America's Drug Problem
Nadelmann, Ethan A.
Legalization of drugs, or decriminalization, means different things to different people. For some it means taking the crime or the money out of the drug business. For others it has become a...
...First, however, it is necessary to identify the five principal components of America's prohibition policy and to assess their potential for solving our drug-related problems...
...and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people being blinded, poisoned, and killed by bad bootleg liquor...
...Cocaine was legal...
...and (5) drug testing...
...The notion has a much broader base of support across America than might be supposed...
...These violators now represent between 30 and 45 percent of all the people being sent to prisons in the major states...
...Would this go very far toward eliminating drug abuse in the United States...
...Conditions then were much healthier than they are today in this respect...
...Having said this, let me acknowledge that interdiction has worked to some extent with respect to marijuana...
...So far the evidence indicates that the answer is no...
...On the other side of the issue we find an alliance that is somewhat more bizarre—that between those indifferent, sometimes callous, white middle-class people who say, "Let the drug users kill themselves," and certain members of the nation's black political leadership, who maintain that the operation of needle-exchange programs is the equivalent of genocide...
...Heroin won't kill you...
...In many states, building and maintaining prisons is the fastest-growing item in the budget...
...If the present drug-prohibition policy is a failure, what should be put in its place...
...In fact, the criminalization of drugs is the chief source of drug-related violence, and it breeds all sorts of other problems...
...Take it away and organized crime may get into other kinds of activity, but nothing will replace this source of revenue...
...But as law-enforcement authorities are the first to admit, this approach is not the only answer...
...Therefore you need very interventionist, intrusive measures to control it, such as wire-tapping, informants, and undercover operations...
...Another reason is that drug dealers need to protect their turf and resolve disputes, and they do so with violence...
...Some users, they say, will not go the extra blocks to get drugs, but most do...
...The drug dealers have the 210 • DISSENT money, the lovers, the nice cars...
...officials go to these producers overseas and say, "Don't you see what you are doing...
...Or people buy what they think is heroin but is actually a more potent synthetic opiate...
...International control efforts...
...If there is demand, there will be supply...
...We need to shift resources away from prohibition efforts and toward other programs, including some that are directed not specifically at drug abuse but rather at the conditions that spawn drug abuse...
...Imagine buying wine without knowing whether it is 8 percent alcohol or 80 percent alcohol or whether it is methyl or ethyl alcohol...
...My argument is that it will be a lot closer to the legalization model than to the prohibition model...
...This is because the export price of drugs from Latin America and SPRING • 1992 • 207 Asia is only a small fraction (1, 3, or 4 percent) of the final street price in the United States...
...At the same time, the drug-prohibition system creates strong incentives for kids to get involved in drug dealing...
...What may be the morality of today was not the morality of the past...
...I take it that this value is, in and of itself, a moral good...
...It means moving along the continuum of policy options, away from the more severe drug-prohibition policies we now follow—but it does not mean going to the opposite extreme...
...Most people tend not to recognize this causal relationship...
...Go back in U.S...
...I would argue that this is the wrong objective—one that is ludicrous, ahistorical, misguided, and even dangerous...
...3) domestic drug enforcement directed at major drug dealers...
...When we seize their assets, we should use them to help pay for drug-abuse prevention programs...
...In our country today we increasingly see an alliance between the people (largely public health officials) who are trying to introduce needle-exchange programs and what is probably the most politically powerless and disorganized constituency in America—the roughly one million intravenous drug users in the nation...
...Basically, they involve setting up places where addicts can exchange their dirty needles for clean ones...
...Heroin and cocaine habits cost fifty to two hundred dollars a day...
...Once again, this is strictly a moral argument, not a "value-free" public-policy argument...
...Because cigarettes are cheap—too cheap, as far as I'm concerned...
...There are judges who say it is constitutional...
...My moral obligation is to do the best I can for myself, my family, and my community...
...A large portion of this has to do with drug-law SPRING • 1992 • 209 violations...
...But prohibition inflates their prices dramatically...
