The case for legalizing drugs is unanswerable
Jack in Amsterdam pointed out this column by John Gray in The Observer:
The war on drugs is a failed policy that has injured far more people than it has protected. Around 14,000 people have died in Mexico‘s drug wars since the end of 2006, more than 1,000 of them in the first three months of this year. Beyond the overflowing morgues in Mexican border towns, there are uncounted numbers who have been maimed, traumatised or displaced. From Liverpool to Moscow, Tokyo to Detroit, a punitive regime of prohibition has turned streets into battlefields, while drug use has remained embedded in the way we live. The anti-drug crusade will go down as among the greatest follies of modern times.
A decade or so ago, it could be argued that the evidence was not yet in on drugs. No one has ever believed illegal drug use could be eliminated, but there was a defensible view that prohibition could prevent more harm than it caused. Drug use is not a private act without consequences for others; even when legal, it incurs medical and other costs to society. A society that adopted an attitude of laissez-faire towards the drug habits of its citizens could find itself with higher numbers of users. There could be a risk of social abandonment, with those in poor communities being left to their fates.
These dangers have not disappeared, but the fact is that the costs of drug prohibition now far outweigh any possible benefits the policy may bring. It is time for a radical shift in policy. Full-scale legalisation, with the state intervening chiefly to regulate quality and provide education on the risks of drug use and care for those who have problems with the drugs they use, should now shape the agenda of drug law reform.
In rich societies like Britain, the US and continental Europe, the drug war has inflicted multiple harms.
Since the inevitable result is to raise the price of a serious drug habit beyond what many can afford, penalising use drives otherwise law-abiding people into the criminal economy. As well as criminalising users, prohibition exposes them to major health risks. Illegal drugs can’t easily be tested for quality and toxicity and overdosing are constant risks. Where the drugs are injected, there is the danger of hepatitis and HIV being transmitted. Again, criminalising some drugs while allowing a free market in others distracts attention from those that are legal and harmful, such as alcohol.
While it is certainly possible that legalisation could see more people take drugs, a drug user’s life would be much safer and healthier than at present. There is no room for speculation here, for we know that a great many users lived highly productive lives before drugs were banned. Until the First World War, when they were introduced under the banner of national security, there were few controls on drugs in the UK or America. Cocaine, morphine and heroin could be bought at the local chemist. Many were users, including William Gladstone, who liked to take a drop of laudanum (an alcoholic tincture of opium) in his coffee before making speeches. Some users had problems, but none had to contend with the inflated prices, health risks and threat of jail faced by users today.
Though politicians like to pretend they embody a moral consensus, there is none on the morality of drug use…
Considering how successful the drug war has been over the last 40 years or so, there is no rational reason to continue this ongoing disaster. Now all we have to do is convince a majority of the voters who apparently are completely oblivious to the problem. Unfortunately the U.S. Supreme Court, as always, has no problem with one of this wars most obvious flaws, meaning the fact that it violates equal protection under the law. But then they have a long history of ignoring the constitution whenever the voters want them to.
Charles Duwel
14 September 2009 at 2:33 am
Unchallenged statistics prove that US drug policy has been dramatically sucessfull. Since the peak of US drug use in 1985 where about 24 million people were using drugs, prevention, treatment and enforcement have halved that number. Unfortunately these numbers have gone unheralded by the mainstream media including the NYT. What a shocker!
Ron
14 September 2009 at 6:30 am
Ron, as someone who has written a book on drug use and has a blog on drug use, Narco Polo, I would like to know the source of your statistic allowing you to call the drug war “dramatically successful.” According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse that has been tracking drug usage rates since 1975, rates peaked in the late ’70s and bottomed out in the early ’90s. Since then rates have risen. Drug usage rates ebb and flow – as does the popularity of most activities – and according to experts like Peter Reuter these usage fluctuations have not correlated with America’s punitive tactics. Don’t blame the media, bureaucratic drug-war cheerleaders aren’t even naive enough to call the drug war “dramatically successful.”
Robert Arthur
14 September 2009 at 7:39 am
Ron, Robert Arthur beat me to the punch. What we need is a link to an authoritative source that supports the statistics you claim. I’m afraid that the comment by itself doesn’t mean a thing. Until you provide the source of the statistic, it doesn’t even have to be challenged—it’s just noise.
LeisureGuy
14 September 2009 at 8:37 am
Robert and LeisureGuy are quite right to challenge the imaginative “statistics” Ron cited to support his assertion that, contrary to all appearances. More than two MILLION Americans are now in penal custody of one sort or another. A huge proportion of them are in jail or prison for drug “crimes”…the “Land of the Free” now has a greater part of its population behind bars than any other country on the planet.
This is not because of drugs, but because of drug LAWS. I maintain that these laws are immoral from the inception. Citizens can delegate to the government the responsibility to use force to protect any right they naturally have (such as the right to life, to be protected from violence, or the right to keep ones property)… but nobody has any natural right to decide what other people ingest. I’m not talking about exercise of any privilege, like driving a car, while inebriated… thats a different matter, because it puts others at real risk… but this is NOT true of someone smoking a joint in his or her home.
Michael
14 September 2009 at 9:54 am
Take a look:
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/142556/over_100_million_americans_have_smoked_marijuana_–_and_it%27s_still_illegal_
Jack
14 September 2009 at 2:25 pm