Why are recreational drugs illegal? The ostensible excuse for our drug laws is concern for users, perhaps because of a wish to protect them from the possibility of reduced economic productivity, perhaps because unhappy people resent the opportunity given the drug user for temporary chemically-induced respite from the human condition. The escalation of a program intended to deal with a minor public health issue into a "war" costing perhaps $50 billion a year 1 has other causes. One may be that the "war" offers vast economic incentives for the judiciary, the criminal bar, and the prison industry. Another may be to protect the large incomes available to the criminal distributors of substances that if legal would be unprofitable. Perhaps the most significant is the opportunity of politicians and journalists to grandstand against an "evil" that has no defenders. Rare is the issue on which one can gain votes and readers without losing any.

The effect of the "war" and its tributaries has been to obscure completely the original justifications for the criminalization of selected recreational chemicals and thoroughly to suppress any dispassionate examination of the social value of our present courses of action. The discussion that follows raises points that are obvious and noncontroversial. Simply stating them in one place and in a logical order has the cumulative effect of revealing one of the greatest sustained follies in the history of our country.

Physiological and Epidemiological

Alcohol can be tolerated in moderation but is addictive with sustained use. Short-term effects include diminished motor function and loss of emotional control. Long-term effects include severe hepatic and neurological damage. Its use contributes to child and spouse abuse, automobile accidents, and personal violence including homicide. Continued use reduces life expectancy.

Tobacco is powerfully addictive. For the beginning user, it provides a mild cardiovascular stimulation, but its continued use is mainly for the prevention of withdrawal symptoms. It is deceptively harmless, since its primary drawback is long term damage to the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. Such damage costs billions in treatment expense and takes millions of years of life expectancy.

Marijuana is a mild depressant that produces a temporary euphoria. Probably not addictive, it has no major side effects. Frequent use may be associated with indifference to conventional social behavior. It is speculated that chain smoking the stuff would produce lung damage comparable to that seen in cigarette smokers.

Cocaine is an exhilarating stimulant. Its effects are short-lasting, although repeated exposure through sniffing can damage nasal tissue. Evidence about true addiction is equivocal, but experience of the drug's effects is so reinforcing that both human users and the subjects of animal experiments will neglect most other activities to seek repetitions. Frequent use, like that of alcohol, may so impair judgement that normal employment is impossible.

Heroin, a narcotic, produces somnolent euphoria in the novice user, and is relatively harmless. (For many years it was an over-the-counter medicine.) Repeated use, however, produces strong physiological dependence, and steadily increasing daily doses may be required to avoid extremely unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. Maintenance doses enable the addict to carry on a normal life. (Euphoria is not produced in the addict.) Although heroin addicts seem to have a greater incidence of digestive problems, life expectancy is normal. The principal medical problem associated with heroin is a consequence of the law, rather than the drug. Because cheap disposable syringes are not available to the public, heroin users reuse and share needles, running a great risk of infections, including hepatitis and AIDS. Because of irregular distribution channels, the amount and nature of adulteration of the pure substance is uncontrolled, and addicts run the risk of lethal accidental overdosage.

Social and Economic

Drug use is costly to society. Lost productivity associated with alcohol use is estimated to run annually to tens of billions. Further billions are spent to treat the medical consequences of alcohol and tobacco. Although use of other drugs at work can impair performance, the significant economic losses from heroin, cocaine, and marijuana are not produced by use, but by criminalization. Police agencies, courts, and prisons at all levels of government consume billions in taxes with efforts to prevent their use.

Heroin and cocaine are cheap generic substances. Criminalization, however, produces an artificial scarcity which drives their prices up enough to put them among the most profitable commodities in the world. Markups at each level of distribution are sufficient to cover whatever bribery is necessary to avoid interference from law enforcement agencies. Indeed, established firms in these markets can use governments to remove unwanted competition.

Artificially high retail prices create severe pressures on the drug-dependent. Few conventional jobs provide the hundreds of dollars required weekly to support a serious habit. Thus criminalization induces the heroin addict (who must have the drug to avoid withdrawal symptoms) to engage in potentially profitable criminal behavior. It is estimated that about half of all burglaries are committed to finance addiction, and that a large proportion of prostitution has a similar genesis. Much lower-level staffing of criminal organizations consists of drug users paid in kind. Because of the high profits, organized criminals have a powerful incentive to create new user-criminals, and the user-dealers constitute an effective marketing force: the more customers they initiate, the more able they will be to support their own use.

Of the drugs under discussion, only alcohol is directly associated with crime and violence. Acute intoxication, we have already noted, is associated with incompetent driving and physical attacks on relatives and acquaintances. Through criminalization, however, other drugs are made to be responsible for vast amounts of crime. In addition to thefts by users, society must endure the corruption of police agencies, courts, prison systems, legislatures, and the banking system, all brought into alliance with organized crime by the vast financial opportunities provided by criminalization. Profitability and illegality also produce conventional crime when dealers kill rivals and creditors kill debtors. These commercial killings, of course, are the truly frightening crimes exacerbating the deterioration of our cities. They are the consequences of the law, not the effects of the chemicals.

