National Drug Policy and Personal Liberties

Steve Sturgill, January 23, 2000

Arizona Republic Series

During the week ending January 23, the Arizona Republic carried an eight part series on a months long investigation of drug and drug trafficking problems in Arizona. The start of the series is titled Questions trump answers in war on drugs. In yesterday's (Saturday, January 22, 2000) paper they asked what readers thought. Here is what I think.

Robert Robb's Column

Though it seems the reporters did a good and complete job, the Republic left it to columnist Robert Robb to highlight the most important aspect of the drug problem in his piece which, in the paper was titled: U.S. drug policy ignores Americans' personal liberties..

Truly, the civil and personal liberties issue is the most important of all in the drug discussion, and Robb's column is well worth reading.

Toward the end of Robb's column he points out that there are difficult questions stemming from the philosophical premise that, in a free society, the use of drugs should not, in and of itself, be the business of the criminal justice system. Robb did not deal with the questions he listed, but made the more urgent statements that the difficulty of the questions does not justify failure to deal with them, nor does the difficulty justify continuing to lock up people for what ought not, in a free society, be regarded as criminal behavior.

The questions Robb listed are:

If drug use is legal, should drug manufacture, distribution and sale also be legal?
If so, under what conditions and regulations?
How do we minimize an increase in drug use if it is legal, and drugs are potentially easier and cheaper to get?

Mr. Robb did not deal with these question in his column, so I will take the bait. I will also take the opportunity to raise a couple of other questions.

If drug use is legal, should drug manufacture, distribution and sale also be legal?

Yes. Absolutely. Legal drug use should be facilitated by legal production, distribution and sale. The idea is to wrest control of drug traffic from the criminals who now run the trade, not continue to facilitate a lucrative black market benefiting the symbiotic parasitism of law enforcement agencies and drug cartels. Law enforcement agencies and courts ought to be put back to work making the streets safe, which they are not.

Legalizing drugs is not the same as condoning or encouraging drug use. People who maintain that posture frustrate me to no end. Is it state policy to encourage gambling? Is smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol encouraged, as state policy, in their continuing legality? Of course not. Get off it, folks! Legalization is not the same as promotion. Quite the contrary. Legalization would represent a serious approach to the problem.

If so, under what conditions and regulations should drug manufacture, distribution and sale occur?

First of all, distinctions need to be drawn among the various classes of drugs. It is absolutely insane that, from a legal perspective, marijuana is equivalent to crystal methamphetamine or crack cocaine. It is a posture unworthy of respect to assert that drugs unlikely to cause serious problems should be lumped in with truly dangerous drugs like ice, crack, heroin and PCP.

Irrespective of the distinctions that should be drawn among different types of drugs, drugs of abuse should be available to whose who would abuse them, and at no cost or low cost. It makes no sense to attempt to gain control of the black market, only to then tax the dickens out of the product. Drugs, as a commodity, are cheap; as the object of prohibition, though, they represent the huge profit margins that are so much of the problem with the drug war.

Some drugs of abuse ought to be available in package stores and supermarkets, just as two other dangerous drugs are now. Tobacco and alcohol are available in this distribution channel, and one or two other drugs fit that category, too. Other substances might be made available at special locations where addicts could avail themselves of the drugs they need, in anonymity. After all, we'd want addicts to get their drugs from legal not black market sources, where we can make sure they can sign up for treatment when they are ready for it.

Drugs should be manufactured, distributed and made available to users in such a manner as to minimize the total cost to society, irrespective of personal costs to the user. Total costs include the intangible value of personal liberty, the erosion of which represents a tremendous cost. I could not possibly care less what happens to a person who, in the face of repeated good advice, starts or continues using dangerous drugs. On the other hand, increased product purity and safety would be of benefit from a health perspective even if you are just talking about a dumb junkie. I'd rather a junkie survive another day so that he might be saved the next, than to have him keel over dead of an inadvertent overdose. Otherwise, we might as well just poison the drugs and get it over with.

