Below are 4 articles that approach drug control policy from a different perspective. The first two articles advocate fundamental changes to current U.S. policy while the last two articles promote continued Prohibition. Morality and economics are at the center of this discussion, and they are never mutually exclusive. I would be interested to hear your opinions on U.S. drug control policy, how you have arrived at these opinions, and any responses to the cases made below.
reason "Just a Matter of When?" (February 2011)
By Brian Doherty
Legalizing marijuana has failed in California. But even in defeat, Proposition 19 might mark the beginning of the end for prohibition.
On Homecoming Day at the University of Southern California, Elizabeth Tauro strode purposefully through the dense, shifting mob of pre-game partiers, bearing huge rolls of “Yes on 19” stickers on each arm.
Saying yes to California’s Proposition 19 would have meant that adults could legally possess up to an ounce of marijuana. They also would have been allowed to grow marijuana on up to 25 square feet of their property. Local governments would have been free to raise (but not reduce) these limits on possession and cultivation. They would also have been authorized to license, regulate, and tax sales of the long-demonized weed.
Tauro, a senior majoring in public policy, was working the crowd on this Saturday before Election Day on behalf of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. At this point in the campaign, she said, she was mostly “just letting everyone know that Tuesday is Election Day” rather than arguing the benefits of pot legalization. “Our generation supports reforming marijuana laws,” she said. “It’s just a question of whether they vote.”
Not enough of them did. Proposition 19 lost by 54 percent to 46 percent just six weeks after most polls showed it winning. The drug war’s foes had been on the verge of achieving a staggering victory, one that would have forced a confrontation with the federal government. Instead they saw history slip through their fingers.
Yet reformers are still optimistic. Prop. 19 won a higher vote total (and higher vote percentage) than any previous attempt to legalize pot in the United States. It made legalization—not medical marijuana, not decriminalization, but full legalization—a legitimate political debate in the country’s biggest state. And it forged a coalition that stretched far beyond the usual axis of antiprohibition activists, notwithstanding some dissension within the ranks. The opposition, meanwhile, conceded some important arguments to the reformers, suggesting that public opinion has moved further along than ever before. The legalization of marijuana, activists argue, is a matter of when, not if.
Who Supported Prop. 19
Prop. 19 sprang from the brain and bank account of Richard Lee, a medical marijuana entrepreneur who operates a big dispensary and associated retail stores in Oakland as well as Oaksterdam University, a vocational school for the new industry that has had more than 12,000 students pass through since 2007.
Lee has played the local politics of medical marijuana as skillfully as anyone, winning city approval for industrial-sized indoor growing operations to feed the medical distribution system as well as a statement of intent to legalize the general sale of marijuana to adults as soon as the state permits it. Lee’s opponents paint him as the would-be kingpin of legal pot, using the political system to guarantee that his in-the-works industrial grows will corner a market he is fighting to create.
Even while thriving within the medical marijuana system, Lee has always pushed for full legalization, because he thinks “prohibition is hypocritical, unjust, and unfair.” In March 2009, a poll Lee commissioned showed, for the first time, a majority of California voters supporting legalization. At that point, he began drafting language for a ballot initiative. Two other legalization measures vied for the 2010 ballot, but only Lee, who spent nearly $1 million just on gathering signatures, had the money to succeed.
Traditional drug reform groups initially either snubbed Lee or advised him that a presidential election year would be better. “It was surprising to see how hostile they got,” he says. Lee joined the board of the Marijuana Policy Project, hoping he could steer it toward supporting his initiative, but the group lacked the money and the will, leading Lee to resign and go it largely alone. Representatives of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) did help him with drafting the language of the initiative, while remaining doubtful about the timing.
The major drug reform groups did eventually all get behind Prop. 19, and two of the biggest moneybags in reform circles, George Soros and Peter Lewis, chipped in during the last days of the campaign. (Soros’ $1 million donation was funneled not through Lee’s organization but through a separate pro-19 group managed by the DPA.) It “hurt us,” Lee says, that the big drug policy groups “didn’t get on board until late in the process.”
