President Nixon's declaration of a War on Drugs in 1971 has led to three major consequences: | |||
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| Drugs are not a good thing. But when you try to prohibit its commerce the results you get are even worse. | |||
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Drugs are bad, but the drug war makes them even worse
What's Wrong With the Drug War?
Everyone has a stake in ending the war on drugs. Whether you’re a parent concerned about protecting children from drug-related harm, a social justice advocate worried about racially disproportionate incarceration rates, an environmentalist seeking to protect the Amazon rainforest or a fiscally conservative taxpayer you have a stake in ending the drug war. U.S. federal, state and local governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make America “drug-free.” Yet heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit drugs are cheaper, purer and easier to get than ever before. Nearly half a million people are behind bars on drug charges - more than all of western Europe (with a bigger population) incarcerates for all offenses. The war on drugs has become a war on families, a war on public health and a war on our constitutional rights.
Many of the problems the drug war purports to resolve are in fact caused by the drug war itself. So-called “drug-related” crime is a direct result of drug prohibition's distortion of immutable laws of supply and demand. Public health problems like HIV and Hepatitis C are all exacerbated by zero tolerance laws that restrict access to clean needles. The drug war is not the promoter of family values that some would have us believe. Children of inmates are at risk of educational failure, joblessness, addiction and delinquency. Drug abuse is bad, but the drug war is worse.
Few public policies have compromised public health and undermined our fundamental civil liberties for so long and to such a degree as the war on drugs. The United States is now the world's largest jailer, imprisoning nearly half a million people for drug offenses alone. That's more people than Western Europe, with a bigger population, incarcerates for all offenses. Roughly 1.5 million people are arrested each year for drug law violations - 40% of them just for marijuana possession. People suffering from cancer, AIDS and other debilitating illnesses are regularly denied access to their medicine or even arrested and prosecuted for using medical marijuana. We can do better. Join us.
How to stop the drug wars
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution
A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.
That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.
Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.
“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.
The evidence of failure
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.
This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.
Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.
Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.
Al Capone, but on a global scale
Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.
The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.
Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.
Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.
That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.
There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.
What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.
By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.
A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?
This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.
Source: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13237193
Commentary: Legalize drugs to stop violence
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (CNN) -- Over the past two years, drug violence in Mexico has become a fixture of the daily news. Some of this violence pits drug cartels against one another; some involves confrontations between law enforcement and traffickers.
Recent estimates suggest thousands have lost their lives in this "war on drugs."
The U.S. and Mexican responses to this violence have been predictable: more troops and police, greater border controls and expanded enforcement of every kind. Escalation is the wrong response, however; drug prohibition is the cause of the violence.
Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground. This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.
Violence was common in the alcohol industry when it was banned during Prohibition, but not before or after.
Violence is the norm in illicit gambling markets but not in legal ones. Violence is routine when prostitution is banned but not when it's permitted. Violence results from policies that create black markets, not from the characteristics of the good or activity in question.
The only way to reduce violence, therefore, is to legalize drugs. Fortuitously, legalization is the right policy for a slew of other reasons.
Prohibition of drugs corrupts politicians and law enforcement by putting police, prosecutors, judges and politicians in the position to threaten the profits of an illicit trade. This is why bribery, threats and kidnapping are common for prohibited industries but rare otherwise. Mexico's recent history illustrates this dramatically.
Prohibition erodes protections against unreasonable search and seizure because neither party to a drug transaction has an incentive to report the activity to the police. Thus, enforcement requires intrusive tactics such as warrantless searches or undercover buys. The victimless nature of this so-called crime also encourages police to engage in racial profiling.
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Prohibition has disastrous implications for national security. By eradicating coca plants in Colombia or poppy fields in Afghanistan, prohibition breeds resentment of the United States. By enriching those who produce and supply drugs, prohibition supports terrorists who sell protection services to drug traffickers.
Prohibition harms the public health. Patients suffering from cancer, glaucoma and other conditions cannot use marijuana under the laws of most states or the federal government despite abundant evidence of its efficacy. Terminally ill patients cannot always get adequate pain medication because doctors may fear prosecution by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Drug users face restrictions on clean syringes that cause them to share contaminated needles, thereby spreading HIV, hepatitis and other blood-borne diseases.
Prohibitions breed disrespect for the law because despite draconian penalties and extensive enforcement, huge numbers of people still violate prohibition. This means those who break the law, and those who do not, learn that obeying laws is for suckers.
