Drug Abuse

For the past seventy-five years, the United States has pursued a policy of criminal prohibition with respect to certain, but not all, mind-altering drugs. Despite its all too apparent failures, a succession of Administrations from both political parties, both locally and nationally and with virtually no exceptions, has persuaded the American public that a prohibitionist policy is the best, indeed the only, way to control drugs and crime.

Curiously, although this policy has historically failed to curb the drug market or reduce the crime associated with it, our policy makers have never seriously reconsidered its underlying premises Instead, they have called for more of the same. This has led to a cycle of more vigorous law enforcement of stronger and stronger laws, despite the persistent failure of such laws to achieve lasting remedial results. Wide public acceptance of this approach has enabled the state to remain largely above criticism and at the same time to accumulate tremendous and sometimes unconstitutional powers.

The unvarnished truth is that far from controlling the drug market and the crime related to it, prohibition is an engine for crime and violence of an increasingly virulent nature. The analogy between Prohibition of the 1920s and current drug prohibition is far from exact, but just as alcohol prohibition produced an increase in violent crime in the 1920s,1 drug prohibition, and especially the current war on drugs, has produced an increase in violent crime in the 1980s, and if current policies continue, we will see more of the same in the 1990s. When the American public finally understands this paradox, drug policy reform will be not only possible, but inevitable.

WHICH DRUG PROBLEM?

In 1989, a staggering 64% of the American public named drugs as the nation's most serious domestic problem in a New York Times-CBS poll. This was the highest percentage ever received by a single issue in any public opinion poll. 2 Although recently drug policy has been eclipsed by the Persian Gulf war and the economy, the public's concern still remains very high. Indeed, Americans are so concerned about drugs that many say they are willing to give up fundamental Constitutional rights in return for a solution to the drug problem.'

But when you probe beneath the superficialities of public opinion polls and talk with people one-on-one or in focus groups, you immediately run into a definitional problem: which "drug problem" are people so intensely concerned about? Are they concerned about the health consequences of drug addiction? After all, the underlying rationale for drug prohibition is that the state has a moral and legal obligation to protect its citizens from the ravages of substance abuse. The drug laws exist to dissuade otherwise law abiding Americans from using those substances that are taboo. And those substances are taboo because according to the United States Supreme Court, "to be a confirmed drug addict is to be one of the walking dead...the teeth have rotted out; the appetite is lost and the stomach and intestines don't function properly...Often times, too, death comes—much too early in life...Such is the torment of being a drug addict; such is the plague of being one of the walking dead."

But the fact is that for the vast majority of Americans, the adverse medical and social consequences of the use of illicit drugs is not the "drug problem" they are talking and worrying about. If the public were really concerned about the physical and emotional health of drug users, then the chief objects of their concern would not be the 9.5 million Americans who use illegal drugs on a regular (i.e., weekly) basis:5 they would be the 94 million who abuse our two most lethal (but legal) drugs, cigarettes and alcohol.6 When measured by the number of users, the number of addicts, the number of deaths, the costs to our health and insurance systems, the costs to employers, then clearly cigarettes and alcohol exact a far greater toll on the nation's medical and social well-being than do all the illicit drugs combined.7 But even though the public knows that cigarettes and alcohol exact a terrible 4011, we do not see newspaper headlines announcing that 64% of the American people think it is our number one problem.

When people talk about the "drug problem'', they are really talking about the pervasive violence and crime that they have come to associate with illegal drugs—the guns, the automatic weapons, the bullets flying, the degradation of their quality of life. The internecine violence we are witnessing today brings to mind the opening scene of the movie, Me Untouchables", which depicts the determined efforts of Elliot Ness to put Al Capone behind bars. A ten-year-old girl is shown, lunch pail in hand, entering a store on an errand for her mother. Unbeknownst to her and to the proprietor of the store, but known to the movie audience, a revengeful bootlegger has placed a valise full of dynamite inside the store. The little girl makes her purchase, and as she turns to leave, the camera pans back and the store is blown to smithereens. It is a shocking and deeply disturbing scene, and the viewing audience invariably groans in unison.