But long before Soros hopped on, the Yes on 19 coalition had expanded far beyond the drug policy world. Seasoned Democratic operatives joined the pro-19 campaign, even though incoming California Gov. Jerry Brown opposed it and Sen. Dianne Feinstein chaired the opposition. The progressive netroots blog Firedoglake launched a “Just Say Now” campaign that, together with Students for Sensible Drug Policy, placed 50,000 targeted get-out-the-vote calls. And perhaps most significantly, the proposition was endorsed by such drug policy newbies as the California chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of United Latin American Citizens of California.
“The groups most adversely affected by the drug war—minorities, Latinos, African Americans—were not [traditionally] in the fray,” says Neill Franklin, a former police officer who leads Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). When the NAACP endorsed Prop. 19, he says, it was “a game changer. I called [Alice Huffman, head of the California NAACP,] up and told her I was law enforcement, and I was for Proposition 19. She said she practically fell out of her chair.” LEAP sent representatives to more than 250 events around the state, emphasizing that police and court resources should be used more productively than in the failed attempt to get people to stop selling and using a relatively benign drug. (A September 2010 study for the Cato Institute by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron found that California spends $960 million a year on marijuana law enforcement.) LEAP recruited the National Black Police Association and the National Latino Officers Association for the cause.
Organized labor was another important source of new support. Dan Rush, special operations director for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Union Local #5, got excited about the jobs that could be created in a legal market for marijuana and hemp. He convinced his union, against initial doubts, that “this initiative would create an industry in retail, agriculture, and food processing, and UFCW is a retail, agriculture, and food processing union.” He became labor director for the Yes on 19 campaign.
Rush convinced the powerful Service Employees International Union and the Northern California Council of the Longshoremen to back Prop. 19, and he persuaded the California Labor Federation (CLF) to refrain from opposing it. When the next legalization campaign comes along, Rush swears he’ll be able to move the CLF from neutrality to support, which could be a key step toward changing minds in the Democratic Party.
Who Didn’t Support Prop. 19
Although Prop. 19 found new allies in the civil rights and labor movements, it did not have the unified support of the marijuana reform movement. The most successful and active medical marijuana group, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), was officially neutral. That in itself was not necessarily a problem. Given the group’s institutional mandate to deal exclusively with medical marijuana, Yes on 19 spokesperson Dale Sky Jones says, ASA’s neutrality was “the closest they could come to officially supporting us.”
Medical marijuana dispensaries were split on the issue. Although the initiative was ultimately crafted to change nothing at all about the laws in place protecting doctor-certified patients’ access to pot and their ability to grow, possess, and exchange it, rumors were rife that they would be hit with new limits on how much they could possess. (The current limit—set by court decisions, not statute—is whatever is deemed medically necessary for the patient.) Others noted that the proposition didn’t legalize smoking pot in public, and worried that this would be a loophole allowing authorities to harass medicinal smokers. Pro-19 canvassers say many dispensaries refused to allow campaign literature in their shops. Since the passage of California’s Compassionate Use Act in 1996, the medical folks had managed to create a market niche for sellers and a relatively safe haven for users, and many feared that opening up the market to more competition would be bad for their bottom line.
For the same reason, and with more anger, most of the growers from Northern California’s fertile Humboldt and Mendocino counties were against Prop. 19. The initiative lost in both. Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and one of the oldest warriors in the national drug policy fight, says the growers rebelled when they decided there was “no way post-prohibition for anyone to fetch $15 or $25 for a gram of dried vegetable matter.” People currently making $25 to $30 an hour trimming weed in Humboldt imagined their jobs reduced to minimum-wage work or eliminated entirely.
Prop. 19 supporters pushed back with the idea of a post-legalization market similar to the market for wine, with room for both cheap, mass-produced offerings like Two-Buck Chuck and expensive, artisanal products like Chateau Petrus for connoisseurs. But with the growing medical market already driving down prices, most Northern California growers didn’t want to hear it. They saw Lee as the wannabe Sam Walton of grass. “People will want something faceless and easy,” one grower told me. “They want their fucking Big Mac. In order to make something of quality, you have to deal with a lot more labor and a lot more time. Just use machines, turn out crap, sell it cheap.”
