How do we deal with the drug problem
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How Do We Deal with the Drug Problem?
1. Drugs
It is possible to stop most drug
addiction in the United States within a very short
time. Simply
make all drugs available and sell
them at cost. Label each drug with a precise
description of what
effect the drug will have
on the taker. This will require heroic honesty.
Don’t say that marijuana is
addictive and
dangerous when it is neither----unlike “speed,”
which kills most unpleasantly, or
heroin,
which is addictive and difficult to kick.
For
the record, I have tried almost every drug and
liked none, disproving the popular theory that
a whiff of opium will enslave the mind.
Nevertheless many drugs are bad and they should be
told
why in a sensible way.
Along with
exhortation and warning, it might be good for our
citizens to recall that the United
States was
the creation of men who believed that each man has
the right to do what he wants
with his own
life as long as he does not interfere with his
neighbor’s pursuit of happiness.
Now one can
hear the warning rumble begin: If everyone is
allowed to take drugs everyone will
and we
shall end up a race of Zombies. Alarming thought.
Yet, it seems most unlikely that any
reasonably sane person will become a drug
addict if he knows in advance what addiction is
going
to be like.
Is everyone reasonably
sane? No. some people will always become drug
addicts just as some
people will always become
alcoholics, and it is just too band. Every man,
however, has the power
(and should have the
legal right ) to kill himself if he chooses. But
since most men don’t, they
won’t be mainliners
either. Nevertheless, forbidding people things
they like or think they might
enjoy only makes
them want those things all the more. This
psychological insight is, for some
mysterious
reason, always denied our governors.
It is a
lucky thing for the American moralist that we have
no public memory of anything that
happened
last Tuesday. No one in Washington today recalls
what happened during the years
alcohol was
forbidden to the people by a Congress that thought
it had a divine mission to stamp
out Demon Rum
---launching, in the process, the greatest crime
wave in the country’s history,
causing
thousands of deaths from bad alcohol, and creating
a general ( and persisting ) contempt
among
the citizenry for laws of the United States.
The same thing is happening today. But the
government has learned nothing from past attempts
at prohibition.
Last year when the supply
of marijuana was slightly reduced by the Feds, the
pushers got the kids
hooked on heroin and
deaths increased dramatically. Whose fault? I
think the Government of the
United States was
responsible for those deaths. The bureaucratic
machine has a vested interest in
playing cops
and robbers. Both the Bureau of Narcotics and the
Mafia want strong laws against
the sale and
use of drugs because if drugs are sold at cost
there would be no money in it for
anyone.
If there was no money in it for the Mafia,
there would be no friendly playground pushers. And
addicts would not commit crimes to pay for the
next fix. Finally, if there was no money in it,
the
Bureau of Narcotics would wither away,
something they are not about to do without a
struggle.
Will anything sensible be done? Of
course not. The American people are as devoted to
the idea
of sin and its punishment as they are
to making money----and fighting drugs is nearly as
big a
business as pushing them.
Therefore the situation will only grow worse.
2. The Trouble with Legalizing Drugs
If
you can’t win the game, change the rules. Such is
the deliciously convenient reasoning that the
drug problem can be resolved by legalizing it.
Unfortunately, legalization sounds too good to be
true and probably is.
It sounds good
because it’s simple. It would immediately remove
the immense profits drugs now
pump into the
criminal underworld, it would reduce the
forbidden-fruit attraction drugs have for
young people and it would take away the
criminal stigmas that prevents many addicts from
seeking help. You even could tax the sale of
now-illegal drugs and use the money to build more
treatment centers, which are desperately
needed.
Deep thinkers have long advocated
lifting the prohibition on drugs. Last year the
debate was
stirred anew when Baltimore Mayor
Kurt Schmoke called for a serious national debate
on the
subject.
Schmoke’s advocacy was
based on his experience as a drug prosecutor. He
felt as though he was
bailing out the ocean
with a teaspoon. Prohibition of drugs is working
no better than prohibition
of liquor worked
earlier this century, he told Congress. It
increases crime without eliminating
addiction.
So let’s change the rules.
He was not alone in
his sentiments. “Prohibition is an attempted cure
that makes matters
worse—for both the addict
and the rest of us ,” wrote Nobel Prize-winning
economist Milton
Friedman in 1972, after
President Nixon declared a “war” on drugs.
The
simplicity of this prescription has proved
irresistible to many. Unfortunately, the simple
beauty of such logic has an ugly gaping hole.
There is considerable evidence to suggest that
with
legalization drug use and its social
costs would increase. Sharply.
Keeping drugs
illegal may not eliminate them, but it almost
surely reduces their use.