...If they become addicted to these drugs, then they deserve help—not just from their families but also from the state—and should not be first placed in prison...
...But to some extent it does seem to be working...
...In New York the figures are much the same...
...In terms of a criminal-justice approach to the drug problem, everything we have done in the past, are doing now, and are talking about doing in the future is inherently limited in its effectiveness against the fundamental problem of drug abuse...
...He tried to determine what the relationship was between drug use and violence, and found that only a small percentage of homicides, under 10 percent, could be called psychopharmacologically related...
...The fact remains that when you look at the seventy million Americans who have violated the drug laws in the last twenty years or so and the millions of Americans who continue to do so, the vast majority of them are doing no harm to anybody else...
...It is the highest percentage of the American population to be incarcerated in American history...
...The United States is now a multiple-source heroin-importing country...
...The private sovereignty of individuals ought to be respected, not just for utilitarian reasons but for its own sake...
...The trouble with calling it legalization is that the model itself often looks libertarian, and hence there is a tendency on the part of some to conclude that what is being advocated is a libertarian alternative...
...Rather, it is opening up vast job opportunities for new generations of young people, often young black and Latino men in the inner cities...
...The answer is no, because of the same phenomenon you have internationally—the push-down/pop-up effect...
...Lower-potency drugs could be legalized, as they were in the United States a hundred years ago, when we had not just cocaine powder but also coca colas and coca teas and coca tonics...
...In Washington, D.C., you push down on dealing at one street corner, and it pops up on another...
...I personally think that the Colombian government should be extraditing those miserable human beings who are shipping drugs and killing people...
...We pushed down on it in Mexico, and it popped up in Southeast Asia...
...Because drug prohibition is the greatest boondoggle that organized crime has ever seen—far better than alcohol prohibition...
...Presumably, there are limits as to how far this effort can be pursued...
...1:1 212 • DISSENT...
...Because toughening penalties for adults inevitably pulls children into the business...
...On the other hand are Democrats and liberals such as Ira Glasser of the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as a number of leading black politicians—Kurt Schmoke, the mayor of Baltimore...
...One consequence is that marijuana trafficking has been replaced by cocaine trafficking...
...That is what I am going to do...
...Legalization also implies something else...
...Very few, I would guess...
...The foregoing are the costs that are conventionally associated with drug prohibition...
...So why do people "overdose" on illegal drugs...
...But when you add up the costs and benefits of competing policies, this value needs to be considered...
...Ready access to clean needles does make a positive difference...
...The figures in California were 1,063 in 1980 and 10,445 in 1988...
...And of course, not everyone shares the same moral perspective on the drug traffic...
...The question is, Which forms of intervention should be taken...
...2) interdiction efforts...
...Among the indirect costs of prohibition are the tremendous benefits derived by organized crime...
...by older people and younger people...
...Paul Goldstein did a study of drug-related homicides in New York...
...My position is that if people use these drugs and do not hurt others, it is no business of the state...
...Nonetheless, the majority of courtauthorized wiretaps in this country involve investigations of drug-law violations...
...He said, "If we're going to have a war against drugs, it SPRING • 1992 • 205 shouldn't be headed by the attorney general...
...And what has happened...
...Look, for instance, at what we are doing to reduce cigarette consumption, and how we could be doing much more...
...In most cases they are not even doing much harm to themselves...
...drug policy...
...What about going after street-level drug dealers and users...
...One has to do with the notion that individuals, or at least adults, ought to be able to make their own choices—even stupid choices...
...That is the first reason for trying legalization, but it is the least important...
...My guess is that if I were to tell my Princeton students that they could not graduate unless they passed a periodic urine test, most of the very few who use illicit drugs would stop...
...The federal government spent $1 billion on drug enforcement in 1980 and about $8 billion in 1990...
...We need to ask two basic questions about needle-exchange programs...
...That figure is double what it was ten years ago, almost triple what it was fifteen years ago...
...I think the answer is yes...
