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Randall Morgan e-mail - randymorgan@mail.org
Those against this idea say to legalize drugs would be to promote death and addiction (Trebach and Zeese, page 78). Wider availability of drugs would lead to increasing number of users, more addicts, and more deaths from drug overdoses. Armed robberies and burglaries will increase drastically as drug addict commit more crimes to feed their addiction. Drug abuse promotes other income producing crimes, such as bank or credit card fraud, forgery, trading in stolen goods, and prostitution. These also would increase.
Those in favor of legalizing drugs say what we are doing now is not working. They point to the lesson of Alcohol Prohibition and say it is Prohibition that is causing the horrible crime and violence now associated with drugs (Trebach and Zeese, page 67). Much of the violence associated with drugs is caused by drug dealers fighting over who controls the local drug trade, or retaliating when a drug deal goes bad. All too often stray bullets from this violence ends up killing completely innocent bystanders, including women, children and even babies. Witnesses to drug crimes are often murdered to prevent their testifying against drug traffickers. Hundreds of law enforcement officers have been killed fighting this futile war on drugs (Bugliosi, page 254). The grieving loved ones of those killed are further victims of this failed policy. Legalization would deny organized crime a lucrative black market to exploit. With drug users able to receive their drugs legally, drug dealers would have no one to sell drugs to and would be out of business.
Currently many drug addicts do commit crimes to feed their addiction (Ingles, page 183). Supporting an $100 dollar a day drug habit is expensive, very few legal jobs will support that kind of expense. Many drug addicts resort to crime to raise this money. Often addicts will aggressively encourage people to try drugs so they can supply these new users and get their own drugs at reduced cost or even free. The high cost of illegal drugs encourages them to do this, and in this way creates new addicts. However if drugs were available from a controlled legal source, at a modest price, the need to raise these huge amounts of money would be eliminated. Drug related crime should actually go down if drugs were legal (Miller, page 87 and 133).
Another serious concern is the harm done to the user by illegal drugs. Many street drugs contain harmful adulterants and impurities. Legal drugs would be of pharmaceutical quality, containing none of these contaminants. Also the potency of street drugs vary hugely, greatly increasing the risk of accidental overdose deaths. With the potency of legal drugs strictly controlled, accidental overdose death would be much less likely (Weil and Winifred, page 86). The spread of AIDS is increased by outlawing the possession of clean syringes without a prescription. Addicts will often share the same dirty syringe and in the process transmit the HIV virus. In Hong Kong where needles are legal and cheep, there is no drug related AIDS (Duke and Gross, page 194). In Scotland where doctors are authorized to prescribe virtually any drug in oral form to addicts, the spread of HIV through contaminated needles has virtually stopped. Crime rates in Scotland have also gone down since this policy was adopted (Duke and Gross, page 304).
Those against legalizing drugs say we can't legalize drugs because drugs hurt people. Those who favor legalization ask if prohibition is reducing harm or increasing it? There is two kinds of harm being done. There is the harm drug users voluntarily do to themselves by choosing to use drugs. And there is the harm done to completely innocent people by the murder, armed robbery, burglary and other crimes caused by prohibition. Which type of harm is more important to prevent? If the answer to this question is the harm done to innocent people is more important, then we must end prohibition to prevent this harm. And even if drugs do hurt people, what sense does it make to put people in jail for hurting themselves? Wouldn't a medical, educational approach really make more sense?
Treating drug users as criminals causes addicts to avoid medical treatment out of fear of arrest, or being denied access to their drug and thus forced into the misery of withdrawal. Those who say that drug users are behaving irresponsibly and deserve whatever happens to them should consider the fact that the infectious diseases that drug addicts acquire infect not only them but also their children and sexual partners and the population at large.
The amount of money we spend on the drug problem is enormous, over $30 Billion dollars in 1995 (Bugliosi, page 13). Legalization would allow us to shift resources away from policies that don't work, such as interdiction and jails, and toward policies that do work such as drug treatment and education.
According to a two year, government funded study by the Rand Corporation, drug treatment is 7 times more effective at reducing drug consumption than jail, and 11 times more effective at reducing consumption than interdiction.
Under our present drug policy only about 20 percent of addicts who want drug treatment can get it. Long waiting lists force addicts to typically wait four to six months to get help (Bugliosi, page 73 and 244). Drug treatment has been shown to more than pay for itself in money saved by reducing crime and health care costs. According to a state funded study of 3000 addicts by the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, every dollar invested in drug treatment saves 7 dollars in reduced crime and health care expenses. In this study, among addicts receiving treatment, drug related crime dropped by 66 percent (Bugliosi, page 73).
Many people who support drug treatment programs still say legalizing drugs is giving up the fight against drug abuse, that legalizing drugs would be sending the message that drugs are OK, go ahead and use them. And even if we did legalize drugs, it would be unmanageable. There would be attempts to divert legal drugs out of legal channels into a black market. And if drugs were legal and available more kids would obtain them and be hurt by them.