Today, in real life, innocent bystanders are being similarly slaughtered by the bullets of oiir modern-day bootleggers—the drug dealers. On December 2, 1990 Maria Rodriguez, a fifty-three-year-old mother of seven, was gunned down in front of her Brooklyn, New York apartment builoding.3 Two weeks later, Randall Wade. a 42-year-old man, was shot and killed while chatting with a friend on a Harlem., New York street corner.9 Randall Wade wu the 26th innocent bystander killed in New York in 1990 by the stray bullets of drug dealers settling their commercial disputes with guns.

Violence is the predictable outcome when the government defines a highly profitable economic transaction as illegal and places it outside the rule of law. When Schenley's and Seagram's have a price war, they sue each other in court. If a liqiior store owner is in debt to a liquor manufacturer, the creditor can turn to the courts for help in collecting the debt. But merchants involved in black market commercial disputes do not have that luxury; they must settle their differences in the streets where innocent bystanders may get in harm's way.

DRUG-RELATED VIOLENCE IS INCREASING

The public perception of mounting out-of-control violence is accurate. In spite of the fact that drug use is actually on the decline' homicide and robbery rates in many urban areas are soaring.' While the rising crime rate cannot be entirely attributed to drug-related crime, much of it can) 3 Certainly police chiefs around the country believe that the increases in homicides are largely caused by drug-related violence. New York City Police Commissioner Lee Brown estimates that more than 30 percent of all homicides in that city are drug-related, and that a still larger percentage of innocent bystander homicides are drug-related."

"Drug-related crime" is an extraordinarily imprecise term that has been used by the media and others to describe many very different scenarios. What does it mean? One thing it usually doesn't mean is people killing other people because they are high on drugs. Just as Al Capone did not order the executions of rival bootleggers because he was drunk, drug dealers are not killing their rivals in the streets of New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, DC because they are high on cocaine. At the height of Washington, D.C.'s outbreak of murderous violence in 1989, then Police Chief Maurice Turner lcnowingly observed: "Eventually the turf will be divided. They will go out and sell their drugs. People will pay their drag bills on time. And we're not going to have all of these shootings we have now."'

That drug-related violence is primarily a consequence of the illegality of those drugs was borne out by the rather dramatic findings of a 1989 government-funded study by Narcotic and Drug Research, inc.16 The researchers scrutinized the circumstances surrounding all 218 "drug-related" homicides in four of New York City's high crime Police Department "zones" over an eight month period in 1988. They discovered that the great majority of these homicides were cocaine-related (166, or 84%). But of those 166 murders. 87% were classified as "systemic";. that is "arising from the exigencies of working or doing business in a black market'7 In only one case was the perpetrator of the murder actually under the influence of cocaine. In almost all of the "psychopharmacological" homicides (in which a specific substance caused the perpetrator to behave in a violent manner) the culprit was not an illegal drug at all; it was alcohol. In fact 21 out of a total of 31 psychopharmacological homicides were alcohol-related (and in another four of those 31, alcohol was present along with one or more other drugs). The "drug problem", by which most people mean the drug-related crime and violence problem, is almost entirely a function of our bankrupt drug policy—prohibition.

THE LIMITS OF THE CRIMINAL SANCTION

For many years the criminal sanction has been the government's preferred tool for dealing with the use of drugs other than cigarettes and alcohol. Defined as a criminal rather than a medical or social problem, various law enforcement strategems have been employed in an attempt to bring the drug problem under control. During the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration favored a "supply side" strategy and spent billions of dollars trying to keep illicit drugs from entering the country. This strategy's greatest accomplishment may have been the successful interdiction of the relatively benign marijuana, whose bulk and odor made it easy to detect. Drug smugglers soon discovered that powdered cocaine was far easier to conceal, and during this period the quantity of cocaine entering the United States rose astronomically.ls Many experts now believe that the successful interdiction of marijuana was a significant contributing factor not only in nurturing the domestic cultivation of marijuana but also in creating the cocaine epidemic of the middle and late 1980s.19 By the time George Bush came into office, the supply-side strategy had been largely discredited and replaced by "demand reduction." In his inaugural speech, President Bush made the new stragegy official: "The answer to the problem of drugs lies more in solving the demand side of the equation than it does on the supply side, than it does on interdiction or sealing the borders."4