...Yet studies uniformly show that those incarcerated for druglaw violations are less likely than other inmates to have a prior history of violating the law and are less likely to be involved in violent behavior...
...But what is a drug-free society...
...Most drug-related killings—whether they involve drug dealers killing one another or killing cops or killing innocent people or killing witnesses or killing children in crossfire—are associated with drug prohibition...
...Indeed, if the ultimate objective is to enhance the productivity of Americans in the workplace or, better still, to maximize the length of time that they live, then there is no sensible point at which to stop such testing...
...More important is the fact that most of what people identify as components of the drug problem are actually the results of drugprohibition policies...
...in 1989 the number was 15,000...
...SPRING • 1992 • 211 history to the turn of the century and slightly before, and alcohol was illegal in hundreds of towns and cities and a number of states—we were on the way toward a national prohibition of alcohol...
...Second, criminals and drug abuse tend to go together...
...It all becomes oriented toward more and more powerful forms of social control, justified by very simple, and seemingly defensible, objectives...
...They represent well over 50 percent of the federal prison population...
...Interdiction efforts cannot keep that from happening...
...Nobody knows for sure...
...Note that I did not specify illegal drug abuse, because I think we need to be concerned as well about legal drug abuse involving alcohol and tobacco...
...That is a ten-fold, in some cases fifteen-fold, increase in the number of people sent to prison for violating drug laws...
...In many respects it is impossible to point out the causal relationship, but in most societies, historically, there have been higher levels of drug abuse among criminals than among noncriminals...
...State and local governments spent between $3 and $4 billion in 1980...
...The libertarian model is in fact a fascinating one, in that it poses interesting and difficult questions about the vulnerability of a society to a free market in psychoactive drugs, as well as about the basic need for drug control...
...We have reduced the amount of foreign marijuana coming into the United States...
...But will it make any difference...
...On the one hand are conservatives such as Milton Friedman, George Shultz, William F. Buckley, Gary Becker, and others associated with the Chicago school of law and economics, as well as the editorial boards of the Economist and many other conservative newspapers in Europe...
...Drug testing...
...Can efforts at apprehending major drug dealers make a difference...
...By contrast, Americans sixty years ago were highly cognizant of this distinction...
...If it means growing these products, then so be it...
...No society in civilized human history has not used psychoactive drugs in one form or another...
...Let me quote Mayor Schmoke...
...policy is not typically aimed at alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine, all of which are psychoactive substances...
...The drug-exporting business brings in good money overseas—billions of dollars each year—much of which trickles down to hundreds of thousands of peasants and other poor people...
...Because every time you arrest number one, number two is going to step into his shoes, and every time you get number two, number three is going to step into his shoes...
...We've pushed down in so many places that it's popped up everywhere...
...One reason is that people tempted into drug dealing often are violently inclined...
...It means evaluating our current drug-prohibition policies in terms of their costs and benefits, and comparing them on this basis with the wide array of what could be called drug-legalization policies...
...So from my point of view, saying to those people, "Because you use these forbidden substances, you lose your job, your driver's license, your money, your freedom," strikes me as a far greater immorality than any immorality associated with the use of these drugs...
...Now let's consider the direct and indirect costs of drug prohibition in the United States...
...Not entirely in jest, somebody once said that the current American drug policy, with its combination of prohibition and ineffectual enforcement measures, is probably the best means ever devised for exporting the capitalistic ethic to potentially revolutionary third-world producers...
...Now let's consider the five connections between drugs and crime...
...Otherwise, every society has used drugs for a variety of reasons: ritual, religious, recreational, and medicinal...
...We could raise the price considerably without having to worry about nicotine-related crime...
...The answer is no...
...You push down on drug dealing in Washington Square in New York City, it pops up in the alphabet streets...
...The conclusion I come to is that when such an analysis is done, the best policy looks more like something called legalization or decriminalization than like something called prohibition...
...Or look at what other nations have done with their alcohol policies...
...Do heroin and cocaine cost any more to produce than alcohol or cigarettes...