Prohibition is a drain on the public purse. Federal, state and local governments spend roughly $44 billion per year to enforce drug prohibition. These same governments forego roughly $33 billion per year in tax revenue they could collect from legalized drugs, assuming these were taxed at rates similar to those on alcohol and tobacco. Under prohibition, these revenues accrue to traffickers as increased profits.
The right policy, therefore, is to legalize drugs while using regulation and taxation to dampen irresponsible behavior related to drug use, such as driving under the influence. This makes more sense than prohibition because it avoids creation of a black market. This approach also allows those who believe they benefit from drug use to do so, as long as they do not harm others. iReport.com: Do you think it's time to legalize marijuana?
Legalization is desirable for all drugs, not just marijuana. The health risks of marijuana are lower than those of many other drugs, but that is not the crucial issue. Much of the traffic from Mexico or Colombia is for cocaine, heroin and other drugs, while marijuana production is increasingly domestic. Legalizing only marijuana would therefore fail to achieve many benefits of broader legalization.
It is impossible to reconcile respect for individual liberty with drug prohibition. The U.S. has been at the forefront of this puritanical policy for almost a century, with disastrous consequences at home and abroad.
The U.S. repealed Prohibition of alcohol at the height of the Great Depression, in part because of increasing violence and in part because of diminishing tax revenues. Similar concerns apply today, and Attorney General Eric Holder's recent announcement that the Drug Enforcement Administration will not raid medical marijuana distributors in California suggests an openness in the Obama administration to rethinking current practice.
Perhaps history will repeat itself, and the U.S. will abandon one of its most disastrous policy experiments.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jeffrey Miron.The Casualties of War
A speech by Sharon Harris
Downtown Atlanta. A nine-month-old baby is killed by a stray bullet. When asked about this, the police chief says, "This is tragic. But the baby was simply a casualty of war. "
In Los Angeles, there was actually an afternoon TV show produced by and for people who have had children and other loved ones killed in drive-by shootings!
It used to be that kids were asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
Now the gruesome joke is, "What do you want to be IF you grow up?"
The war we're talking about is the so-called War on Drugs, and it has had - and is having -- a devastating effect on our inner cities. And notice I didn't say drugs are having this effect; I said the War on Drugs is having this effect.
Ladies and gentlemen, we don't have a drug problem; we have a police
problem. We have a drug policy problem.
My friend Susan is fond of sarcastically saying that she has the solution to the so-called drug problem: Let's just make drugs illegal; then no one can get them." As silly as this sounds, that's precisely the logic behind the Drug War.
I submit to you that it is time to call a truce - to surrender if you will. It is time -- past time -- to legalize drugs. This may sound shocking, but I think the facts I'm going to share with you will shock you even more.
Let's look at the facts.
First, the Drug War is totally ineffective. It has failed to reduce overall
use of illegal drugs or even availability. Narcotics were no more prevalent before Prohibition than now, and cocaine is more widespread.
And it's easy to see that drug laws actually cause more harm than good:
(1) by increasing the price, forcing users to steal to pay for their habits.
It is estimated that 40% of property crimes are committed by drug users -- 4 million crimes per year; $7.5 billion in stolen property.
(2) Prohibition creates stronger and more dangerous drugs. Seen any white lightning lately? Crack cocaine and many designer drugs would not even exist without Prohibition.
(3) by criminalizing use of drugs, we create criminals. Once a person is labeled a criminal, why not commit other crimes? Once that threshold is crossed, it's hard to come back.
(4) normal jobs don't pay enough, so we discourage people from working. This especially affects young people who find role models in punks wearing gold jewelry, leaning against their Mercedes, and smearing at any kid who takes a minimum wage job. And why should a child aspire to anything else when he is given the opportunity to make thousands of dollars a week?
(5) drug-related disputes are removed from the legal system, thus creating a context of violence.
(6) the black market creates jobs -- for professional criminals.
(7) users are forced to have daily contact with criminals.
(8) the violence associated with drug trafficking kills innocent people -- many of them children. Children in our inner cities are afraid to walk to school and are terrified just lying in their own beds at night.
(9) And let's not forget the COSTS. Law enforcement costs alone are over $13 billion per year. The economic cost has been estimated at over $80 billion -- money funneled into the black market. Not to mention lost productivity. And of course we can't put a price tag on the lost lives. Milton Friedman estimated that at least one-half - or 10,000 - of gun deaths each year are a direct result of drug laws.