There are many ways for the government to reduce the public's demand for a potentially harmful product. There is, for example, the extraordinarily successful government public education campaign to curtail cigarette smoking. The percentage of Americans using this highly addictive drug has dropped dramatically in the past two decades, from 43% in 1965 to 30% in 1980.21 This reduction was accomplished without resort to urine tests, without reliance upon the criminal law, and without bombing the tobacco fields of North Carolina (Indeed, it was accomplished at the same time the government was paradoxically subsidizing the nation's tobacco crop!)

The campaign to reduce cigarette smoking has been primarily founded on considerations of public health. Through persistent and pervasive public education, we have changed the way our culture views cigarette smoking. We did use some laws, but sparingly. We said you could- no longer smoke in circumstances where your habit would irritate innocent bystanders. People can no longer smoke in elevators, in subways, on airplanes or in certain parts of restaurants. But these laws focused on innocent bystanders and did not attempt to criminalize smokers who smoked privately or in a way that did not impose the habit on other unwilling people. Moreover, even these laws were passed after a significant change had taken place in the public's attitude towards smoking and those laws, in turn, fostered a deepening of those attitudes. The breaking of a dangerous national drug habit that was far more institutionali7ed and widespread than all of the illegal drugs combined was achieved without bludgeoning our citizenry with a heavy dose of the criminal sanction and without causing violent crime.

For reasons of history and cultural bias, (but not for reasons of science or public health) we have chosen a different path in our efforts to reduce the demand for the currently illegal drugs. For cocaine, marijuana, and heroin, we have used the criminal law as our primary instrument. Law enforcement officials, however, are often the first to admit that our criminal justice approach to drug control has enormous limitations. Police chiefs, district attorneys and corrections officials throughout the country have repeatedly warned us that our over-reliance on the criminal sanction will lead only to the strangulation of our criminal justice system, not to the a resolution of the drug problem.23

When asked what we should be doing to reduce the demand for drugs, those same law enforcement officials suggest that we should be dealing with the underlying social problems that lead so many of our youth to seek escape through intoxication: poverty, unemployment, lack of educational and vocational opportunities. This approach has often been derided as an old-fashioned, liberal view. But by late 1990, this theme among police  çhiefs had become so persistent that then federal drug czar William Bennett felt compelled to criticize them for departing from official dogma. According to the Los Angeles Times, in private meetings with police chiefs around the country, Bennett "chided them for ,emphasizing the role of others, including schools and families, in combating the drug problem." He urged them to, "stress their own role in battling narcotics" instead!'

Czar Bennett's hostility to the proposition that the criminal sanction might not be the best way to reduce this country's huge appetite for drugs shows the extent to which our drug policy has been guided by ideology rather than facts. The truth is that the government is far more interested in law enforcement, no matter how counterproductive, than it is in figuring out how to bring drug use under control. Although we may experience periods of relatively low drug use (we appear to be heading into such a period now that the cocaine epidemic of the 1980s is abating), our drug problem (crime and violence) will remain out of control as long as we pursue the illusory goal of achieving a "drug free America" by means of criminal prohibition.

NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF CRIMINAL PROHIBITION

Prohibition has not only caused escalating levels of violence; it has produced other negative social consequences as well:

Prohibition-driven laws criminalizing the possession of hypodermic syringes have led to an explosion of ADS cases among intravenous drug users. Against all common sense and in the face of mounting scientific proof that these laws encourage unsafe injection practices, those states with the highest rates of contagion, including New York and New Jersey, have refused to decriminaIize needle possession, much less initiate publically funded needle exchange programs

Functionally, our drug laws are protective legislation for criminal drug cartels. They protect the cartels against competition, against taxation, against regulation and against quality control. Because there is a demand that cannot be extinguished and that remains large enough even when it is repressed to support a flourishing market, prohibition operates to create and sustain a violent criminal market entirely beyond the reach of government regulation and the rule of law. Empowered by their immense wealth, the drug barons corrupt our legal system, and shoot our citizens and our police.