...We are arresting thousands and thousands of drug users 208 • DISSENT and dealers, running them through the criminal justice system, increasingly incarcerating them, and keeping them in prison for longer periods of time...
...That was big in the sixties and has now become big again in the late eighties and early nineties...
...We need to deemphasize the reliance on criminal-justice approaches while trying to change the conditions that lead people to abuse drugs...
...Still, it is one that I think rings true for the civil libertarians of Stanford and the northeast as well as for the "rednecks" of South Texas...
...4) domestic drug enforcement directed at street-level dealers...
...What moral assumptions do I make...
...Reducing criminal-justice controls, which is what legalization and decriminalization are all 206 • DISSENT about, requires us to rely on other forms of control...
...Legalization also has a much more moderate meaning—the one that political figures often use...
...If we use the word legalization in this sense, then we can begin to appreciate which policy leads to the best mix of costs and benefits...
...In Florida in 1980, 785 people were sentenced for violating drug laws...
...Life would be a little more dangerous...
...alternative is also supported by people in medicine, law, law enforcement, and education...
...The answer is no...
...I am largely in agreement with that...
...When all is said and done, the whole notion of international control has no effectiveness as a drug-control device, no matter how much the politicians may insist otherwise...
...Consider the wide range of prominent individuals who have expressed support for legalization...
...In one sense the notion, if you take it literally, is ludicrous...
...The use of the military, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, the Navy, Customs, AWACS (the Air Force's airborne warning and control system), satellites, and radar satellite balloons to try to keep drugs from coming into the United States is not working...
...The first is, Do these programs encourage more people to become intravenous drug users...
...So street-level law enforcement is not making the drugs less accessible...
...When you analyze the costs and benefits of our current drug policy and consider which mix of costs and benefits represents the optimal policy, you cannot get away from some very basic value claims...
...If only we could turn the notion of a public health approach into a verb, "to public-healthify" drug policy, maybe we would have a more acceptable, if less catchy, label for what many mean by legalization...
...Another consequence of our interdiction efforts vis-a-vis marijuana is that the United States has now emerged as perhaps the number-one producer of marijuana in the world...
...and state legislative figures from New York, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere—even one Congressman who dared to say the word decriminalization shortly before he retired—George Crockett of Michigan, a former judge...
...We could legalize or decriminalize individual possession of all drugs...
...they may now be spending $10 billion...
...And what the producers say is, "Let me tell you what my moral obligation is...
...Marijuana is bulky...
...But can this effort make any difference in the availability of drugs or in the fundamental drug-abuse problems we have in this country...
...They knew that the irresponsible consumption of alcohol was to blame for a host of society's ills—which was why they had imposed prohibition in the first place...
...The drug-related morality of today and of the last few decades is just that—the drug-related morality of today...
...tens of millions of people being labeled criminals for their involvement in the business of alcohol...
...Drug prohibition in effect imposes a de facto value-added tax on the sale of drugs, enforced by the government and collected by the criminals...
...Cigarettes were prohibited in a dozen states...
...The opiates—opium, morphine, heroin—were legal, except for use by Chinese people in California...
...In ten years or so a nearly perfect drugtesting system may be technologically feasible...
...Trying to catch the six to ten tons of heroin and the hundred or two hundred tons of cocaine coming into this country during each of the last few years makes looking for a needle in a haystack seem like child's play...
...In Europe, accepting as a given that people will use and abuse drugs and trying to reduce the negative consequences is associated with something called the harm-reduction philosophy...
...My moral obligation is not to keep some stupid gringo from shoving white powder up his nose or sticking a needle into his arm...
...We know that removing criminal-justice controls—that is, implementing a policy of legalization—will mean three things: the price of drugs will go down, the availability of drugs will go up, and the deterrent power of criminal sanctions will be diminished...
...drug policy should have two objectives...
...More and more companies are doing it...
...But it is not, in the end, the policy solution advocated by most of those who support legalization or decriminalization...
...We need to make the distinction between problems of drug abuse and those that result from drug prohibition...
