Undoing Drugs

...State and local law enforcement agencies will thus be under greater pressure and closer scrutiny to enforce antidrug laws efficiently, concentrating on suppliers instead of drug users...

...Although Kansas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma are no longer completely dry, a bewildering variety of regulatory schemes continues in the several states to this day...

...others will adopt more lenient policies, including regulated legalization...

...Some readers may be put off by certain features of the exposition in Undoing Drugs...

...Daniel K. Benjamin and Roger Leroy Miller, professors of economics at Clemson University, argue that drug prohibition should go the way of alcohol prohibition—which is not to say necessarily that drugs should be legalized...

...What are the likely consequences of decentralizing drug policy...

...B enjamin and Miller argue that such diversity is all to the good: good in practice because it responds fittingly to the different social values and tempers of different parts of the nation...

...First and most important, we will no longer have a national policy on drugs, a policy necessarily born of political compromise "onerous enough to impose substantial costs upon us, but not tough enough to get the job done...

...Although richly informative, the book is somewhat cloying in its repetitiousness...

...Each state will in effect become a laboratory from which the others can learn what works and what doesn't...

...UNDOING DRUGS: BEYOND LEGALIZATION Daniel K. Benjamin and Roger Leroy Miller Basic Books/296 pages/$23 reviewed by JOHN R. DUNLAP Among today's fault-line issues, there are few so inert as the topic of drug legalization...

...good in principle because it follows both the spirit and the letter of a Constitution that was carefully drafted to respect regional differences...

...We are reminded that Prohibition successfully reduced the number of the nation's drinkers by about 30 percent, but that most of those who went on the wagon were only casual drinkers to begin with...

...As an English teacher, though, I oppose clichés, and the topic of drug legalization has become so mired in bromides, pro and con, as to leave the 20-year-old college junior without hope of doing more than sliding into a verbal bog...

...Fifty state legislatures and hundreds of county and municipal governments will be compelled to think hard and argue cogently about drug policy, with their constituents listening very closely to what they say...

...Under the Constitutional Alternative, the diversity of drug policies across the several states will destroy the organizational advantage now enjoyed by the national gangs, eliminating the principal reason for their existence...

...In an appendix on "Legal Perspectives," the authors show the principal legal mechanism required to achieve a state-level refocusing of drug policy: simply change the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 "so as to expressly enunciate a policy of delegation...

...171 The American Spectator June 1992 59...

...More than thirty states delegated enforcement authority further by allowing local jurisdictions to prohibit or permit alcohol as they saw fit...

...Thus do Benjamin and Miller complete the otherwise shopworn analogy with Prohibition...

...Changes will come gradually, by trial and error through a lengthy course of experimentation and innovation...

...The Constitutional Alternative is a serious proposal by two serious scholars who deserve an attentive hearing...

...But there is an added benefit to anticipate...

...The analogy drawn by legalizers between the current era of antidrug warfare and the era of Prohibition (1920-33), a familiar mainstay of the drug debate, is pursued at length by Benjamin and Miller...

...Competition among the several jurisdictions will help to guard civil liberties in the get-tough regions and to prevent libertarian excesses in the lenient ones...

...They avoid any exaggerated claims for their proposition, and they anticipate just about every objection...

...Given the consequent impasse, and amid evidence that the war on drugs hasfailed abysmally, Undoing Drugs proposes a third way, which the authors call "the Constitutional Alternative...

...In the states with liberalized drug laws, the illegal market can be expected to dry up, as happened quickly to the whiskey barons when the national policy of Prohibition ended in 1933...

...No small triumph of the Twenty-first Amendment was the implicit deference paid to the Tenth Amendment, part of the original Bill of Rights: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people...

...Despite an obvious sympathy for the legalization arguments, which take up more than half the book, the authors reject national drug legalization as democratically unacceptable (a majority of Americans just won't tolerate it) and prudentially inadvisable, a real Pandora's Box if the arguments of the legalizers turn out to have been merely plausible...

...The "quiltlike pattern of laws" likely to emerge under the Constitutional Alternative has other advantages...

...Seventeen other states elected to permit the distribution of alcoholic beverages only through state-controlled outlets...

...If drugs are legalized, drug use is certain to increase, and drug abuse is almost certain to increase proportionately...

...warrant: drugs promote moral debasement...

...Less familiar is Benjamin and Miller's analysis of the legal status of Prohibition...

...Perhaps because they are not just academicians (Benjamin is a former chief of staff at the U.S...

...It is one of the handful of topics that I declare off-limits in an argumentation course I teach once a year...

...Their relatively insignificant teetotalism was achieved at the cost of a staggering rise in organized crime and gang violence, a higher consumption of hard liquor in place of beer and wine, an increase of disease and death caused by adulterated booze, and so forth...

...Nor would this "Constitutional Alternative" require the cumbersome process of amendment...

...Those who argue against drug legalization have the advantage of living with a national policy that they can, at least, live with...

...Under the Constitutional Alternative, the states will adjust their drug policies "to correspond to the differing preferences and circumstances of their citizens...

...Forced to exert themselves, they have come up with good arguments, chiefly in support of the proposition that drug prohibition makes the drug problem worse than it might otherwise be...

...I support free speech...

...Apart from matters of interstate commerce and taxation, responsibility for alcohol control was returned to the several states...

...What we need is not a federal legalization of drugs but an end to the federal monopoly on drug policy...

...What the Twenty-first Amendment did, precisely, was to end the role of the federal government as enforcer of most laws pertaining to alcoholic beverages...

...their operations can easily be cloned from one place to another...

...America's alcohol trouble is bad enough without placing a snort of cocaine on the legal footing of a shot of rye...

...But a tiresome repetition has worn down the persuasive power of such arguments, leaving the unmoved majority to yawn while the legalizers wax testy and self-righteous...

...Those who favor drug legalization (just over 30 percent of the adult population, according to polls) are stuck on an uphill grade, contending with political inertia as well as dialectical counterpoint...

...Most states limited the hours at which alcoholic bever58 The American Spectator June 1992 ages could be purchased...

...As it happened, Kansas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma chose to continue Prohibition...

...The national gangs know that what works in Los Angeleswill work in Seattle and Kansas City...

...nor will the authors earn points from antidrug hardliners by lumping all "mood-altering substances," from caffeine to crack, under the sanguine cover term "psychoactives...

...The states which decide to get tough will no longer be able to "hide behind the veil of federal leadership...

...When Prohibition ended with the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933, a blanket legalization of alcohol did not thereby kick in...

...Nonetheless, Benjamin and Miller have made a superb argument...

...Department of Labor, and Miller is a legal scholar as well as an economist and a producer of film documentaries), the authors are able to answer this question with a persuasive concreteness and nuance...

...Unlike federal-scale fiascoes engineered by distant politicos and bureaucrats, the inevitable mistakes and false turns will be relatively easy to contain and to reverse...

...A pivotal chapter ("Farewell to the Founding Fathers"), on the drug war's alleged threats to our civil liberties, seems overwrought and oddly sophomoric...

...Tougher laws cost money, and state legislators will have to raise the taxes needed to pay for the laws demanded by their antidrug constituents...

...Current national drug policy fosters the spread of extremely violent drug gangs like the Jamaican posses in the East and the Bloods and Crips in the West...

...They don't feel much need to exert themselves in defense of their position, and their debater's points are never too far removed from their underlying John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University and contributes regularly to The American Spectator...

...Don't get me wrong...

...Over time, some states (or some localities in those states that further delegate enforcement authority) will choose tougher measures against drugs...