Capitol Ideas/Drug Story
Bethell, Tom
Drug Story by Tom Bethell 6 6 hT e news is not good," says the latest edition of National Drug Control Strategy, put out by the White House; 1.1 million people were arrested for drug offenses in...
...We are "playing games" with drugs...
...Those who want to break the law are bad people...
...Hard-core use of cocaine has soared since 1980, casual use declined and is now stable...
...Discovering the harm that drugs do would discourage their use...
...Within a few years, court rulings permitted eager officials to turn regulation into prohibition...
...The first point to notice is that we live in a drug-saturated culture...
...None cited fear of law-enforcement...
...How were these distinctions arrived at...
...II The American Spectator September 1995 21...
...Human nature is hard to change, but the mind will submit to a determined program of chemical reform...
...Yet they are legal...
...House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in July that we should either legalize drugs or reconfigure the penalties...
...It's a measure of the confusion surrounding drug policy that Gingrich would make the penalty harsher on one side of a voluntary transaction and milder on the other...
...Criminalization creates stronger drugs...
...Legalization of drugs would produce an incalculable "peace dividend" in the inner cities, in the jails and in the courts...
...This would increase demand and reduce supply, raising the price...
...About half the advertising on the evening network news seems to be devoted to "soft" drugs...
...But Milton Friedman has a chart showing expenditures on alcohol as a percentage of total consumption expenditures, rising from the end of Prohibition until the end of World War II, and declining steadily thereafter...
...We don't really know the effects of using illicit drugs daily for ten years or more, but there is epidemiological evidence that the bad effects accumulate, as with cigarettes...
...Some things may be bad for us (a tumbler of whiskey, a shot of heroin), but we have free will, and ourselves to blame...
...Idaho's 1887 statute, making it unlawful to visit a house where opium was smoked, referred explicitly to white people...
...By the same token, harsh drugs like crack-cocaine are an unexpected byproduct of prohibition...
...Mary Jeanne Kreek of Rockefeller University said recently that heroin is a "blessedly untoxic drug...
...He gets more dollars for the bulk if he carries more potent drugs...
...It's difficult to study chronic use in humans," comments Harry Haverkos of the National Institute on Drug Abuse...
...Alcohol in excess causes serious problems, too...
...The lower price, in conjunction with the disarmed law, would surely increase the number of users...
...But saloons were for some reason thought to be the embodiment of evil, with which there should be no compromise...
...But anyone making this argument must be prepared not just to retain the drug laws but to restore (liquor) prohibition...
...The hardest idea to get across is that legalization does not imply moral approval...
...Nicotine may be the world's leading killer-drug, but we subsidize it and export it...
...In the longer run, it seems, the legalization of alcohol did not stimulate alcoholism...
...Negro cocaine users might become oblivious of their prescribed bounds and attack white society," David F. Musto, the Yale medical historian, has written...
...The Constitution was still intact at that point, and police power was assumed to be reserved to the states where it had not been explicitly delegated...
...The great problem today is not that we don't have enough laws or prison-cells or drug agents, but that preachers dare not preach much more than soft-socialism and respect for the environment...
...Despite the harm still done by binge-drinking and addiction, we do not think Prohibition should be restored...
...The overworked phrase "drug abuse" tells us that we believe drugs are good in themselves...
...The Harrison Narcotics Act provided a record-keeping role in the regulation of opium, coca leaves, and their derivatives...
...Having failed to enforce our laws, we try to internationalize them...
...But it would be easier to dissuade young people from doing something that had convincingly been shown to be harmful...
...James Q. Wilson has added a moral argument which it is important to address, particularly as libertarians tend to be uncomfortable with it or to dismiss it outright...
...Gingrich would like to put the issue on the ballot: "Either legaliie it or get rid of it, but quit playing the games that enrich the evil, strengthen the violent, addict our children and make us look pathetic and helpless...
...Feel depressed...
...no itch, ache, or pain can be tolerated...
...As we learned in the 1960s, the long term use of cigarettes causes lung cancer and other serious problems...
...Anglos using it were thought to be embracing alien habits and risking "reefer madness...
...0 ne of the strongest arguments against legalization is that the price of drugs would drop considerably (although taxes could restore some of that loss...
...Your kid has "attention deficit disorder...
...the retail value of the illicit drug business was about $50 billion in 1993...
...How would we feel if the Chinese government decided cigarettes should be illegal, but, unable to enforce the law, they demanded our cooperation...
...Give him a drug...
...A Martian who arrived on Earth, saw all the drug stores, commercials, liquor stores, and cigarette packs, and was told without further explanation that we had a "drug problem" might seriously wonder whether that meant too many drugs were being consumed, or not enough...
...Gingrich's underlying theory seems to be the dubious one that those involved in an uncoerced transaction are respectively evil and innocent...
...20 The American Spectator September 1995 D rugs with known ill-effects are legal, while others whose longterm effects have not been studied are illegal, but were legal in the nineteenth century...
...After passage of the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) in 1919, sharply increasing the price (and reducing the quality) of liquor, poorer people turned to marijuana...
...The moral climate is such that clergy will surely support the status quo in a drug-legalization debate, as in the welfare debate...
...Long after its sale was prohibited (in most states in the years 1897-1913), doctors thought itwas harmless...
...Opium dens, established in major cities, were outlawed in the 1880s because Orientals were thought to be corrupting whites...