...Where I differ from those authorities is in insisting that we should rely less on the criminal-justice approach and much more on education, prevention, and treatment...
...Prohibition makes drug dealing essentially a crime of vice...
...However, for a number of reasons, I would argue that legalization is advisable, that it can be implemented in a controlled fashion, and that we need to consider taking these risks, none of which are as great as many people fear...
...It is a principle we do not talk about much in American discourse, especially political discourse...
...Most addicts who participate in these programs change their injecting habits and reduce or stop their needle-sharing...
...The drugs in question are grown virtually everywhere...
...We pushed down on heroin coming out of Turkey in the early seventies, and it popped up in Mexico...
...Increasingly we hear of children turning their parents in to the police, and vice versa—precisely the sort of behavior we have traditionally associated with the totalitarian states that we now see crumbling around the world...
...But then they began to distinguish these from other problems: organized crime...
...bootleggers becoming role models for children and taking over towns and cities...
...Do I think we should do drug testing...
...These drugs are so cheap that even when we do all sorts of things overseas to raise the cost of production, we have no impact on consumer prices in the United States...
...It will be a policy that relies much more on the public health system than it does on the criminal justice system...
...At some point Americans, for a great variety of reasons, said enough is enough and turned away from prohibition...
...I come back to the issue of values and to the question of how far government and employers should go in policing the lives of citizens and employees...
...In this nation, so intensely divided on the issue, it is significant that the few politicians willing to take the brave step of proposing decriminalization have been African Americans...
...We tend to talk about the drug problem as one great big hodgepodge of drug-related problems without distinguishing between those associated with the misuse of drugs and those that stem from prohibition...
...Beneath this whole issue, moreover, is a key principle that we cannot avoid dealing with...
...These people may not be model citizens, but should we send them to prison...
...The second is, Do these programs work...
...In Colombia this drug-crime connection virtually defines the drug problem...
...This leads me to what may be perhaps the most fundamental argument against drug prohibition...
...But this This essay first appeared in the Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, December 1991, and is reprinted here with its kind permission.—Ens...
...Before proceeding with the analysis of costs and benefits, we need to begin by asking a question that is rarely asked: what is the objective of U.S...
...I do not think we should be sliding down this slippery slope—but for moral reasons, not strictly on grounds of public policy...
...rising levels of violence and corruption in urban areas...
...The objective really seems to be to prohibit the use of restricted psychoactive substances without the authorization of a doctor, irrespective of whether or not that use causes any harm...
...Opiates and marijuana can be grown almost anywhere in the world, and coca can be grown in a far broader area of Latin America and other parts of the world than is currently the case...
...While there, addicts may be given information about treatment or about how to use needles safely...
...When New York and other states imposed draconian penalties for selling crack a few years ago, they might just as well have called them measures for improving child employment in the illegal drug trade...
...It doesn't destroy the internal organs...
...And meanwhile, you North Americans, who are you to speak of moral obligations, when your special trade representatives fly around Asia and the Third World, pushing down barriers to your tobacco exports...
...Note also that I said abuse, not use...
...What are the moral notions underlying the ideal of a drug-free society and the drugprohibition model...
...Consider, as well, how drug laws are enforced...
...Don't you see how immoral this is...
...Interdiction...
...These are key assumptions underlying the current U.S...
...it should be headed by the surgeon general...
...First, the point has to be made that it is impossible to make any sort of legitimate, intellectually honest distinction between the morality of alcohol and tobacco use on the one hand and the morality or immorality of cocaine and opiate use on the other...
...First, on billions of occasions each year, people buy, sell, and consume drugs in violation of the law...
...One negative consequence of legalization might be that production would largely be controlled by big producers, as opposed to being a business for hundreds of thousands of small producers...
...We pushed down on it there, and it popped up in Southwest Asia...
...These drugs kill far more people than illegal drugs do, and this has more to do with the nature of these products than with the fact that they are legal...
...It doesn't do what cocaine does to your body or what alcohol does to your liver or what cigarettes do to your lungs...
...police being killed...