In our single-minded prosecution of the War on Drugs, we have diverted funds from social programs, including economic opportunity program, that even law enforcement officials say are the best crime prevention tools we have. The only economic opportunity program we have for inner-city youth today is drug dealing. For the teenager or pre-teenager living in the ghettos of this country, often with an unemployed or underemployed mother and a father he has never met or rarely sees, who has no legitimate job options and exists in the midst of an economy that is not likely to accomodate him, drug peddling is a lure, a magnet, and a high even more than the drug itself. Asking such a child to "just say no" to ZOO a day is a cruel joke. These young people, raised in a violent criminal subculture, will grow into adults who have nothing but contempt for the law and who operate outside it.

Our hyperactive enforcement of criminal drug laws is destroying our criminal justice system. The sheer volume of drug arrests is overwhelming our police, our prosecutors, our defense bar, our courts, our jails and our prisons. The focus on primarily non-violent drug offenders has meant inattention to other far more serious crimes, including violent crimes like rape and murder.

These negative consequences of prohibition have produced a sense of crisis and the growing public perception that law enforcement has not ended the "drug plague because we have not been tough enough. The public has been led to believe that we have not been tough enough because of the ACLU, because of lenient judges, because of the cultural residue of the sixties, and because of the Constitutional handcuffs placed on the police. None of this is true. But people want results, and they want them right away. If they are told that more prisons are the answer, they will support more prisons. If they are told more street sweeps and more arrests are the answer, they will say, "fine". If they are told that constitutional rights, even their own, are getting in the way of the war on drugs, they will give them up. And our politicians, ever mindful of the public's mood, have responded by building more prisons and passing an astonishing array of repressive laws that strike at many of our most fundamental rights.

The United States now has the dubious distinction of having the world's highest known rate of incarceration. According to a new study by The Sentencing Project, we have surpassed even the incarceration rates of the Soviet Union and South Africa with our current rate of 426 prisoners per 100,000 population. 2s Our incarcerated population has doubled during the past decade to its present, unprecedented level of one million.
The study names the war on drugs as the "largest single factor behind the rise in prison population during the past decade".26

The public has been willing to pay dearly for this dubious distinction. It now costs $16 billion per year to incarcerate one million Americans in our jails and prisons. 27 They have been willing to pay because they believe that putting drug offenders behind bars will make the streets safer. But the truth is that our bulging jails and prisons have not given us safe streets. Even with the highest incarceration rate in the world we only arrest and convict a tiny percentage of those who buy and sell illegal drugs. In 1988, approximately 28 million Americans used illicit drugs, 28 and billions of illegal drug transactions took place but only one million of those offenders were arrested, and two-thirds of them were arrested for possession, not sale? Those dealers who did get caught were quickly replaced by other willing recruits. Indeed, at the same time our prison population was growing by leaps and bounds, so was our rate of violent, drug-related crime.

The public has also accepted and supported the steady erosion of civil liberties. Individual rights are always among the first casualties in any war, and the war on drugs is no exception. A fearful public is most vulnerable to false claims that constitutional "technicalities" shackle the police and prevent them from doing their job.3° High crime rates always spell trouble for civil liberties.

