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I can understand the people who look at the crime that results from drug prohibition and try to estimate that it is higher than would be from increased drug usage in the population. Reasonable minds can estimate those factors differently. What I can't understand is this seemingly pervasive opinion that increasing costs in a market somehow doesn't affect equilibrium quantity. Some people go so far as to say that decreasing costs would lower equilibrium quantity, which is even more absurd. At least with the former, one could have the faintest of theoretical support if they posited a totally inelastic demand curve, one that could not even be shifted by applying/removing literal criminal penalties. This still seems like a pretty whack assumption, but that's what you'd need to even get the weakest version of this sort of claim.
You're not thinking marginally. Any demand curve has "high value consumers". The "addicts", so to speak. They're the ones all the way up at the top left part of the curve. Literally no other product in existence leads people to reason by way of, "There are some high value consumers of this product; therefore, the entire demand curve is nearly perfectly price inelastic." None.
Years back, in the old old place, we analyzed published estimations of the price elasticity of marijuana. I can try to find some time to dig it up. In the meantime, would you like to venture a guesstimate?
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Aren't there some goods for which lowering their price actually decreases the quantity sold, because it allows people to substitute it with more expensive, higher quality products? However, I've also been told that this was just a hypothetical good speculated by some economists rather than something observed to exist in reality.
But either way, I think almost no one thinks to model this type of thing in terms of supply and demand. There was another comment a couple days back here about why Freddie DeBoer and/or people like him didn't find it obvious that slut shaming was a metaphorical form of unionizing by women in the metaphorical mating market where I think the same phenomenon happens. For some topics, people tend to see as almost supernatural in how they're free from the basic laws of reality, and both crime and love fit into those things. As for why people treat these things as supernatural instead of bound by reality, I think it mostly has to do with how most people, most of the time, including people like me who write on this site, prefer to feel good than to be right. Being right takes hard work, research, skepticism, correcting self-biases, modeling, etc. But it's easy to believe that whatever my side is saying about some controversial topic is correct, and it feels so damned good to do so.
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