One Giant Leap for Mankind

Every so often I revisit the issue of the war on drugs, and every time I do I get more frustrated. Since I am once again mulling over all the bad consequences of such an ill-advised "war", I thought I would post an excellent analysis by William F. Buckley et al. that I read a while ago. I read this shortly after September 11, when the seriousness of that attack and the persuasiveness of these articles fused together into an everlasting opposition to victimless crime in general, and the war on drugs in particular. Here is an excerpt:

WE ARE speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from consumers, is responsible for nearly 50 per cent of the million Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50 per cent of the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000 policemen -- yet a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect...

I HAVE spared you, even as I spared myself, an arithmetical consummation of my inquiry, but the data here cited instruct us that the cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs. We have seen a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last thirty years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers, to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health, even as, we can assume, a growing number of Americans desist from practicing unsafe sex and using polluted needles in this age of AIDS. If 80 million Americans can experiment with drugs and resist addiction using information publicly available, we can reasonably hope that approximately the same number would resist the temptation to purchase such drugs even if they were available at a federal drugstore at the mere cost of production.

And added to the above is the point of civil justice. Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.

I have not spoken of the cost to our society of the astonishing legal weapons available now to policemen and prosecutors; of the penalty of forfeiture of one's home and property for violation of laws which, though designed to advance the war against drugs, could legally be used -- I am told by learned counsel -- as penalties for the neglect of one's pets. I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.

Ending the drug war would be a giant step forward in our domestic and foreign policy. There must come a point when policy initiatives are revisited, measured for success, and finally thrown out if they have been unmitigated failures. The War on Drugs is such a failure.

By any metric, this pseudo-war has been a disaster (except in the feel-good, I'm-a-politician-and-I'm-on-a-soapbox metric). Drug use has not declined, drug crime has not declined, drug supply has not declined, and drug potency has not declined. This after unprecedented effort by the government over a span of several decades. A substantial amount of our prison population were incarcerated because of drug possession or sale. The removal of drugs from the white market has caused an immense growth in the black, which leads to gangs and turf-wars and terrorist groups like the ELN and FARC.

One of the first uses of the Patriot Act was by the DEA. In an age of global terrorism, can we afford to expend such manpower and assets trying to keep citizens from deciding what to put into their own bodies?

The only argument for the drug war is a moral one. All the utilitarian arguments have been invalidated by facts. Its supporters say that a society that allows drug use is a rotten society. This is an interesting formulation since, while we don't currently allow drug use, we have quite a bit of it, and since it is illegal, instead of worrying just about use we must also worry about gangs, crime, murder, terrorism, and dysfunctional states. I'd rather have a society with legal access, where the private sector can control use through drug tests for jobs, than a society with all the other problems listed above that, despite such heavy-handed laws, still has drug use.

Not that it's likely to end anytime soon. Any politician that puts forward such an agenda would be labeled "pro-drug", instead of pro-order and pro-freedom and pro-personal-responsibility. It's too bad. The crimewave that spawned from Prohibition is revisited in spades by the ill-advised war on drugs.