...In virtually every major state in the country, over 20 percent of the people sentenced to prison last year had violated drug laws...
...Ask any law enforcement officer...
...It is not the morality of the past, and it need not be the morality of the future...
...drug policy, and I do not agree with them...
...This is an area of public policy in need of government intervention, as well as other forms of intervention...
...Imagine taking an aspirin without knowing whether you are taking a dose of 5 milligrams or 500 milligrams...
...The government is pushing it...
...It is the highest percentage of the population of any democratic nation to be incarcerated in human history...
...How many of you have ever worried about being mugged by a nicotine addict...
...That rhetoric has come to dominate the formulation of policy...
...But there is another, quite severe one: drugs are more dangerous when they are illegal...
...Someone who thinks he is getting 4 percent heroin may actually be getting 40 percent...
...But it seems to me that the only message that the opponents of these programs are sending is, "If you're an intravenous drug user and you can't stop, then die—and before you die, put whoever you have sex with or share needles with at risk of AIDS...
...Last year the United States had over one million people behind bars in federal and state prisons and local jails, and another two-and-a-half million under other forms of criminal-justice supervision...
...All three of these results suggest negative developments in terms of drug use and abuse...
...That is, do they help reduce the transmission of AIDS...
...Evidence suggests that drug testing could be the wave of the future...
...In fact, in the case of Colombia, if you buy the cartel theory of cocaine exports (that is, that a small number of people control the supply to the United States), and if you arrest the heads of the cartel, you will have even more cocaine coming into the United States because there would be no controls...
...One notion is that drug use—better still, the use of prohibited drugs— is immoral...
...As I see it, when Mayor Dinkins of New York City took office and obliged prominent black leaders in his city by canceling rather than expanding needle-exchange programs, he effectively signed a death warrant for thousands of people...
...The President's Commission on Organized Crime estimated that half of all organized crime revenue comes from drug dealing...
...Carrie Saxon Perry, the mayor of Hartford, Connecticut...
...When people talk about a drug-free society, they do not really mean a society without psychoactive drug use, because current U.S...
...The analogy with today's drug problem is totally apropos...
...I would argue that the mainstream objective, the government's objective, the objective to which most people will instinctively relate, is that of creating a "drug-free society...
...If we were to criminalize alcohol again, we would have the same alcohol-associated violence we had during prohibition...
...My analysis of the current criminal-justice approach to the drug problem in this country is that some of these efforts work to some extent...
...Do they help lure people into treatment...
...As far as I am concerned, the use of psychoactive substances per se is not a problem...
...The same is true of the recruitment of informants, and not just from the criminal milieu but from all walks of life...
...If there were a market for a hundred tons of heroin in the United States instead of six to ten tons, a hundred tons would come in...
...Some of these costs can be calculated in tax dollars...
...We begin, presumably, with illicit drugs, but it can be shown that higher rates of absenteeism are associated with cigarette smoking...
...Two or three years ago the surgeon general of the United States pointed out that nicotine was as addictive as, if not more addictive than, cocaine or heroin...
...Alcohol was more dangerous than ever, precisely because it was illegally produced and unregulated...
...Now, I am not arguing that addiction is good, but I am suggesting that addiction is an inevitable fact of life—one that well describes how many human beings relate not just to illicit drugs or alcohol and tobacco but also to coffee, food, work, exercise, money, and one another...
...Why...
...Even prominent public officials have equated AIDS with drug addiction—forgetting that one is deadly and that the other, in most cases, is not...
...This is especially true in a country like the United States, which has certain legal and other societal values and principles that keep us from going to extremes in law enforcement...
...And it is not cheap...
...Both cigarettes and alcohol are addictive, but people can maintain those habits for only a few dollars a day...
...You might get addicted to it, but you can live a long life as a heroin addict...
...Some of them are individuals who might not otherwise have pursued lives of crime but who unfortunately have few other economic opportunities...
...To call it immoral because it happens to be associated with certain substances is wrong...
...As a result, we have what is called the pushdown/ pop-up effect...