“Prof. James Q.
Wilson tells us that during the years in which
heroin could be legally prescribed
by doctors
in Britain, the number of addicts increased forty-
fold,” wrote drug czar William
Bennett in the
Sept. 19 Wall Street Journal in a rebuttal to an
open letter economist Friedman
had directed to
him in an earlier issue. “And after the repeal of
Prohibition---an analogy favored
but
misunderstood by legalization advocates---
consumption of alcohol soared by 350 percent.”
Unfortunately, Bennett’s approach also misses
the boat. Drugs are a symptom of deeper ills in
certain segments of our society, particularly
the impoverished segments. You can call in all the
troops you want and build more jails and drug
boot camps, but as long as demand remains, the
traffic will find ways to get through. And
demand will remain as long as the social ills that
feed it
remain.
Bennett is right to say
the nation’s drug problem is too multifaceted to
be destroyed with a
“magic bullet.” But he is
wrong to limit his targets. The proverbial quick
fix that legalization would
seem to provide is
illusory. But so is the slow fix offered by
further criminalization.
3. Legalize? No.
Deglamorize
Legalization sounds like a cheap
and easy solution. It works instantly. By
redefining drug use as
legal, it eliminates
all drug-related crimes.
Now. legalization
does solve the drug enforcement problem. If drugs
are legal, there are no
profits to be made
from smuggling, no mafias and drug cartels to be
enriched by the trade. No
one goes to
jail. We save billions in law enforcement and
reduce corruption to boot.
What legalizers
minimize is the catastrophic effect that
legalization would have on public health,
and
effect that would far outweigh the savings in law
enforcement.
Well, you ask ,if alcohol is now
legal, what is the logic of prohibiting cocaine
and heroin? No logic,
just history, alcohol
use is so ancient and so universal a practice that
it cannot be repealed. The
question is not:
Which is worse, alcohol or cocaine? The question
is: Which is worse, alcohol
alone or alcohol
plus cocaine and heroin? Alcohol is here to stay.
To legalize other drugs is to
declare that the
rest of the pharmacy is here to stay too.
Do
we really want the additional and permanent burden
of the other intoxicants, some of which
are
infinitely more addictive that alcohol? Since 1987
there have been 37 railroad accidents
involving drug use. With cocaine and heroin
readily available, additional transportation
deaths
alone would dwarf the current number of
drug-related deaths.
Even legalization
proponents admit that it would increase drug use.
First, legalization gives a
social sanction.
Second, it makes drugs available without risk.
Third, it makes them available at a
price that
must match or undercut the street price---
otherwise, the whole rationale for
legalization is defeated. All three effects
would increase consumption. What we save in law
enforcement we would have to spend many times
over in traffic deaths, lost productivity and
hospital costs.
What to do? For any
problem that is ultimately cultural, there can be
no quick fix. The answer has
to be cultural,
too, and changing attitudes takes decades. But it
can be done. The great paradigm
is the success
of the now 25-year-old antismoking campaigns.
When I was a kid, the most glamorous image one
could imagine was Bogie with a cigarette
dangling from his lips. No more. Tobacco
advertising is banned on TV, a clear violation of
free
speech and a good one. A relentless
government campaign, finally picked up by
Hollywood and
the rest of culture industry,
has thoroughly deglamorized cigarettes: It is
considered a confession
of personal weakness.
This is not the image a person wants to project,
and projecting an image is
why people start to
smoke in the first place.(Addiction is why they
continue.)
The combination of moral
persuasion, deglamorization and mild
repression—segregating
smokers, banning TV
ads—has led to a dramatic decline in tobacco usage
in one generation. It
was 40 percent when the
surgeon general’s first report was issued in 1964.
It is 30 percent today.
Nancy Reagan’s Just
Say No to drugs campaign drew ridicule, but it
recognized the only
nonrepressive way to go
after drugs. Do to them what was done to tobacco:
deglamorize. The
only way to reduce
consumption is to reverse a cultural impression.
That cannot be easy. But
there is no other
way.
You must start cracking down hard on
users. Not by putting them all in jail. There
aren’t enough
cells to go around, but by
imposing stiff sanctions against property---heavy
fines and confiscation.
When a user has to
calculate the price of coke at $$100 per gram plus,
say, a $$10,000 premium
thrown in, he might
start looking for cheaper forms of recreation.
There you have it: four solutions. If you are
desperate for a quick fix, either legalize drugs
or
repress the users. If you want a civilized
approach, mount a propaganda campaign against
drugs
on the scale of the antismoking
campaign. And if you are just a politician looking
for reelection,
send in the Marines and wave
to the cameras.