yet we willingly accept the market for alcohol and tax its purchase, and, apply (a portion) of those taxes to alcohol prevention programs (albeit not very efficiently).

Professor Mariano Rojas
Professor of Economics, Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla

"The 'decriminalization of drugs' may substantially contribute to raise people's well-being in many states. The best way to understand this is by recognizing that the criminalization of drugs is generating a lot of problems that threat people’s well-being: First, the criminalization of drugs creates an illegal industry with the financial capacity to corrupt all layers of government, from the police to the highest judicial and political spheres of a state. Second, the ‘criminalization vision’ hinders the possibility of addressing drug consumption as both a social and a public health problem; this makes it more difficult to reduce the consumption of drugs and to deal with the real social problems which are behind mass drug consumption. Third, the strategy of fighting production rather than fighting consumption has led to many well-being threats in producing countries, mostly associated to the rise in violence.
Corruption, violence, and lack of efficient actions to reduce consumption constitute major threats to the well-being of many populations in the world. The ‘decriminalization’ of drugs does not eliminate all threats, but it is a step in the right direction; it needs to be combined with an efficient strategy to reduce drug consumption.
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Professor Arie Kapteyn
Professor of Economics, University of Southern California

Drug use is sometimes referred to as a "victimless crime". So at the very least it makes little sense to punish the drug user. Rather one may want to help drug users in some form or another if it has adverse personal consequences. The situation with drug trafficking is different as this may indeed do harm to others, e.g. by turning people into addicts

Professor Arthur Grimes
Chair of Wellbeing and Public Policy, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

The people who are hurt by ant-drug laws are often in marginalised groups who are penalised further through the legal system. Removal of the stigma and penalties associated with criminal drug use will help many people in these communities. It also reduces the hold that organised crime has over these people.

Professor Martin Binder
Professor of Socio-Economics at Bundeswehr University Munich

I think the short-run effects from decriminalization of drugs on well-being would have to have been positive, but I'm not aware of good evidence on the long-run costs and benefits associated with such initiatives; and I would assume this to be a tricky question to answer, considering for example the quite harmful long-run effects of legal drug use such as cigarettes.

Professor Mark Wooden
Professorial Research Fellow and Director of the HILDA Survey Project, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic and Social Research, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne

"I confess this is far outside my area of expertise, but the evidence to date, as summarised in Schein et al (BMJ Open 2020), does not support the conclusion that drug decriminalisation and associated legal reform has led to any marked change in drug use, and that the impacts on other outcomes are mixed, but if anything suggest harmful effects are more likely. On the positive side, studies of crime suggest either beneficial or no effects following decriminalisation. On the negative side, studies also tend to find that the incidence of driving under the influence of the regulated drug, hospital admissions, and cases of overdose involving the regulated drug all rise. Involvement in the criminal justice system has also been found to rise, though the evidence here is equally balanced between those finding harmful effects and those finding no effects. The evidence on mental health impacts (4 studies) also suggests no beneficial effects – with one study reporting harmful effects, two mixed effects, and one no effect.

But what we perhaps learn most from his review of research is that we still do not know much. Most research has focussed on decriminalisation of cannabis (mostly in the USA), and most has been focussed on impacts on prevalence of use. Studies on physical health impacts, for example, are extremely rare (Schein et al only identify one study, and that study use a convenience sample with an n of just 34).

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Professor Gigi Foster
Professor, School of Economics, UNSW School of Economics

I have yet to see any compelling evidence from history that any country's movement towards criminalisation of drugs has resulted in wellbeing gains. By contrast, there is substantial evidence that movements towards decriminalisation of drugs in several countries have delivered wellbeing gains in important areas like health, violence, and mental wellbeing.

Professor Ronnie Schob
Professor, School of Business and Economics, Freie Universitat Berlin

It reduces both exclusion and individual risks without promoting drug addiction

Professor William Tov
Associate Professor of Psychology at Singapore Management University

It is likely that criminalizing drug use exacerbates existing inequalities insofar as people who are less wealthy, less educated, and minorities tend to be prosecuted more often than people with higher status. Thus decriminalization policies are generally a positive development--but with the caveat that they are accompanied by adequate support structures for those who suffer from drug addiction. The costs that would go toward prosecuting and imprisoning drug users need to be invested in programs that help them to recover and lead more productive lives.