...It is not an absolute good...
...Prisons are a very easy place to get a handle on the issue because we have solid figures...
...So arresting high-level drug traffickers is not the answer...
...Education, drug-abuse prevention programs, needle-exchange programs, drug-maintenance programs of the type one sees in England and the Netherlands—these things do make a positive difference...
...Some people say there is one possible exception—the Eskimos, because they could not grow anything...
...The answer seems to be yes...
...Once again, no...
...Fewer people would drink wine or take aspirin, but more of those who did would get sick or die...
...Where the costs, measured in dollars and scarce resources, are most apparent is in such areas as the court system and prison operations...
...What of needle-exchange programs, which are being implemented in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States...
...First, it should aim to reduce the extent of drug abuse in American society...
...Where do we draw the line on the slippery slope of drug testing...
...There is generally no victim who reports the crime to the authorities...
...The simple reason is that illegal drugs are often adulterated, impure, and of unknown potency...
...In the inner city, drug dealers—not teachers, lawyers, or politicians—are often the role models for kids...
...All these tactics are necessary, even in a democratic society, for dealing with organized crime, corruption, terrorism, and the like—but the use of these tactics should be kept to a minimum...
...And if they use these drugs and hurt others, whether they are under the influence of these substances at the time or not, they deserve to be punished...
...Most of the homicides resulted from the fifth connection between drugs and crime—what he called the "systemic" sources of drug-related violence...
...It is a moral one...
...Third, we have the problem of drug addiction "causing" crimes such as robbery, theft, and burglary...
...Another is that addiction itself is fundamentally immoral...
...The only way to explain the divergence between the government's policy objectives and those I propose is by reference to fundamentally different moral notions about drug use and drug policy...
...Consider the intensive law-enforcement operations such as Pressure Point and Clean Sweep...
...Some evidence suggests that this may work in certain small neighborhoods, but can it make a difference in large cities...
...As long as the laws are what they are, we should invest our law-enforcement resources in going after the most egregious violators of the drug laws...
...Marijuana, however, was legal...
...They deter some people, keep the price of drugs high, and keep availability relatively low...
...People who directly hurt others should not be giving up their jail cells to people who engage in crimes of vice...
...Why not test for cigarettes, and then alcohol, because alcohol is dangerous too...
...These components are (1) international drug control (that is, the suppression of drug production overseas...
...U.S...
...It is the notion that people who do no harm to others should not be harmed by others—and especially should not be harmed by the state...
...We could have them all in this country...
...If we were to criminalize cigarettes we would surely have immense violence...
...Domestic law enforcement...
...cocaine is compact...
...I think we can, to a certain degree, move away from the prohibition side of the continuum and incur minimal risk...
...Even if these drugs were legalized and heavily taxed, prices would be lower than they are now, and the need for addicts to steal to support their habits would be much reduced...
...We do not need the mandatory minimum sentences that are sending people, sometimes first offenders, to prison for extensive periods of time...
...Fourth, there is the notion that drugs make people violent...
...Ask what ought to be our drug policy, without any ideological or moral obligation to the notion of legalization, if our basic objective is to reduce death, suffering, and pain...
...In America, we hear a tremendous outcry that needleexchange programs are wrong and immoral, and that they condone drug abuse...
...I must stress that these alternatives are best understood not as polar opposites but as a variety of points across a spectrum, with the most prohibitionist policies at one extreme and the most libertarian ones at the other...
...Prison cells cost anywhere from $12,000 to $52,000 per person, per year...
...The second objective is equally important: we need to minimize the negative consequences of drug-control policies...
...You are producing these drugs that are killing Americans...
...For others it has become a rallying cry, in much the same way that "repeal prohibition" was sixty years ago—one that brings together people from across the political spectrum, with very different views about what is wrong with our current policy of drug prohibition, and very different notions about what should replace it...
...it is not something to which all policy must defer...
...This drug-crime connection is the essence of drug prohibition, and it is responsible for other connections between drugs and crime...
Vol. 39 • April 1992 • No. 2
