The Nation's Pulse/The Year They Legalized Drugs
Gold, Victor
THE NATION'S PULSE THE YEAR THEY LEGALIZED DRUGS Give Up Drug War; Legalize Drugs Instead —Headline on a column by Lynn Scarlett, USA Today, circa 1989 V es, well, all things considered, just I...
...So much for tidy analogies...
...I mean, it wasn't as if the vendors had to worry about a consumer revolt...
...Personally, I can't see it, but who am Ito say...
...Some of the anti-war activists insisted that it wasn't legalization they wanted but decriminalization...
...just as the neighborhood street dealers —the Fuller Brush men and Avon ladies of the 1990s—would do whatever was necessary to hold on to their sales territories in America's fastest growing industry...
...Elsewhere, the Economist of London and the Democratic mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, joined hands across the water to urge a pragmatic rather than a prohibitive attack on the drug problem...
...Lower prices, new customers...
...Its repeal in 1933 brought dramatic reductions in homicides...
...and Joseph Sobran singing the same tune...
...Their customers, they knew, would do whatever it took to work up the money for their daily fix...
...Legalization of drugs would have similar results...
...At first, the price of street drugs did fall . . . but only because the cartel knew a few things about the law of supply and demand...
...Milton, Milton . . . I don't knowby Victor Gold Lynn Scarlett from Scarlett O'Hara, but how could you, of all experts, have missed the point...
...Homicides and street crime...
...when he flies to the States next month to talk to the Securities and Exchange Commission...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 33...
...So it came to pass...
...Why not...
...There was dancing, not to mention pushing, in the streets of Manhattan and Medellin...
...The war was over...
...Not that the coalition always sang in harmony...
...by a 330-92 vote in the House and a 91-5 count in the Senate...
...From the entrepreneurial right, Professor Milton Friedman was lecturing William Bennett, the drug war generalissimo, that "illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords," with Lynn Scarlett of the Reason Foundation and columnists William F. Buckley, Jr...
...In 1919, alcohol prohibition led to increases in homicides...
...But who did you expect to supply the drug market after legalization, Milton...
...the bottom line (another of the grinding clichés of that era) was that, as far as drug pushers and users were concerned, legalization and decriminalization were peas in a pod, distinctions without a difference...
...But once Friedman's premise was accepted —that free-market principles ought to be applied to the drug trade because "repressive measures" were only making "a bad situation worse"—who could draw a line...
...Then, too, there was the question of what drugs ought to be legalized...
...If there were anything wrong with it, it wouldn't be legal...
...With drugs legalized, the daily body count is viewed as more of an environmental problem...
...Why not, they asked, just declare a defeat in the drug war and call off the dogs...
...Legalize Drugs Instead —Headline on a column by Lynn Scarlett, USA Today, circa 1989 V es, well, all things considered, just I say that by the 1990s it was an idea whose time had come...
...T n fairness, the legalizers were half I right...
...Still, Victor Gold is The American Spectator 's national correspondent...
...Supply, Milton, supply...
...Legalize, said Friedman, and drug prices will fall, the "obscene" profits will disappear, and the street killings will stop because the "drug lords" will move on, just as the bootleggers moved on after Repeal...
...All those free-market experts and not one of them saw the difference between the Chicago bootleggers of the 1920s and the Andean mob of the 1980s...
...It was an odd coalition, all right...
...As it turned out, the drug legalizers were thinking in terms of the last peace, the one brought on by thelWenty-first Amendment...
...though it didn't quite work out the way we expected...
...The last I heard, the head of EPA plans to talk to the CEO of Medellin, Inc...
...Nobody took him seriously then, but two decades later a coalition of neo-Aikensians put some fresh spin on the senator's idea...
...Price-fixing, that's what cartels are all about, remember, Milton...
...R. J. Reynolds-Nabisco...
...As an illicit business," wrote Lynn Scarlett, "drug trading falls into the hands of criminals lured by high black-market profits...
...Who controls supply controls the market, remember...
...Lots of new customers...
...In theory, fine, but in practice it didn't work out because illicit or licit, the drug business stayed in the same hands, down in Medellin...
...Not everyone shared Miss Winters's enthusiasm for putting heroin on the Agriculture Department's approved list...
...From the American left, Anthony Lewis argued in favor of "social and economic measures to reduce the appeal of drugs," while the actress-philosopher Shelley Winters, in the second volume of her ongoing autobiography, pointed out that if heroin had only been legalized in 1955, "drugs would not be the blight they now are in the U.S...
...No doubt it's another one of those ideas whose time has come...
...But then, after their new customers were hooked, supply suddenly ran short...
...Left, right, and elsewhere, voices were being raised for a George Aikens-type conclusion to what everyone called the drug war...
...There was a legitimate alcohol industry before Prohibition, so when Repeal came to pass it was just a matter of reopening the Kentucky distilleries and Midwestern breweries...
...In those days, understand, war was the metaphor-of-choice among domestic crisis-mongers, and twenty years before, Aiken had been the senator who shrewdly surmised that the best way out of Vietnam was to declare a victory and split the scene...
...V es, indeed, an idea whose time had come...
...You know, like industrial waste...
...The cartel, it seems, wants to go public, get on the big board in New York...
...Well, yes, except we no longer refer to it as a war...
...They say the trouble with generals is that they're always fighting the last war...
...So drug prices shot up again, with profits as "obscene" as they'd been before legalization...
Vol. 22 • November 1989 • No. 11