Professor Ruut Veenhoven
Professor of Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam

It is part of a wider change to greater personal freedom, which makes that more people come to live a life that fits them. Tough this freedom also involves negative effects, such as in this case drug dependency, the positive effects of greater freedom dominate.

Professor Paul Frijters
Professorial Research Fellow, CEP Wellbeing Programme, London School of Economics

"Important examples of decriminalisation are the experiments in Portugal, where they found that decriminalisation of hard drugs reduced both the use of hard drugs, the numbers of drug-related deaths, and the level of crime (Hughs and Stevens 2007). For many decriminalisation changes around the world, a recent review article by Scheim et al. (2020) also found no negative effects on public health, whilst the positive effects on crime levels and prison levels are clear: Gavrilova et al. (2019) for instance found that legalised marijuana in the US was providing a cheap legal alternative to illegal drugs, diminishing crime along the Mexican border. Kalbfluss et al. (2018) thus also find that decriminalisation reduces the length of time spent in bad mental health.
So the available evidence suggests that decriminalisation of drugs reduces crime, reduces harm of hard-drugs, and increases mental health and the number of people going into rehabilitation. That makes it pretty certain that decriminalisation delivers wellbeing gains.

Hughes, Caitlin Elizabeth and Stevens, Alex (2007) The effects of the decriminalization of drug use in Portugal. Discussion paper. The Beckley Foundation, Oxford (KAR id:13325)
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/9/e035148.abstract
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12521
Kalbfuß, Jörg, Odermatt, Reto and Stutzer, Alois (2018) Medical marijuana laws and mental health in the United States. CEP Discussion Papers (CEPDP1546).
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Professor Maurizio Pugno
Full Professor of Economics, University of Cassino

When the fight against drug use was pursued, no significant results were achieved, and if achieved interventions were very costly (Felbab-Brown, 2008, Brookings). This does not imply that policies of decriminalization of drugs reduce drug use and increase people's well-being. My guess is that the use of drugs is rather inelastic to their de/criminalization.

Professor John Helliwell
Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of British Columbia

Decriminalization has helped to deliver more addicts into effective treatment programs, and to improve the safety of street drugs in the process.

Professor Wenceslao Unanue
Associate Professor, Business School, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez

"Under the standard economic theory, we may assume that decriminalization of drugs would increase drugs supply (e.g. lower costs of crime) and would increase drugs demand (lower costs of illegal consumption). Thus, we may expect higher drugs consumption. Is it good for well-being?

From a psychological point of view, well-being and happiness has been conceptualized from 2 traditions: Hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.

Hedonic well-being refers to feeling pleasure, avoiding pain, and having a high life satisfaction.

Eudaimonic well-being refers to the Aristotle view of a good life. For example, edaumonic well-being includes meaning in life, self-realization, autonomy, competence and good relationships (among others).

Further, drug consumption may increase (at least at the beginning) pleasure and positive emotions, such as joy and short-term happiness. Additionally, people´s feeling of freedom to decide what to do may also increase on the population. Thus, hedonic well-being may increase in the short run.

However, it is clear to me that in the medium-long term, an addict person will be affected negatively their ability to feel autonomous, competent and building enduring and solid relations. Moreover, it would be difficult to find meaning in life and self-realization. Additionally, drug consumption may affect not only our mind, but also our physical condition and our soul. If this happen, stronger negative effects may be observed in both types of well-being.

Based on the above-mentioned, I think that the costs of drugs decriminalization are higher than the benefits for well-being. Please note that my answers assumed no well-design actions from public policies to control the costs of drug´s depenalization.
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Doctor Tony Beatton
Visiting Fellow, Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

I am strongly of the opinion that drug use should be decriminalised. In my country the bike gangs are major supply chains for drugs. Quality is variable, people die from contamination. The bikers fight for access to markets, many people die. Society gets to clean up the mess by bearing large police & justice cost/resources to catching and lock up the crims, and some users; instead of applying those funds to the treatment of drug-related maladies. Why can’t cannabis, heroin and all the other drug choices be available be provided through the existing public health provision system? The doctors and hospitals will happily accept the extra revenue; the chemists will see increased trade, which will make them happy; the general public will happily accept the extra tax revenue; the drug user will happily avoid jail, they may even get a secure roof over their heads (having a home makes us happy), but; perhaps the drug squad will not be happy when they are sent back to the streets to help our children safely cross the road to school.