Political

Governmental action regarding drugs has been a discouraging mixture of demagoguery, deliberate distortion, wasted money, and cruelty. Billie Holiday was barred from working in New York night clubs, the principal place of employment for one in her profession, and was arrested on her deathbed by zealous policemen. Only a Hitler could conceive of a public benefit in this sort of casual sadism.2

Drugs have always frightened the ignorant, and politicians seeking to distract the public from substantive issues or wishing to conceal personal malefactions have long found gold in ranting on the subject. Our leaders exploit and abuse the genuine fears of ordinary people. The response to concern about our children is to put them in jail, where they may be repeatedly raped by men bigger and meaner than they are. Government deals with concern about the interaction of drugs and job performance by stigmatizing users and rendering them unemployable. George Bush, the latest and loudest of anti-drug crusaders, supports subsidies for tobacco, the most lethal of the substances under discussion, and opposes efforts to control its advertising. Ronald Reagan's aides passed out souvenir packs of cigarettes emblazoned with the Presidential Seal.

This sort of sleazy hypocrisy is unfortunately typical of the political use of the drug problem. Out of pretended sympathy for users and potential users, legislatures hastily enact laws that multiply the dangers and damage to the supposed beneficiaries, while increasing the financial incentives for production, distribution, and promotion of the dread substances.

Exaggerated fears of drugs and misplaced blame for drug-related crime (which should be called drug law-related crime) jeopardize our fundamental liberties. Surveys sponsored by the Drug Policy Foundation and others have found popular majorities favoring illegal searches of cars and homes, and the Rehnquist court recently approved roadblocks to screen for alcohol abuse. In order to increase arrests of casual users, the police in Kalamazoo, Mich., are themselves selling cocaine.3

Without doubt, use of these substances is risky. We forget, however, that many other recreational activities also entail serious risk. Far more people die from hunting, swimming, boating, flying, and driving than from marijuana, heroin, and cocaine combined. Reasonable people believe, if they think about it at all, that swimmers and hunters know there is a risk involved and are free to take the risk if they wish. Only hysteria prevents us from giving the heroin user the tolerance we give the beer drinker and the sky diver. The Constitution is shaky these days, so the argument that this is a free country for consenting adults may be weak, but it is still worth trying.

Summary

The principal illegal drugs, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, are lesser medical hazards than alcohol and tobacco. Their personal and social costs have been multiplied, not diminished, by decades of criminalization. The vast majority of illegal drug users are not addicts, but casual and temporary experimenters. Among heavy users, heroin and cocaine addicts are a very serious problem only because of the crimes they must commit to afford maintenance doses. The vast amount of money spent to counter this problem with the criminal justice system has engendered far more crime than it has prevented.

The financial cost is not a trivial factor. A rough estimate of the combined expense of detection, interdiction, prosecution, and imprisonment by federal, state, and local governments is $50 billion a year, and there are additional losses from burglary and other indirect effects of criminalization. A million people or so have serious drug-related health problems, defined as use of heroin or cocaine at least once a week. We are therefore spending about fifty thousand dollars a year per case in an ineffective and socially destructive approach to a medical problem affecting fewer than one-half of one per cent of the population.

Prohibition of alcohol was a similar failure, wisely abandoned in favor of social control. In recent years, heightened awareness of the dangers of alcohol and tobacco have induced widespread moderation and abstinence. The case of LSD is also instructive. Easily manufactured, it cannot be controlled by border patrols, nor can supply control make it very expensive. Nonetheless, its use has apparently diminished. Why? Because when evidence of its association with possibly permanent brain damage was disseminated, people simply stopped using it.

A common scare tactic is the use of the hypothetical air controller high on cocaine, and similar possibilities. There is a simple, direct, and inexpensive remedy for such situations: whenever an employee is incapable of doing his job properly, he is fired or transferred, whether his performance is impaired by intoxication or incompetence. This works as well with the cokehead as with the drunk. And reckless driving is illegal whatever the cause.

The most effective and least expensive method of dealing with dangerous substances is honest discussion of their risks and benefits, control or prohibition of advertising, and generally treating them as we now treat alcohol and tobacco. Increased availability of voluntary detoxification facilities and self-help programs can help users break habits and reverse addiction. The possible value of medical treatment of heavy users has been illuminated by recent studies indicating that use may be a form of self-medication to offset pre-existing imbalances in the user's brain chemistry.

Rational approaches to social problems are not favored in contemporary America, of course. If the child who observed that the emperor had no clothes had been one of us, he would have been hustled off to juvenile court.

Footnotes

1 The cost of the drug war is unknown. If half the expense of the criminal justice and penal systems is devoted to drug-related crimes, $50 billion is plausible, especially if ancillary costs like burglary losses are added. Drug convictions are responsible for the boom in prison construction. A growing and costly backlog of civil cases is attributed to the dogging of courts with drug cases, and it is claimed that successful prosecution of savings-and-loan fraud is severely hampered by shortages of investigative agents and federal attorneys otherwise occupied with drug caseloads.

2 Narcotics appear in the biographies and autobiographies of several musicians. Reviewing this small sample of users clearly supports two observations: narcotics use seems to be incidental to other psychosocial problems and irregular employment; and law enforcement exacerbates rather than ameliorates these difficulties.

3 One of the most celebrated drug busts was that of Gene Krupa in 1943. According to those present, a bandboy was arrested for possession of marijuana. The arresting officers then planted some in Krupa's room and offered to forget the whole thing for $10,000. Krupa refused and was arrested and convicted, not on drug charges, but for contributing to the delinquency of a minor (the bandboy). The police got publicity. Krupa lost his band and gained an entirely unwarranted reputation as a drug addict.