Kids gaining access to drugs is a serious concern. On this point the pro-legalization and anti-legalization sides agree 100 percent, kids should not use drugs. We must send a strong message to kids that drug use is dangerous and the smart choice is to avoid drug use. The two sides differ however on what is the best way to keep drugs away from kids. Those in favor of legalization say prohibition is promoting drug dealing, which is increasing kids access to drugs. In surveys done by the National Institute of Drug Abuse when High School kids were asked which was easier to get drugs or alcohol, the overwhelming answer was drugs were easier to get. Since legalization would put most drug dealers out of business, there should be fewer of them around to sell drugs to kids. There would also be strictly enforced age limits on who could buy legal drugs; drug dealers have no age limits. They will sell to anybody!
There would probably be some diversion of legal drugs to a small black market, but this small leakage would be tiny compared to the massive hemorrhaging we have now with prohibition.
The drug laws are not very effective at deterring drug use. According to surveys by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, 32 percent of Americans age 12 or older have tried an illegal drug at least once in their lives (Bugliosi, page 238). Out of apx. 20 million regular drug users there are 500,000 arrests per year for drug possession. So in any given year a drug user has about a 1/40 chance of being arrested. If this person uses drugs once a week this works out to a 1/2000 chance or about an 0.05 percent risk per use of being arrested. Also 80 percent of the drugs consumed are used by those addicted to them (Duke and Gross, page 217). Addicts are very unlikely to be deterred by the laws against drugs.
The argument is sometimes made that if we legalize drugs we will have a huge increase in the number of people using drugs. It does seem logical that making drugs as legal as tobacco and alcohol would encourage people to try drugs. However there are other factors than simple availability that strongly affect peoples decision to use drugs. In one national scientific survey of 1,400 adults, people were asked how likely they were to try marijuana or cocaine if they were legalized. Of those who had never tried these drugs, 4.2 percent said they might try marijuana if it were legalized, 0.9 percent said they might try cocaine if it were legal (Trebach and Inciardi, page 107). It seems likely that people's belief that a drug will hurt them is a much stronger deterrence to drug use than its legality.
From 1965 to 1996 The number of adults who smoke tobacco dropped from 40 percent to 25 percent. This drop was caused by an effort to educate people on the devastating effects of smoking on human health (Duke and Gross, page 283). There is every reason to believe that truthful education about the harmful effects of drugs will prevent people from using legal drugs.
Many politicians have made speeches where they say "We have not really fought the War on Drugs. We need tougher laws, longer prison sentences, and more prisons so we can lock up these criminals who are selling drugs." Unfortunately these politicians never examine the cost of actually doing this. There are approximately 20 million regular drug users in this country. If 5 percent of them are also selling drugs, that equals 1 million drug dealers. According to the Department of Justice the cost of apprehending, arresting, prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating one drug dealer for 5 years is $500,000 dollars. So to lock up 1 million drug dealers for 5 years would cost $500 Billion Dollars! This is 16 times what we are now spending on the War on Drugs, and would eat up a full 50 percent of the Federal budget (currently at just over 1 Trillion Dollars.) This is very clearly politically and financially impossible. We cannot solve the drug problem in this way.
The reason alcohol was legalized in 1933 was the public saw all the crime and violence prohibition was causing and thinking back to the time when alcohol was legal, said legal was better (Inglis, page 152). There were some problems with people who used alcohol to excess or became alcoholics, but there was no organized crime terrorizing the whole country over control of the illegal trade in alcohol. Unfortunately there is no way for people living today to think back to a time when drugs were legal and say legal was better. This terrible uncertainty, of what would happen if drugs were legalized is a very serious concern. Lurid stories in the press and a strong effort by schools, church and the government to warn people about the danger of drugs have, very understandably, made many people very fearful of the idea of legalizing drugs.
Short of total legalization, there are half way measures that would have some of the advantages of legal drugs but would maintain a high degree of control over how they were sold and used. One model for a type of limited, controlled drug legalization has been proposed by a Dr. Tod Mikuriya, a drug treatment counselor in Berkeley, California. In it he suggests drug users be permitted to obtain a special drug user permit that they would receive after going though an education process to make sure they were well informed of the potential hazards of drug use, the laws and penalties of irresponsible use, and that they would lose their legal access if they behaved irresponsible. They would then present their user ID card at a pharmacy and receive small amounts of the drugs they wanted (Trebach and Zeese, page 8). Dr. Mikuriya's proposal highlights an important fact in legalizing drugs. When a drug is legal you can control it. You can control how it is manufactured. You can control how it is sold. You can control who has access to it. When a drug is illegal you have no control at all!
Some of the critics of drug legalization have said we have no way of knowing what would happen if we legalized drugs, since drugs have never been legal. This is not correct. America has a long history of legally available drugs. Marijuana was an important commercial crop, starting from its introduction in New England in 1629. In 1762 marijuana grown for fiber production was considered so important that Virginia imposed penalties on farmers who did not produce it! George Washington recorded his growing of marijuana at Mount Vernon in 1765 (Brecher, page 403.) Marijuana continued as a legal commercial crop until it was outlawed in 1937.
