In the Chronicle Review, Brian DeLay has a thoughtful discussion of the war on drugs, placing it in light of border wars in the Southwest 160 years ago. At one point, DeLay has a clear summation of the war, one that recognizes that it isn't an answer to the problems of drug abuse, but a compounding of them.
“The drug war is born of law. According to estimates by the United Nations, roughly one in 20 adults worldwide uses illegal drugs—and nowhere more than in the United States, where the vast market for illicit drugs remains immensely profitable. Prohibition has failed. What it has done is deny drug producers, distributors, and consumers access to the protections and conveniences of the legal marketplace.”
A week ago, The New York Times sponsored a forum in response to an article in The New York Times Magazine about marijuana addiction. It had five leading voices, each one an expert in drug addiction and treatment. They were Roger Roffman, professor of social work at University of Washington; Wayne Hall, professor of public-health policy at University of Queensland in Australia; Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy at UCLA; Peter Reuter, professor of public policy and chair of the department of criminology at University of Maryland; and Norm Stamper, former chief of police of Seattle.
Each one of them recognizes the dangers of marijuana usage. Yet, each one also recognizes, at the very least, benefits from decriminalization.
Here is Roffman:
“Will more people use marijuana and become dependent if marijuana is decriminalized? Probably not. A number of U.S. studies tell us decriminalization would not likely have an effect on the rates of marijuana use by adults or adolescents.”
And Hall:/p>
“Marijuana dependence should be taken into account in considering whether we should legalize marijuana in any of these ways. But this concern also needs to be weighed against the costs of current policy, that is, the creation of perverse incentives to produce more potent marijuana, the widespread disregard of legal prohibition on marijuana use that could contribute to a decline in respect for law and policing; the unregulated access of minors to marijuana; and the social and economic costs of a large marijuana black market.”
>And Kleiman:
“If cannabis were made legal, restrictions could be put both on potency and on the THC/CBD ratio. So rising potency makes no sense as an anti-legalization argument; if anything, less-potent legal pot would be expected to substitute for the more-potent pot that would remain illegal.”
>And Reuter:
“Legalization in the U.S. might be a much more commercial matter than in pragmatic Holland, where the government created a legally ambiguous regulatory system with minimal court oversight. The U.S. might find it hard to prevent producers from using their First Amendment rights to actively promote the drug. A way of avoiding this would be to remove prohibitions on growing for your own use and for gifts to others. No doubt there would still be a black market but it would allow access to marijuana without creating a full commercialization. Probably this would lead to a modest increase in the number of people who use the drug, which needs to be weighed against the elimination of 750,000 arrests for simple possession.”
And Stamper:
“Any law disobeyed by more than 100 million Americans, the number who’ve tried marijuana at least once, is bad public policy. As a 34-year police veteran, I’ve seen how marijuana prohibition breeds disrespect for the law, and contempt for those who enforce it.”
These are people who can't be charted on an ideological spectrum. They also recognize that social policy is rarely a simple choice of good-or-bad options. Most every option has its advantages and disadvantages, and so the decision comes down to weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each one. Legalization, of course, has its down sides, and anti-legalization voices (social conservatives, nanny-state paternalists, people whose paycheck depends on the war on drugs) point them out as if they stood alone. But we must set them on a scale with 750,000 arrests for simple possession on the other side. The objections, then, look a lot different.
4 Responses to More Experts Against the War on Drugs
kreinertson - July 28, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Not only are the American people responsible for funding the existence and persistence of Mexican drug cartels, we also fund the assistance and adaptation of drug cartels by increasing military spending on the border. The only thing keeping a politician, police, or soldier from collecting a paycheck from the cartels in return for intelligence, training, and service is a moral defense in support of an immoral policy. Do the people fear tequila distributors? Did we need to legitimize Al Capone to make that happen? The last time I checked Grupo Modelo and Anheiser-Busch are not battling in gun fights against themselves and the Mexican government, despite the fact that their commodity kills more Americans annually than does ALL the cartel’s commodities.
joeerwin - July 28, 2009 at 5:14 pm
As a native of Humboldt County, California, one of the
places in which growing potent, world-class, “bud” that
is is a major local economic force, my opinion on
“legalization” is that neither prohibition nor legalization
is simple. Many otherwise perfectly respectable folks who
live near the place where my family settled and homesteaded
about 70 years ago have been turned into outlaws by laws
against growing pot. But many less respectable people–
people who already were deeply committed to criminality
or attracted by anarchism, moved into the area. A cartel,
of sorts, developed and usurped, through violence or threat
of violence, the self determination of people who grew for
their own use or modest subsistence. Illegal activities
came to dominate the lives of many people I knew and liked.
What would become of them if legalization occurred? I do
not know. Others, with much less direct experience than I
have had, claim to know. I can imagine that some people
would continue to grow–in small plots like the family
plots of tobacco that were common not so long ago in
Tennessee, Kentucky, and other places–and that some
would sell to legally licensed buyers for the legal and
tightly controlled commercial market. It is difficult
for me to imagine, however, that the illegal market would
magically disappear. It would surely be sustained by
underground sales to minors and international sales of
potent varietal bud, such as that from Humboldt County
(which can be found for sale openly and by name in
Amsterdam, among other places).
I do not have the answer. I favor some legalization and
decriminalization, but I’m pretty sure it will not
eliminate illegal traffic in pot.
edubrul - July 29, 2009 at 10:45 am
When it comes to drug laws, drug wars, any kind of problems with drugs, the discussion should always start with the ideas of Ronald K. Siegel. Siegel has recently (2005) published an update of his book Intoxication, and it should be required reading for all who are interested in these questions. In a nutshell, Siegel exhaustively demonstrates that the use of brain-altering substances is a natural biological drive seen in all animals. He points out that the problem for humans is twofold: 1) drugs are available to us in highly purified and concentrated forms and, as such, 2) they have numerous dangerous side effects.
What to do? The answer is simple: Develop drugs that have the same psychological effects and delivery systems that are safe.
It is only when we realize that drugs are good, fun, natural, and dangerous that anything can ever be accomplished.
etenner - July 29, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Trying to suppress drug use in this country is useless, even crazy. We tried it with alcohol and that didn’t work. I say let’s legalize marijuana and regulate it as we do alcohol and tobacco – age restrictions, legal dealers, no advertising, etc. Regulating the potency of the marijuana would only continue to encourage an “illegal” high-potency underground.
In regard to addiction, my personal experience leads me to think that “addictive personalities” will always get addicted to something. I used marijuana for years and easily stopped cold-turkey, unlike the cigarettes I used to smoke, which took a good deal of effort to give up. Yes, I still smoke a doobie on occasion – twice in the last 15 years!
So legalize pot.