Professor Mariano Rojas
Professor of Economics, Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla

"I do copy my previous comments: The 'decriminalization of drugs' may substantially contribute to raise people's well-being in many states. The best way to understand this is by recognizing that the criminalization of drugs is generating a lot of problems that threat people’s well-being: First, the criminalization of drugs creates an illegal industry with the financial capacity to corrupt all layers of government, from the police to the highest judicial and political spheres of a state. Second, the ‘criminalization vision’ hinders the possibility of addressing drug consumption as both a social and a public health problem; this makes it more difficult to reduce the consumption of drugs and to deal with the real social problems which are behind mass drug consumption. Third, the strategy of fighting production rather than fighting consumption has led to many well-being threats in producing countries, mostly associated to the rise in violence.
Corruption, violence, and lack of efficient actions to reduce consumption constitute major threats to the well-being of many populations in the world. The ‘decriminalization’ of drugs does not eliminate all threats, but it is a step in the right direction; it needs to be combined with an efficient strategy to reduce drug consumption.
"

Professor Arie Kapteyn
Professor of Economics, University of Southern California

since "well-designed" is not defined, it is hard to disagree.

Professor Arthur Grimes
Chair of Wellbeing and Public Policy, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

I am strongly of the opinion that drug use should be decriminalised. In my country the bike gangs are major supply chains for drugs. Quality is variable, people die from contamination. The bikers fight for access to markets, many people die. Society gets to clean up the mess by bearing large police & justice cost/resources to catching and lock up the crims, and some users; instead of applying those funds to the treatment of drug-related maladies. Why can’t cannabis, heroin and all the other drug choices be provided through the existing public health provision system? The doctors and hospitals will happily accept the extra revenue; the chemists will see increased trade, which will make them happy; the general public will happily accept the extra tax revenue; the drug user will happily avoid jail, they may even get a secure roof over their heads (having a home makes us happy), but; perhaps the drug squad will not be happy when they are sent back to the streets to help our children safely cross the road to school.

Professor Martin Binder
Professor of Socio-Economics at Bundeswehr University Munich

I think this would be heavily dependent on the type of drug one considers. Again, short run-effects could be positive when considering a reduction of crime associated with procurement, lower incarceration rates, police being able to focus on other crimes etc. I'm just not sure of the overall effects on the population in the long-run, which would depend on how many people take up legalized drug use and how negatively this may or may not impact their lives.

Professor Mark Wooden
Professorial Research Fellow and Director of the HILDA Survey Project, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic and Social Research, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne

My (uniformed) prior was that well designed interventions would indeed lead to well-being gains, but in light of the existing empirical evidence, I have had to revise that. My strong expectation was that decriminalisation of drugs (including hard drugs) should enhance population well-being through reduced rates of crime and through improved economic and health consequences for drug users. The evidence to date, however, suggests that the expected health benefits may not be forthcoming, and that there may be other adverse consequences -- notably an increased incidence of driving under the influence. Decriminalisation will thus need to be accompanied by other policy interventions to counter these unintended consequences. And clearly a lot more research is needed before we can say anything about long-term impacts with confidence.

Professor Gigi Foster
Professor, School of Economics, UNSW School of Economics

"Some may quibble with decriminalising ""hard drugs"", and this must be done carefully so that young people do not receive the message that it's either expected or in their interests to use mind-altering and/or addictive drugs on a regular basis. Yet once again, the evidence from the Netherlands shows that the decriminalisation of hard drugs can be done well and can bring wellbeing gains. This is true not just for recreational usage, but in medicine, e.g., in the supervised treatment of resistant PTSD (e.g., in war veterans with suicidal ideation) with hallucinogens, which has shown great efficiency and effectiveness but continues to be banned in many countries.

The goal should not be to remove the stigma associated with using drugs - that stigma is arguably useful in promoting wellbeing - but rather to bring into social visibility the dimensions of humans' problems with drugs, such that they can be more directly addressed by our institutions rather than occurring in the shadows and out of reach of social goodwill. To channel all of that goodwill only into stigmatisation and warnings against drug use is to neglect the real problems faced by drug users today, and the wider problem of harmful drug trafficking networks. Moralising, monitoring, and punishment at the micro-level is an approach to addressing these problems that has been shown not to work - which should come as no surprise, given the natural limits of these activities - but fundamentally changing the industry by legalising, regulating, and monitoring distribution at the meso-level has been shown to be able to reduce the aggregate negative effects of drugs, when done well. "

Professor Ronnie Schob
Professor, School of Business and Economics, Freie Universitat Berlin

It helps (re-)integrating drug addicted, alleviates the pain for the relatives and reduces the cost of fighting drug dealing.

