Foreign Policy's "think again" on legalizing illegal drugs in America
Friday, September 7, 2007 at 7:57AM THINK AGAIN: "Drugs," by Ethan Nadelmann, Foreign Policy, September-October 2007, p. 24.
I have to admit, this is my second mailed issue of FP (I got a subscription this summer) and I'm wondering if I'll renew. It's certainly more interesting than Foreign Affairs, but it also comes off as rather light, to the point where I don't find myself clipping anything.
This issue's polling of "100 top foreign policy" experts re: Iraq and the war on terror was especially unimpressive, to my surprise. I just found myself completely uninterested in the conglomerate opinion of a load of former government officials and establishment academics. In some instances it was surprising and in too many others it just came off as goofy (like 90%-plus saying America is in more danger now than prior to 9/11, an opinion and polling statistic I couldn't care less about since it's mostly an indictment of Bush's policies than some objective judgment). I mean, it basically reduced the field to the equivalent of a toothpaste commercial: "nine out of ten foreign policy experts say . . ."). Again, I was just bored by it all.
The one thing that's consistently good in FP is the "Think Again" column. It's a cool format and it's always provocative. This time is no different.
The arguments offered here about rethinking our "war on drugs" are very solid. We have all these tough laws and what do we end up with: 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prison population, and drug-use rates worse than all those lax European states. Amazing!
The basic comparison to Prohibition is a good one: zero tolerance is just a bankrupt approach, given human nature.
Worst, America has managed to export our tough-approach rule set around the world. As the author puts it, "Rarely has one nation so successfully promoted its own failed policies to the rest of the world."
The killer bit: 40% of our nation's 1.8 million drug arrests each year are for tiny amounts of pot. We thus lock up more people each year for drug violations (roughly 500,000) than Europe locks up for all crimes.
In short, it's a failed policy that retards our relationship with states to our south and it should go. We should medicalize the problem instead of criminalizing it. We've done great things with alcohol abuse and smoking in the last 20 years, so why not be more ambitious with drugs?
Reader Comments (6)
Our war on marijuana is rather amazing in the simple fact that vastly more people consume it now than when the war on it was first declared decades ago.
But even more incredible is that we're in a state of warfare with a plant. A plant that grows with such ease all over the world that it's frequently taken on names such as "weed." And it seems to also be a remarkably useful plant. I'd long scoffed at some of the grande claims of the powers of industrial hemp as the rantings of stoned hippies, but the evidence of hemp's economic value is increasingly hard to ignore. In fact, former CIA director James Woolsey is now an advocate for the legalization of industrial hemp for its strategic and economic benefits to the US.
Stuart notes the problems of legalization leading to commercialization, and this is a problem that I've long had with the fundamentalist libertarian view. If we fully adopted the libertarian outlook, one could expect that it would lead to some ugliness. But legalization (or de-criminalization) need not lead to this.
Perhaps there is a way for the government to handle sales, attempting to maintain price points which adequately fund anti-drug public information campaigns (similar to our success in reducing smoking in recent decades) while not keeping the prices so high as to encourage criminal black markets.
This is simply false. If tobacco offered no benefit of any sort, no one would use it. But it does provide a benefit: pleasure to the smoker. You can argue, perhaps, that some (certainly not all) smokers have gone beyond pleasure and are simply addicted; you can argue the cost/benefit of that pleasure against the drawbacks of use; but to claim that the millions of smokers in the world derive no pleasure from tobacco is patently absurd.
And no, I don't smoke.
///The analogy to tobacco and alcohol doesn't work because those products were never illegal
Perhaps not tobacco, but for alcohol, I think you're missing a certain thirteen year chunk of time last century, as well as the goodly number of counties that are still 'dry.'
In the larger sense, yeah, there are certainly some new problems that would come from widescale legalization of drugs. But we have a long history of success with the regulation and taxation of tobacco and alcohol (how many cigarette ads do you see on TV, despite all those lobbyists and First Amendment lawyers you mention?), and I don't see how that would be any different for, say, marijuana. Moreover, I don't see how the result to our culture could possibly be any worse than the situation we're in now.
For those who slipped into heavy use or addiction and became a threat to or dependent on society, legal measures would have to be taken to get those people into heavy duty, forced rehab.
The profits from the drug trade could be used to fund anti-drug education starting in kindergarden and made as pervavsive as anti-smoking education is today.
The profits could also be used to partially fund rehab programs. Patients in rehab should be required to pay at least some (means tested?) of the cost of their treatment.
Those who committed crimes while under the influence of drugs would be subject to stiff penalties.
Also, employers who did not want drug users in their employ should be able, with certain safeguards, to check a person's drug usage record. This would allow decreased employee drug testing in industries like aviation, railroading, long haul trucking, etc.
This would not result in a perfection, but might be an improvement over the chaos and dysfunction of our present "War on Drugs."
Maybe a large state like California could give this idea a five year try to see how it worked.