Analýza efektivity prohibice psychoaktivních drog a ekonomicko-sociální důsledky jejich legalizace

Nowadays, there is lot of discussion about drug legalization or about the inefficiency of the current prohibitive policy. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the economic and social impact of prohibition, compare them with the likely economic and social impact of legalization and then, from this comparison, evaluate which of these two policies is more efficient. The first part is an introduction of the topic of illicit drug policy and illicit drugs in general. In the second part, I evaluate the impact of these two policies on the wide spectrum of domains which drug policy affects. In the third part, where I summarize and compare the impacts of these two policies, I reach the conclusion, that prohibition compared to legalization causes significant increase in criminality, increases the harm of drugs used, increases the expenditure and lowers the revenue of the state budget and a lot of other negative effects. On the other hand, prohibition probably reduces the amount of drug users. Moreover I reach the conclusion that drug policy will be soon challenged by problems raised by new technologies. The thesis concludes that legalization would be better since it has the potential to reduce or completely minimize the negative impacts of prohibition.