The drug war is not working Essay Example for Free

The drug war is not working Essay That is certainly true if we assume, as he does, that the purpose of the drug war is to induce Americans to consume only approved drugs. But as the war wears on, we have to wonder what its purposes really are. If its purpose is to make criminals out of one in three African-American males, it has succeeded. If its purpose is to create one of the highest crime rates in the world and thus to provide permanent fodder for demagogues who decry crime and promise to do something about it it is achieving that end. If its purpose is de facto repeal of the Bill of Rights, victory is well in sight. If its purpose is to transfer individual freedom to the central government, it is carrying that off as well as any of our real wars did. If its purpose is to destroy our inner cities by making them war zones, triumph is near. Most of the results of the drug war, of which the essayists here complain, were widely observed during alcohol prohibition. Everyone should have known that the same fate would follow if the Prohibition approach were merely transferred to different drugs. It has been clear for over a decade that Milton Friedmans warnings about Prohibition redux have been borne out (see his Prohibition and Drugs, Newsweek, May 1, 1972). At some point, the consequences of a social policy become so palpable that deliberate continuation of the policy incorporates those consequences into the policy. We are near if not past that point with drug prohibition. For forty years following the repeal of alcohol prohibition, we treated drug prohibition as we did other laws against vice: we didnt take it very seriously. As we were extricating ourselves from the Vietnam War, however, Richard Nixon declared all-out global war on the drug menace, and the militarization of the problem began. After Ronald Reagan redeclared that war, and George Bush did the same, we had a drug-war budget that was 1,000 times what it was when Nixon first discovered the new enemy. The objectives of the drug war are obscured in order to prevent evaluation. A common claim, for example, is that prohibition is part of the nations effort to prevent serious crime. Bill Clintons drug czar, Dr. Lee Brown, testified before Congress: Drugs especially addictive, hard-core drug use are behind much of the crime we see on our streets today, both those crimes committed by users to finance their lifestyles and those committed by traffickers and dealers fighting for territory and turf. . . . Moreover, there is a level of fear in our communities that is, I believe, unprecedented in our history . . . If these remarks had been preceded by two words, Prohibition of, the statement would have been correct, and the political reverberations would have been deafening. Instead, Dr.Brown implied that drug consumption is by itself responsible for turf wars and the other enumerated evils, an implication which he and every other drug warrior know is false. The only possibility more daunting than that our leaders are dissembling is that they might actually believe the nonsense they purvey. I have little to add to the catalogue of drug-war casualties in the other essays assembled here. I do, however, see another angle of entry for Mr. Buckleys efforts at quantification. I have argued elsewhere that the drug war is responsible for at least half of our serious crime. A panel of experts consulted by U. S. News World Report put the annual dollar cost of Americas crime at $674 billion. Half of that, $337 billion, was the total federal budget as recently as 1975. The crime costs of drug prohibition alone may equal 150 per cent of the entire federal welfare budget for 1995. I also think Mr. Buckley understates the nonquantifiable loss of what he quaintly refers to as amenities. Not only is it nearly suicidal to walk alone in Central Park at night, it is impossible in sections of some cities safely to leave ones home, or to remain there. Some Americans sleep in their bathtubs hoping they are bullet-proof. Prohibition-generated violence is destroying large sections of American cities. We can have our drug war or we can have healthy cities; we cannot have both. In this collection of essays, we critics have focused on the costs of the drug war. The warriors could justly complain if we failed to mention the benefits. So lets take a look at the benefit side of the equation. Were it not for the drug war, the prohibitionists say, we might be a nation of zombies. The DEA pulled the figure of 60 million from the sky: thats how many cocaine users they say we would have if it werent for prohibition. Joseph Califanos colleague at the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, Dr. Herbert Kleber, a former assistant to William Bennett, puts the number of cocaine users after repeal at a more modest 20 to 25 million. In contrast, government surveys suggest that only about 3 million Americans currently use cocaine even occasionally and fewer than 500,000 use it weekly. The prohibitionists scenarios have no basis either in our history or in other cultures. In many countries, heroin and cocaine are cheap and at least de facto legal. Mexico is awash in cheap drugs, yet our own State Department says that Mexico does not have a serious drug problem. Neither cocaine nor heroin is habitually consumed by more than a small fraction of the residents of any country in the world. There is no reason to suppose that Americans would be the single exception. Lee Brown used to rely on alcohol prohibition as proof that legalization would addict the nation, asserting that alcohol consumption shot straight up when Prohibition was repealed. He no longer claims that, it having been pointed out to him that alcohol consumption increased only about 25 per cent in the years following repeal. Yet even assuming, contrary to that experience, that ingestion of currently illegal drugs would double or triple following repeal, preventing such increased consumption still cannot be counted a true benefit of drug prohibition. After repeal, the drugs would be regulated; their purity and potency would be disclosed on the package, as Mr. Buckley points out, together with appropriate warnings. Deaths from overdoses and toxic reactions would be reduced, not increased. Moreover, as Richard Cowan has explained (NR, How the Narcs Created Crack, Dec. 5, 1986), the drugs consumed after repeal would be less potent than those ingested under prohibition. Before alcohol prohibition, we were a nation of beer drinkers. Prohibition pushed us toward hard liquor, a habit from which we are still recovering. Before the Harrison Act, many Americans took their cocaine in highly diluted forms, such as Coca-Cola. We would also end the cruel practices described by Ethan Nadelmann wherein we deny pain medication to those who need it, preclude the medical use of marijuana, and compel drug users to share needles and thus to spread deadly diseases. The proportion of users who would consume the drugs without substantial health or other problems would be greatly increased. In comparison to any plausible post-repeal scenario, therefore, there simply are no health benefits achieved by prohibition.