http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22403.htm

A Criminally Stupid War on Drugs in the US

By Clive Crook

April 12, 2009 "Financial Times" -- How much misery can a policy cause before it is
acknowledged as a failure and reversed? The US “war on drugs” suggests there is no
upper limit. The country’s implacable blend of prohibition and punitive criminal justice
is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in principle, since it prosecutes victimless
crimes, and in practice a disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to
suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an act of reckless
self-harm.

Even a casual observer can see that much of the damage done in the US by illegal
drugs is a result of the fact that they are illegal, not the fact that they are drugs.
Vastly more lives are blighted by the brutality of prohibition, and by the enormous
criminal networks it has created, than by the substances themselves. This is true of
cocaine and heroin as well as of soft drugs such as marijuana. But the assault on
consumption of marijuana sets the standard for the policy’s stupidity.

Nearly half of all Americans say they have tried marijuana. That makes them criminals
in the eyes of the law. Luckily, not all of them have been found out – but when one is
grateful that most law-breakers go undetected, there is something wrong with the
law.

Harvard’s Jeffrey Miron published a study denouncing drug prohibition in 2004*. He
noted that more than 300,000 people were then in US prisons for violations of the law
on drugs – more than the number incarcerated for all crimes in Britain, France,
Germany, Italy and Spain combined. Today the number is higher – according to
some estimates, nearly 500,000. The far larger number of people who have been
convicted, at any point, of a drugs offence face permanently impaired employment
prospects and all manner of other setbacks: in the US, once a criminal always a
criminal.

Strict enforcement, Mr Miron explained, has reduced drug use only modestly –
supposing for the moment that this is even a legitimate objective. The collateral
damage is of a different order altogether. Violence related to drug crimes has surged
in Mexico and in US cities close to the border, giving rise to renewed interest in the
topic. Thousands are thought to have been killed by criminal gangs competing for
the trade.

Many users also die because of tainted drugs, or because they share needles –
consequences again of prohibition. There is an obvious national security dimension as
well: in countries such as Colombia and Afghanistan, the huge surplus derived from
prohibition supports terrorists.

The consequences of prohibition corrupt governments everywhere, and the US is no
exception. Since a drug transaction has no victims in the ordinary sense, witnesses to
assist a prosecution are in short supply. US drug-law enforcement tends to infringe
civil liberties, relying on warrantless searches, entrapment, extorted testimony in the
form of plea bargains, and so forth. Predictably, in the US the hammer of the law on
drugs falls with far greater force on black people: whites do most of the using, blacks
do most of the time.

Few policies manage to fail so comprehensively, and what makes it all the odder is
that the US has seen it all before. Everybody understands that alcohol prohibition in
the 1920s suffered from many of the same pathologies – albeit on a smaller scale –
and was eventually abandoned.

The present treatment of alcohol, which is to regulate and tax the product, is the
right approach for today’s illegal drugs. One could expect some increase in the use of
the drugs in question, but also an enormous net reduction in the harms that they
and the attempt to prohibit them cause. Adding the direct costs of prohibition (police
and prisons) to the taxes forgone by the present system, the US could also expect a
fiscal benefit of about $100bn (€75.7bn, £68.2bn) a year.

Is an outbreak of common sense on this subject likely? Unfortunately, no. Only the
most daring politicians seem willing to think about it seriously. One such is James
Webb, a refreshingly unpredictable Democratic senator for Virginia, who has called
for a commission to examine the criminal justice system and the law on drugs.
Politicians such as Mr Webb are very much the exception.

Elsewhere, signs of movement are minimal. Barack Obama has admitted that as a
young man he used not only marijuana – and, unlike Bill Clinton, he inhaled; the
whole point was to inhale, he joked – but also cocaine. This might suggest the
president has an open mind on the subject. And in a departure from the previous
administration, his attorney-general has said he will not bring federal prosecutions
against the medical use of marijuana in states that allow it. But then at a recent
event Mr Obama ran away from a question about the broader decriminalisation of
marijuana under cover of a wisecrack.

For now, outright legalisation of marijuana, let alone harder drugs, is difficult to
imagine. Even gradual decriminalisation – a policy that maintains prohibition but
removes it from the scope of the criminal law – seems unlikely, though perhaps not
unthinkable. A new study by Glenn Greenwald, a writer and civil rights lawyer, looks
at Portugal’s policy of decriminalisation**. He judges it a success: “While drug
addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to skyrocket in many European
Union states, those problems – in virtually every relevant category – have been either
contained or measurably improved within Portugal since 2001.”

Somebody in the White House should take a look. This national calamity is no
laughing matter.

*Drug War Crimes, published by the Independent Institute. **Drug Decriminalization
in Portugal, published by the Cato Institute

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2009.


_______________________________________________
Theharderstuff mailing list
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
http://mail.psychedelic-library.org/mailman/listinfo/theharderstuff