When a person goes to pick up his or her drugs, he or she ought to be able to sign up for treatment on the spot. It needs to be up to the drug addicted individual to decide to get treatment, and when he reaches that point, it needs to be available immediately, not three or four months down the road.

Treatment also needs to be a completely voluntary choice of the addict. The addict will not assume ownership of the decision to seek treatment unless it is completely voluntary, and ownership of the decision is a strong deciding factor in the success of rehabilitation. Having legal sanctions to force compliance removes the voluntary nature of the decision and is counterproductive at best. This is just the nature of the human being. The odds of success in rehabilitating an addict are diminished, not enhanced, by the presence of legal sanctions to force compliance.

Yes, you probably do see a lot of druggies in treatment because of the threat of jail. After all, they are addicts but they are not complete fools. The question is what happens to the odds of success when treatment is forced on an individual, not how many bodies the bureaucrats can count.

How do we minimize an increase in drug use if it is legal, and drugs are potentially easier and cheaper to get?

The question assumes there will be an increase in drug use if drugs are made legal. I do not agree. Instead, drug use will decline as a function of legalization. Efforts to minimize any temporary upsurge in apparent drug use should be a function of education and treatment availability. I do not know of any person who will begin to use drugs just because they are legalized. It seems likely, though, that statistics presently skewed by the illegality of their subject may suddenly become more accurate if drugs are legalized, especially when the origin of these statistics is no longer a law enforcement agency out to show how good a job it is doing.

You minimize drug use through education and treatment, not coercion and law enforcement. If a person continues to slowly kill himself, you let him do so while minimizing other costs. By this approach we will make more progress than by prohibition through law enforcement.

Now my questions:

Who benefits from present national drug policy?

Follow the money. The beneficiaries of current national drug policy are law enforcement agencies and drug cartels, not you and me.

Who is hurt by present national drug policy?

Every citizen of this country is hurt by current national drug policy. So are citizens of producing and transshipment countries like Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. The latter probably pay a higher price than we do.

Consider:

We are wasting fantastic sums of money.
We are slowly but surely losing civil liberties.
Our institutions are being corrupted by the influence of drug money.
We are being distracted and attention is diverted from other pressing problems.
Our military are becoming more and more involved in civilian law enforcement, which previous generations were wise enough to specifically forbid.
We're sending $1,300,000,000 to Colombia, per the news this past week, to fight guerrillas financed largely by our own drug consumption, compounding the self-inflicted insult to ourselves and revealing the tip of the iceberg.
RICO laws are routinely applied, not to Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations as intended, but to hapless individuals, through civil forfeiture.
We finance foreign insurgencies via drug profits, and we facilitate agencies of our own government breaking the law, as in Iran Contra.
Give me a few more minutes and I'll remember more downsides to the national drug policy. Give me hours and I can't think of one real benefit.

The illogic of our national drug policy is glaring. We need to get off this fouled lake, but our policymakers are punching holes in the boat. In the meantime, unfortunately, I predict that the young man highlighted in today's Arizona Republic, wearing the slacker pants with a pager in the front pocket, and feigning disbelief that someone would cheat, will pose continuing problems for himself and society.

	We are wasting fantastic sums of money.
	We are slowly but surely losing civil liberties.
	Our institutions are being corrupted by the influence of drug money.
	We are being distracted and attention is diverted from other pressing problems.
	Our military are becoming more and more involved in civilian law enforcement, which previous generations were wise enough to specifically forbid.
	We're sending $1,300,000,000 to Colombia, per the news this past week, to fight guerrillas financed largely by our own drug consumption, compounding the self-inflicted insult to ourselves and revealing the tip of the iceberg.
	RICO laws are routinely applied, not to Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations as intended, but to hapless individuals, through civil forfeiture.
	We finance foreign insurgencies via drug profits, and we facilitate agencies of our own government breaking the law, as in Iran Contra.
	Give me a few more minutes and I'll remember more downsides to the national drug policy. Give me hours and I can't think of one real benefit.