(10) The cost of incarcerating a drug offender is amazing. There's not enough jail space, so when someone is imprisoned under mandatory sentences, violent criminals have to be released. For each year a drug offender serves, there will be an estimated 40 robberies, 7 assaults, 110 burglaries and 25 car thefts. I don't know about you, but I feel a whole lot safer.
(11) Drug laws corrupt the entire legal system, especially the police -- just
like alcohol Prohibition did.
(12) The Bill of Rights has been virtually gutted by the Drug War. With seizure of property, invasion of privacy, searches, drug-testing --- a whole speech could be written on this topic alone. Even the 2nd amendment comes under this category. If you believe in the right to bear arms, you better be against the Drug War, because that is the main impedance behind gun seizure. A bill has actually been introduced into Congress calling for the repeal of the 2nd amendment, and use of guns by drug dealers was cited as its reason.
(13) Not to mention that the whole idea behind the War on Drugs is
immoral and can never be justified. The premise is that the government has a right to tell you and me what we can and cannot put into our bodies. Whose body is this anyway? I don't know how you feel about this, but my body does not belong to the government.
But what about deaths from drugs? Well here are the figures: each year while alcohol kills 150,000 and tobacco kills 390,000, 400 people die from heroin, 200 from cocaine, 0 from marijuana. And remember that almost all the deaths from illegal drugs are directly caused by Prohibition. To borrow from the gun-rights' bumper sticker: illegal drugs don't kill people; drug LAWS kill people.
Virtually all drug-related violence is really drug-law-related violence. You need only look at the lack of violence in the legal drug market. There's no violence in the sale of alcohol, cigarettes… aspirin.
But, you may be asking, wouldn't we be condoning drug usage if we legalized drugs? This is simply nonsense. As a society, we don't condone cigarette smoking. We don't condone the philosophy of Adolf Hitler or the KKK. Yet we allow people to choose to smoke, we allow publication of Mein Kompf, we let the Klan march down Main Street. Because in this country we condone freedom of expression. We condone individual choice.
The idea of getting rid of drugs sounds like a noble one. But it's a pipe dream. It’s simply not going to happen.
Let's face it, there is and always will be a market for unhealthy things that make some people feel better. There's a market for alcohol, for cigarettes, for butter. For drugs.
Wardens and guards can't keep drugs out of our federal prisons, yet there are those who want to turn this country into a prison in an attempt to eliminate drugs.
You may not use drugs, but believe me, the casualties of war affect you ¬directly and indirectly. In your taxes. In the violence on the streets. In our children's futures.
We've all heard that great definition of insanity: Insanity is keeping on doing the same thing and expecting different results. That's what we've been doing. Throwing more money and more lives at the problem and expecting things to get better. They won't until we end this insanity.
There is blood in the streets – and blood on the hands of all politicians who won't admit what has to be done. Including one politician name Bill Clinton, who refused to even look at the research on this issue. I wonder if he thinks he should have been arrested when he smoked marijuana? Oh, that's right, he didn't inhale, but the law doesn't say "If the person didn't inhale, it's OK." An arrest just might have hindered his future career plans.
Courageous people from all political spectrums are finally realizing what has to be done and are calling for the repeal of drug laws. Curtis Schmoke, mayor of Baltimore, conservative journalists William F. Buckley and Joseph Sobran. Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman. Former secretary of state George Schultz. And YOU, I hope.
We must demand that Congress put an end to this NOW.
And what will be the results? Realize that I'm not calling for a radical experiment. I'm calling for the end of a failed experiment -- for re-Iegalization of drugs. Drugs were legal in this country well into the 20th century. Opium, morphine, and cocaine were legal and cheap, available in grocery stores, drugstores and through the mail. Yet we had none of the violence and other criminal problems we associate with drugs today.
The day after repeal of the drug laws, our streets will be safer. Real drug education can begin. Drug dealers will be gone. Organized crime will take an $80 billion cut in pay. We will live in a safer and freer country.
No longer will punk drug dealers harass and intimidate our children. We can once again ask them, “What would you like to be when you grow up?”
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Please note: This article was originally written as a speech. The author wishes to thank James W. Harris for research, help with writing, and major editing. Feel free to use this material as a speech -- we want this information to get out there to as many people as possible! If used in written form, please give proper credit. Thank you!
About the author: Sharon Harris is president of the Advocates for Self-Government She is also author of "The Invisible Hand Is a Gentle Hand," "They Pry Them from Our Cold, Dead Fingers," and "What Should We Do about Guns?"
Source: http://www.theadvocates.org/library/casualties-of-war.html
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