Over the past decade we have seen the evolution of what some legal experts have called "the drug exception to the Constitution." Random, suspicionless drug testing has become so widespread that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has railed against this "immolation of privacy and human dignity in symbolic opposition to drug use."31 For the first time since the Civil War, and in a radical departure from American tradition and the Posse Comititus Act, the military has participated in domestic law enforcement. During the summer of 1990, soldiers were deployed in rural counties in California and Oregon to eradicate marijuana cultivation. "Drug courier profiles", which circumvent the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, are being used in airports, train stations, bus depots and on highways. If you are black and well-dressed and pay for your ticket in cash, you are in real danger of being interrogated by the police. People are losing their homes through streamlined forfeiture proceedings because they were caught growing a few marijuana plants in their basements. We are prosecuting impoverished, pregnant women for using drugs while at the same time denying them access to prenatal care and drug treatment. The war on drugs has altered our constitutional landscape much to the detriment of civil liberties. But :hese tough sounding measures have not brought the relief from the drug problem that the politicians promised. The crime rate is still climbing. Innocent bystanders are still dying.

Clearly prohibition has failed. The criminnli7ltion of a social problem—drug use—leads only to escalating levels of violence, which leads to a fearful public clamoring for more prisons, tougher laws and fewer rights. In the end, everybody loses except for the drug dealers.

DECRIMINALIZATION WILL LEAD TO A HEALTHIER, LESS CRIME-RIDDEN AMERICA

The strongest argument prohibitionists have against decriminalization is that it would almost certainly lead to an unacceptable increase in drug use and drug abuse. This is an article of faith among prohibitionists and has gained credence through repetition. But the actual evidence is far from clear. There is even some evidence that drug use actually remnins constant or may even decline after decriminn1i7ntion.32 This is a very complex issue that requires further research and study.33

But merely focussing on the possible increase in drug use begs the many more important questions that need to be asked and debated. Even if more people use drugs under a regime of decriminalization:

•    Will drug-related violence decrease?
•    Will the health of drug users be enhanced through quality control of drugs, regulated potency, and the legal availability of sterile needles?
•    Will civil liberties and the rule of law be strengthened?
^    Will the criminal justice system be released from the immpossible burden of adjudicating more than one million drug arrests a year?
•    Will the criminal drug cartels be to a large extent defunded?
•    Will the corruption of public officials decrease?

•    Might we focus on the real social and economic problems faced by our inner city residents instead of on one of the symptoms?

Decriminalizing drugs will make it possible to recognize drug- abuse as a health problem and a social symptom, not a crime problem. By shifting the responsibility for drug conn-ol from the criminal justice system to the health system where it properly belongs, those who use drugs need no longer be consigned to a life of criminality Liverpool, England, which embraces a medical approach to drug misuse, boasts "the healthiest addicts in the world: It is a boast worthy of emulation. Decrimin2ii7ing drugs will also lead to an enormous reduction in violent crime. Reducing the harm to drug users is a worthy goal; reducing the harm to the rest of us is even more worthy.

' Ira Glasser is the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

ENDNOTES

1 During Prohibition, violence was commonplace inestablishing exclusivt sales territories, in obtaining liquor, or in defending a supply. Between 1923 and 1926, the peak period of struggle for control of the Chicago market, an estimated 215 bootleggers died in that city at the hands of rivals. In New York, more than one thousand gangland murders occurred during Prohibition. See, David E. Kyvig„ Repealing National Prohibition (University of Chicago Press, 1979), p.27.

2. New York Times, September 12, 1989, p.B8.

3. According to a Washington Post-ABC News Poll taken just after President Bush's September 1989 national address on drugs, 62% of those interviewed said they would be.. willing to give up "a few of the freedoms we have in this country* to reduce illegal drug use Eighty-two percent said they favored the use of the military in domestic drug law enforcement; 52% said they would agree to let police search homes of suspected drug dealers without a court order, even if the houses 'of people like you were sometimes searched by mistake"; 67% favored allowing the police to stop cars at random to search for drugs, 'even if it means that the cars of people like you are sometimes stopped and searched"; and 83% favored encouraging people to report drug users to the police, "even if it means telling police about a family member who uses drugs.' Richard Morin, "Many in Poll Say Bush Plan Is Not Stringent Enough', Washington Post, September 8, 1989, pAl.

4. Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962), concurring opinion of Justice William O. Douglas. The adverse physical consequences of drug addiction are grossly exaggerated in this passage and ignore both the differences among drugs and different patterns of usage, but this gruesome description is still deeply embedded in the public's consciousness as the singular image of all users of all drugs.

5. National Institute On Drug Abuse National Household Survey on Drug Abuse: Population Estimates (1988).

6. Surgeon General's Office (1989); National Household Survey (1988).

7. According to the National Council on Alcoholism, Inc., 97,500 Americans per year die from alcohol abuse. Marsha Rosenbaum, Just Say What? (National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 1990) p.6. In 1990 there were 434,000 smoking-related deaths in the United States, an eleven percent increase over 1989. S. Okie, "Smoking-Related Deaths Up 11% to 434,000 Yearly, CDC Reports," Washington Post, February 1, 1991, p.1.

8. Donatella Larch, "Mother of Seven Killed on Street By Stray Bullet', New York Times, December 4, 1990, p.83.

9. James McKinley, Jr., 'Man Killed on Corner, Apparently by a Stray Bullet", New York Times, December 16, 1990.

10. Larch, 'Mother of Seven'.

11 The results of the National Institute on Drug Abuse's ninth periodic National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, issued in July 1989, showed that the estimated number of Americans using any illegal drug on a "current' basis (once per month) had dropped 37 percent from 23 million in 1985 to 14.5 million in 1988. Current use of marijuana and cocaine were down 36 and 48 percent, respectively. National Drug Controi Strategy, (The White House, September 1989) p.1-

12. An August 1990 report issued by the F.B.I. showed significant increases in the rates for murder, robbery and a,ggrarated assault between 1985 and the present. During that period murder rose by 13 percent; aggravated assaults rose by 32 percent; robberies rose by 16 percent and forcible rapes increased by 7 percent.
"F.B.I.- Report Confirms Sharp Rise in Violent crime', New York Times, August 6, 1990. In 1990 homicide records were broken in eight of the country's largest cities. New records were set in New York City, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, Memphis, Milwaukee and Boston. 'Many Cities Setting Records for Homicides in Year', New York Tunes, December 9, 1990, p.41. According to the Federal Centers for Disease Control, homicide is ravaging the community of young black Men. The homicide rate among black men between the ages of 15 and 24 rose by two-thirds in the five years through 1988. In 1987, homicides accounted for 42 percent of deaths among men in this group. Seth Mydans, 'Homicide Rate Up for Young Blacks', New York 'rungs, December 7, 1990, pA26.

13. In 1990 drugs were the leading cause of killings in Washington, D.C., accounting for 39 percent of all homicides. 'Again in Capital, a Homicide Record', New York Times, November 25, 1990. The Federal Centers for Disease Control also named drug trafficking as a major contributing factor to the rising homicide rate among young blacks. Mydens, 'Homicide Rate Up".

14. Jonathan Greenberg, "All About Crime', New York Magazine, September 3, 1990, p27.

15. 'Capital Official Secs Crime Drop Once Pushers Divide Markets", New York Times, March 26, 1989, P-20.

16. Paul Goldstein, Henry Brownstein, Patrick Ryan and Patricia Bellucci, 'Crack and Homicide in New York City, 1988: A Conceptually-Based Event Analysis,' Contemporary Drug Problems, Winter 1989.

17. The researchers cLassified as 'systemic homicides' those killings that resulted from: territorial disputes, the robbery of a drug dealer, assault to collect a debt, punishment of a drug worker, dispute over a drug theft, retribution because a dealer sold bad drugs. Goldstein, 'Crack and Homicide', p.14.

18. See, Peter Reuter, 'Can the Borders Be Sealed?", The Public Interest, Summer 1988, p.53; Arnold Trebach, The Great Drug War (Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987), p.177-178.