In the end, it might not matter whether the “marijuana community” per se supports legalization. The total number of voters in the major growing counties amounted to only 65,000 or so ballots in an election that was lost by half a million, and even adding all the people across the state involved in cutting or moving their product wouldn’t be enough to have ensured victory. Still, many Prop. 19 strategists say they want to bring in medical marijuana producers, sellers, and consumers as stakeholders from the beginning next time around. They hope to persuade all involved that full legalization would ensure less police harassment, and less danger from violent black market criminals, and they hope to persuade producers that, especially in the short term, there will still be room for small family growers.
Other activists are less forgiving. “If growers are against legalization,” West Coast Leaf Publisher Chris Conrad told The Huffington Post, “they can’t be part of the legalization process, and now it’s up to them to show good-faith support or be left out of the process.…Prop. 19 offered them a legal customer base, a statewide regulatory framework, and a local voice to protect their interests. The next campaign is more likely to pitch a more restrictive approach to bring [in] more conservative voters like Asians and housewives, who want heavy-handed controls, and will consider whether growers deserve any consideration at all. Those folks are unreliable at best, traitors to the cause at worst.”
What the Opposition Concedes
The narrow space around the sunken floor of Hollywood’s hip Café Was was crammed with a dozen reporters. Cameras jockeyed for an angle on the table where activist/actor Danny Glover, singer Melissa Etheridge, and likely 2012 Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson talked about the importance of passing Proposition 19. Also on the bill: comic actor Hal Sparks, Sarah Lovering of the Marijuana Policy Project, and 20-year L.A. police veteran Stephen Downing of LEAP.
The activists pointed out the fiscal madness of spending billions over decades on a failed attempt to stop people from using a benign weed. They talked about the taxes not collected when a $14 billion industry is driven into the black market. They discussed the rape kits that went untested while police processed 861,000 misdemeanor pot arrests in California last year. They argued that it’s actually easier to keep kids from pot in a legal market, since legal merchants check ID and illegal drug dealers don’t. They noted that we don’t tend to see illegal vineyards in state and national parks in California, where violent drug dealers sometimes grow their wares.
Alone and earnest on the sidewalk outside the club, a blonde woman in a business suit was passing out pamphlets. It was Alexandra Datig, one of the primary public voices against Prop. 19. She comes from the “I stopped; you shouldn’t start” school. A former call girl in Heidi Fleiss’ famous escort business, Datig insists that her own life was derailed by drugs—pot and the harder stuff she insists pot led to—and that legalization will only create more stories like hers.
Datig’s pamphlet shed light on the shifting shape of the drug reform debate. It stressed, for example, that voting against Prop. 19 would “not interfere with a patients [sic] access to medical marijuana.” Those who remember the mid-1990s might be amazed that the anti-19 forces declined to attack, and in fact defended, medical marijuana, just 14 years after a remarkably contentious political fight over the Compassionate Use Act, a.k.a. Proposition 215, the first successful initiative to legalize marijuana for medical purposes in the United States. Medical pot is now as mainstream in California as surfing, and 14 other states and Washington, D.C., have embraced it as well.
Datig’s literature also implicitly accepted a central argument of the legalizers: that black markets create negative ancillary effects. “Legalization would not eliminate the black market or organized crime,” the pamphlet warned. “Black market sales to kids would expand.…Taxation would return buyers to the black market.” The No on 19 forces thus conceded that the black market created by prohibition is something to worry about.
That was the most striking thing about the Prop. 19 fight: The opposition was not defending the drug war status quo. They just picked at particular aspects of the initiative, hoping to move lukewarm legalizers into the no column. While that approach undoubtedly helped kill Prop. 19’s chances, it is great news for the larger debate over drug policy. Although 26 of the state’s biggest daily newspapers editorialized against the initiative, many used language like this from the San Francisco Chronicle: “We agree with the architects of Prop. 19 that the ‘war on drugs’—especially as it applies to marijuana—has been an abject failure.”