...Who knows what evils will arise if we change long-established laws...
...Can the pharmacological society be serious when chemists seek the formula for one type of mind-bender, drug-enforcement agents hunt down others, corporations hawk others, consumers may pay for one but must shun the other, prisons are filled by the users of this, clinics by the users of that...
...Marijuana was not criminalized until the 1930s...
...But we hear neither message...
...The challenge today is to see the drug problem in the same way...
...If we believe as I do that dependency on certain mind altering drugs is a moral issue, and that their illegality rests in part on their immorality, then legalizing them undercuts, if it does not eliminate altogether, the moral message...
...The same applies to cocaine-sniffing...
...And as far as NIH is concerned, "It's hard to sustain long-term studies with the way our funding cycles go...
...We are disposed to believe that the law has its reasons...
...Race seems to have been a big factor...
...Prisons increasingly overflow with drug offenders—they account for about 60 percent of those incarcerated in federal prisons...
...Asked why they stopped using cocaine, high school students gave health as the most important reason...
...Chinese laborers who build the transcontinental railroad brought opium with them...
...Peter Duesberg, a molecular biologist at U.C...
...He predicted that legalization would receive no more than 20 percent of the vote...
...Consider the phrase drug education...
...I agree at least with the first part...
...In addition, after Prohibition, alcoholic drinks became milder and far safer and less contaminated...
...The most important thing is to get people, when they hearabout shootings in the street, to say, `Damn that prohibition,' not 'damn those drugs.— We should have the same reaction when we hear about clogged courts and prisons so overflowing that violent prisoners are set free by court order...
...The main libertarian argument is that we should be responsible for our lives...
...As the Cato Institute's David Boaz put it: If a dealer can only smuggle one suitcase full of drugs into the United States or if he can only drive one car full of drugs into Baltimore, which would he rather be carrying—marijuana, coca leaves, cocaine or crack...
...it was in Coca-Cola until 1906...
...Of chemicals we are made and by chemicals we can be remade...
...Today that mostly means: Watch out for the microbes...
...Prohibition's errors and unintended consequences are now a commonplace...
...Freud advocated cocaine as a tonic...
...T he status quo with respect to drugs is upheld above all by an instinctive conservatism...
...As for cocaine, its euphoric properties were arousing racial suspicions in the South by 1900...
...In the long run, the supply-side might even flourish...
...Drunkenness is both unhealthy and, as I understand, a confessable sin, even without side-effects upon innocents...
...James Q. Wilson, chairman of the president's National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse Prevention in 1972 and a leading opponent of drug legalization, wondered how credible drug education would be if we tried to discourage something that was legal...
...Relief' is the blessed end-state...
...It's a prohibition system, but most Americans don't think of it that way because we've all grown up under it," Ethan Nadelmann of the Lindesmith Center told Reason...
...Earlier, its use had mostly been confined to immigrants from Mexico and the Caribbean, and the drug remained associated with them...
...Don't question it, obey it...
...there are now 1.3 million cocaine users, 9 million marijuana users...
...As recently as 1982, researchers reported in the Scientific American that a cocaine dependency was hardly more serious than a salted-peanut dependency...
...We need to be told about the ill-effects of drugs on both body and soul...
...There is no mechanism for a national referendum, but Gingrich favors a way for voters to "direct the Congress that it either abolish the drug laws, or take those steps...
...The secondary message is that the pure drugs are okay (bliss...
...Take a drug...
...Berkeley, who believes that AIDS is in reality "a subset of the drug epidemic," tried to find research on the effects of long-term use of recreational drugs...
...then pressure from family and friends...
...We believe in the pharmacological reconstruction of man...
...Use clean needles...
...1.1 million people were arrested for drug offenses in 1993...
...Can "hard" drugs be far behind...
...G ingrich is right about one thing...
...Not until 1914 did the federal government play a role...
...Dealers who bring commercial quantities into the country should get the death penalty, but users should perform two days' public service a week...
...He concluded that the studies have not yet been done...
...It gave a tremendous fillip to organized crime, and it exposed policemen to the temptations of bribery...
...There is not one such study funded by the National Institutes of Health," he asserts...
...the murder rate would drop, and law enforcement would become less exposed to the hazards of corruption...
...Government at all levels spent up to $25 billion a year on drug control efforts...
...Traffickers can make an irresistible offer to lawmen: plata o plono—the silver or the lead (bullet...
...The foreign supply that meets our domestic demand is destroyed, airstrips and makeshift labs are blown up, officials are corrupted...
...Stern laws substitute for their lack of fortitude and conviction...
...today we have wine coolers and near-beer, and the consumption of hard liquor has plummeted...
...If Chinese helicopters came swooping down on North Carolina tobacco fields and set cigarette factories ablaze...
...Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...And that is a scary prospect for our mostly secularized, morally timid clergy...
...If drugs were legalized, the onus would be on them to warn us about the spiritual hazards of drugs...
...To be sure, there are innocent bystanders, children in particular...
...Use, but don't abuse...
...Because high profits are available to those willing to risk the law, the bribes are stupendous by Third World standards...
...No doubt that would initially be true...
...NIH studies the immediate effects of drugs such as heroin and cocaine, usually with a time horizon of minutes or hours—weeks at most...
...Drug stores are on every corner...
Vol. 28 • September 1995 • No. 9