19. See, Ethan Nadelmann, 'Drug Prohibition in the United States: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives," 5cience, September 1, 1989, p.940; Mark AR. Kleiman, Marijuana: Costs of Abuse. Costs of Control (Greenwood Press, 1989); Richard C. Cowan, 'How the Narcs Created Crack", National Review, December 5, 1986, p.26; Daniel Lazare, "How the Drug War Created Crack," The Village Voice, January 23, 1990, p.27-

20. Boyd, "Bush, Citing Costs, Says Drug War Will Focus Largely on Education,' New York Times, January 26, 1989, p.L

21. That cigarette smoking is highly addictive is no longer a matter of controversy. According to the Surgeon General's 1988 report on nicotine addiction: -The pharmacologie and behavioral processes that determine tobacco addiction are çirrtilar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine " "The Health Consequences of Smoking," The Surgeon General's Report, 1988, p.9.

22. In his classic book, Drugs. Set. and Setting, Dr. Norman Zinberg describes this interaction between informal social controls, (social sanctions and rituals) and formal social controls (laws and institutional rules). Zinberg's research supported his theory that conditions for controlled, non-addictive drug use arc optimal when informal and formal social controls are in harmony, as has been the case in the government's campaign to reduce cigarette smoking. Norman E. Milberg, Drugs. Set. and Setting, (Yale University Press, 1984), p.5-18.

23. See, Robert Reinhold, 'Police, Hard Pressed in Drug War, Are Turning to Preventive Efforts', New York Times, December 28, 1989, p.1, quoting various law enforcement officials to the effect that police, on their own, cannot solve the drug problem.

24. Ronald Ostrow, Briefing/Law Enforcement,' Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1990, p.A-5.

25. Mark Mauer, "Americans Behind Bars: A Comparison of International Rates of Incarceration," The Sentencing Project, January 1991.

26. Ibid., p.9. The Sentencing Project study also documents the radically disproportionate representation of black men in American prisons compared to their representation in the general piipulation. The United States now incarcerates black men at a rate four times that of black men in South Africa.

27. 'Justice Expenditure and Employment, 1988', Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Department of Justice, July 1990.

28. National Institute on Drug Abuse Household Survey, 1988.

29. "Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics-1989, Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Department of Justice, 1990.

30. Police and prosecutors, on the other hand, know that Constitutional protections do not impede them in their efforts to enforce the law. In its November 1988 report, the American Bar Association's Special Committee on Criminal Justice announced the results of its national telephone survey of over 800 defense lawyers, judges, prosecutors and high ranking police administrators. The Committee found that, "Taken as a whole, the testimony and the survey results demonstrate that constitutional limitations are not seen as a relatively significant problem by the people who must work within those limitations.' 'Criminal Justice In Crisis', American Bar Association, November 1988, p.14.

31. National Treasury Emplovees Union v, Von Raab, 109 S.Ct. 1384 (1989).

32. Following the clecr4rn;n2H7Ation of the possession of small amounts of marijuana in a number of states in the early 1970s, follow-up studies in several of them indicated that the use of marijuana had not increased at a significantly greater rate since decriminalization and that some law enforcement resources had been freed up to deal with more serious crimes. See, 'Marijuana Survey—State of Oregon,' 1977; California ("Impact Study of S.B. 95 1976'); and Maine ('An Evaluation of the Decriminalimtion of Marijuana in Maine" 1978 and; 'A Time/Cost Analysis of the Decrinlinnlintion of Marijuana in Maine-1979), cited in Zinberg, Drugs, Set. and Setting, p.196. In the Netherlands, where possession and sale of marijuana were decriminalizzd in 1976, the number of new users has deceased in the intervening years. Before 1976,10% of Dutch 17-18 year olds used marijuana; by 1985 the rate had dropped to 6.5%. Dr. Frits Ruter, The Pragmatic Dutch Approach to Drug Control: Does It Work?", The Drue Policy Forum, May 25, 1988, p.1.5.

33. Zinberg argues persuasively that prohibition causes more, rather than less, drug abuse because repressive criminal laws prevent users from developing more effective informal social controls that promote moderate, controlled use. See, Drugs_ Set. and Setting, at p.p.196-197.