Opium was completely legal in the United States until the first federal drug law was passed in 1919. Before this it was legally and conveniently available at low prices throughout the country. Most was legally imported but it was also grown here as an medicinal crop as early as 1781 (Brecher, page 3 and 4.)
Cocaine also was legal from the time of its introduction in 1870 until it was banned in 1919. It was a major ingredient in many patent medicine. It was also added to many beverages such as "Mariani's wine." Up until 1906 each bottle of the soft drink Coca Cola contained 5 milligrams of cocaine (Brecher, page 270.)
For many years in this country it was possible to walk into virtually any pharmacy in America and buy cocaine, opium, and marijuana products, legally over the counter. They were often available at grocery stores or even by mail order (Brecher, page 3). It was no secret that these products made people feel good. The manufacturers advertised this fact heavily in the newspapers of the time. They were sold for a variety of ailments, as legal as aspirin is today. And even though these drugs were easily and cheaply available there was virtually no drug related crime (Miller, page 133). No armed gangs having shootouts over control of the local trade in drugs. No kids being drawn into gangs and drug dealing so older drug dealers could protect themselves from the law. No billionaire drug lords destabilizing whole countries with violence and terror. None of this existed.
It is also true that there were people addicted to these drugs, but the simple fact that they were legal allowed these people to live there lives with no desperate need to victimize their neighbors to get money for drugs. Addicts were usually able to function productively and were not considered evil or outcasts (Duke and Gross, page 197). During this time of legal availability it is estimated that less than 1 percent of the population was addicted to any drug (Trebach and Inciardi, page 49.) Most people had no interest in them at all. Clearly America was not devastated by the legal availability of these drugs.
When presented with the historical evidence of legal drugs in America, those against legalization protest that it was a totally different world back then than exists today. And that we still have no evidence of what would happen if we legalized drugs today. Again this is not correct. In 1997 the government of Switzerland released a report summarizing the results of a three year experiment in which 1,146 heroin addicts in 18 cities across Switzerland were provided with legal state provided heroin on a daily basics (New York Times 9/28/97, The Washington Post 12/21/97)
This experimental program accepted only "hard-core" junkies - people who had been injecting for years and had attempted and failed to quit many times. Addicts injection of prescribed heroin had to be done under a doctor's supervision and injectable narcotics could not be taken home, but they were allowed to take home heroin laced cigarettes. Addicts were offered practically unlimited amounts of heroin (up to 300 milligrams, three times a day.) Most addicts stabilized their doses well below this level and there were no overdose deaths. Psychological counseling was provided to assist addicts in gaining employment, finding housing, and getting into drug treatment to get off heroin.
The results of this experiment were dramatic. When they enrolled in the program 70 percent of the participants were earning income from criminal activity. This number dropped to only 10 percent after 18 months, a 60 percent drop in drug related crime! The number of unemployed participants fell by more than half (from 44% to 20%). The general and nutritional health of participants improved rapidly during the program. New cases of AIDS, hepatitis and other blood disorders fell sharply. 83 people decided to give up heroin and switch to abstinence therapy. The program administrators concluded that heroin per se causes very few, if any, problems when it is used in a controlled fashion and administered in hygienic conditions, and recommend it be continued. The basic belief underlying Switzerland's heroin program is that its 30,000 or so addicts are not criminals, but people in need of help.
In September of 1997 Switzerland held a national referendum to vote on whether or not to continue the policy of allowing legal heroin to hard core heroin addicts. Swiss voters overwhelmingly endorsed their government's drug policies, voting by a margin of 71 percent in favor of continuing this policy (New York Times 9/28/97.)
In conclusion, there would seem to be considerable evidence that
many of the problems now associated with drugs are really caused by drug
prohibition. By treating drug use as a crime that must be stamped out by
legal sanctions we are creating many of the problems we so badly want to
eliminate. Legalizing drugs will not eliminate drug abuse, but it will
eliminate the harm done by prohibition, and will create an environment
where the problem of drug abuse can be addressed more clearly as the
medical problem it truly is.
Brecher, Edward M. Licit and Illicit Drugs. New York: Consumers Union, 1972.
Bugliosi, Vincent T. The Phoenix Solution - Getting Serious About Winning America's Drug War. California: Dove Books, 1996.
Duke, Steven, and Gross, Albert. America's Longest War - Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade Against Drugs. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1993.
Inglis, Brian. The Forbidden Game - A Social History of Drugs. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975.
Miller, Richard L. The Case For Legalizing Drugs. New York: Praeger, 1991.
Trebach, Arnold, and Zeese, Kevin. The Great Issues of Drug Policy. Washington, D.C.: Drug Policy Foundation, 1990.
Trebach, Arnold, and Inciardi, James. Legalize It? - Debating American Drug Policy. Washington, D.C.: The American University Press, 1994.
Uchtenhagen, A., Gutzwiller, F., and A. Dobler-Mikola. Programme for a Medical Prescription of Narcotics - Final Report of the Research Representatives. Zurich: Institute for Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Zurich, 1997.
Weil, Andrew, and Rosen, Winifred. Chocolate to Morphine - Understanding
Mind-Active Drugs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983.
Randall Morgan e-mail - randymorgan@mail.org
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