Professor William Tov
Associate Professor of Psychology at Singapore Management University

Decriminalization cannot simply be a change in how drug possession and drug use are handled by legal institutions. It must come with an added investment in the lives that are affected by drug abuse -- this includes the larger community that users come from. In addition to mental health treatment and support, governments must attend to broader inequities in economic opportunities since poverty can put individuals at greater risk for substance abuse. If people are not only treated for drug abuse but are also able to find work and become financially independent, then there is greater hope for improving their wellbeing in the long run.

Professor Ruut Veenhoven
Professor of Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam

The history of decriminalization of alcohol suggest that gains will outweigh losses

Professor Paul Frijters
Professorial Research Fellow, CEP Wellbeing Programme, London School of Economics

"The evidence on the past is clearly that decriminalisation of drugs, as done in Portugal and the US, has improved the wellbeing of the population. There are many other countries in Europe, Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America where there are huge problems with hard drugs because of the proceeds to crime and the health effects of criminalised drugs use. It seems very likely that similar benefits are available to those countries as were gained by Portugal and decriminalising US States.
The one additional element to look out for is that medicalised drug use (basically opiods on prescription) can be as bad as criminalised drugs use. Hence one wants to avoid medicalising drugs (the 'opiod crisis') use whilst decriminalising it, an issue discussed in Soelberg et al. (2017).

https://doi.org/10.1213/ANE.0000000000002403 "

Professor Maurizio Pugno
Full Professor of Economics, University of Cassino

"I would Completely Agree if decriminalization of drugs was preceded and accompanied by policies for well-being, including economic, social, and health policies. Indeed, drugs are attractive and push people into a trap if they already have low levels of well-being.
The unfortunate grand ‘natural experiment’ in the US shows this. Faced with an increase in the ease with which to obtain drugs (opioids, new heroin), only a group of Americans since about 2000 includes increasingly intensive users to the point of becoming heavily addicted. This group is made up of people who are less educated, earn less labour income than their parents, lose their jobs in the middle of their career, so that they lose their status and join people who are already at the bottom of the social scale (Case and Deaton 2017, Brookings Papers of EA; Dasgupta et al., 2018, Am J Public Health 108:182–186).
A radical policy to reduce drug consumption would promote education, especially for disadvantaged people. Heckman et al. (2006, Jou Lab Econ) shows, by using a national longitudinal survey, that schooling strengthens both cognitive and noncognitive skills, which, in their turn, reduce marijuana use."

Professor John Helliwell
Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of British Columbia

Especially opioids require further regulation and controlled access to dampen the current crisis in many communities. The current situation is damaging to the well-being of the users, their families, and the communities in which they are living.

Professor Wenceslao Unanue
Associate Professor, Business School, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez

"Based on my previous response, the answer is it depends. I believe that the costs of hard-drugs decriminalization are much higher than the benefits. Thus, I completely disagree in terms that decriminalization of hard-drugs, even if they are well-designed, could be expected to lead to net wellbeing gains in the population.

However, if we are analyzing soft-drugs decriminalization, my answer is different. I think that public policies (education, setting limits to the consumption, dealers’ control, quality control), if they are well-designed, could compensate the costs in terms of well-being mentioned in question 1. In this sense, decriminalization may decrease police deaths, violence and so on. In addition, it may increase people´s feeling of freedom. Thus, the higher consumption (as a result of the decriminalization) of soft-recreational drugs may, theoretically, lead to net hedonic well-being gains. Nonetheless, again, I still think that eudaimonic well-being (meaning, autonomy, competence, etc.) will decrease. Because of all of that, my final answer is I neither agree nor disagree.

To make a summary of questions 1 and 2, I´d like to cite Vicknasingam et al. (2018). The authors conducted a systematic review on decriminalization research, which led them to compare seven articles that discuss decriminalization against 57 papers on legalization. The authors mentioned that “Scientific evidence supporting drug addiction as a health disorder and the endorsement by the UN strengthen the case for decriminalization” (p. 300). Nonetheless, they also said that “studies reporting on the positive outcomes of decriminalization remain scarce” (p. 300). My own interpretation is that we need more evidence to support decriminalization, despite it is the current UN approach.

References

Vicknasingam, B., Narayanan, S., Singh, D., & Chawarski, M. (2018). Decriminalization of drug use. Current opinion in psychiatry, 31(4), 300-305.
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