The opposition to 19 was also heavily outspent, by more than 10 to one. The last time a major drug law reform was on the ballot in California—Prop. 5 in 2008, which would have moved nonviolent drug offenders from jail to a largely treatment-oriented model—it was defeated with $1.8 million in California Correctional Peace Officers Association cash. CCPOA stayed out of the fray on 19, as did many of the formerly anti-reform and deep-pocketed Indian tribes. Some police chiefs and narcotics officers groups gave tens of thousands to fight 19, and the California Beer and Beverage Distributors gave $10 grand, but no one seemed willing to spend significant amounts fighting legalization.
Why Did Prop. 19 Lose?
Message discipline is tight in the Yes on 19 camp. No one sounds discouraged, even after their electoral defeat. All parties say they will remain unified, this time from the start, in a likely 2012 redo, when the youth vote they are sure can push them over the top is more likely to come out for the presidential race. Richard Lee cautions that he is not in a position to sink the same amount of money into this cause again. But NORML’s Allen St. Pierre says one of Prop. 19’s great long-term victories was that it uncovered “more young millionaires committed to marijuana law reform”—such as former Facebook president Sean Parker, who gave the campaign $100,000—“and we are interacting with them in their ascendancy, not in their doddering retirement years.”
But it’s hard to know how to do better if you aren’t sure why you failed. I found no consensus among pro-19 forces regarding what went wrong. Some are sure that more money early on, more TV ads, and/or more mailers would have made a decisive difference, but that the timing and the messaging were otherwise fine. Most 19ers saw their campaign as an attempt to get an already existing mass of pro-legalization citizens to vote, as opposed to changing anti-legalization voters’ minds. Steve Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project thinks that that attitude is dead wrong, and that more sales work on the essential harmlessness of pot needs to be done to ensure enough of a margin of victory. The UFCW’s Dan Rush says the next initiative should include a statewide tax and regulatory scheme. Firedoglake’s Michael Whitney thinks the campaign has to put more effort into “building the kind of grassroots infrastructure and volunteer network needed to sustain turnout.” (More than one 19er thought that such efforts in Los Angeles especially, where the initiative lost, could have won it for them statewide.) Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance wants to lose the initiative’s language that would forbid employers from discriminating against or punishing an employee for using pot if it didn’t actually impair job performance, which the California Chamber of Commerce and several newspapers cited as a reason to oppose Prop. 19.
Almost everyone agrees that if a benefactor wants to drop $1 million on the campaign the next time round, he should do it before absentee ballots have been cast. (Instead, around a third of the campaign’s money came in only in the last two weeks.) And while debates at in-person events and in the papers are all well and good, legalizers need to reach the mass of people whose main exposure to political thought is on TV. That means more TV ads (like one the pro-19 camp launched at the last minute) with police officers explaining that legal pot will mean more, not less, law and order.
Public support for pot legalization continues to rise. According to Gallup, since 1995, before the dawn of the medical pot era, support for marijuana legalization has risen nationally from 25 percent to 46 percent. And as of Gallup’s October 2010 poll, in states west of Texas 58 percent of those polled support the change that Prop. 19 tried to make.
Still, the reform movement has not yet managed to sell legalization to otherwise libertarian-minded folk as a logical part of constitutionalist, limited government. A CNN Election Day exit poll in California found that 61 percent of those who think government is doing too much nonetheless opposed Prop. 19, as did 53 percent of those “angry” at the federal government and 63 percent of Tea Party supporters.
Even more surprising, a post-election Greenberg Research poll financed by Prop. 19 supporters found that 31 percent of California voters who believe pot should be legal nonetheless cast their ballots against the measure. That suggests many voters objected to this particular proposition, rather than legalization in general. The initiative, with its many provisions designed to pre-empt opposition, offered multiple targets for opponents to shoot at.
One point of contention, stressed heavily by the anti-19 campaign, was the local option, which gave local jurisdictions leeway to establish their own regulations and taxes for the cultivation and sale of marijuana. According to opponents, this system would have created “a jumbled legal nightmare,” as anti-19 spokesman Roger Salazar put it, even though California, like most of America, already deals with many controversial matters, from booze to gambling to gun possession, with a variety of local restrictions rather than one statewide rule.
One aspect of Prop. 19 that bothered both anti-pot activists and pro-legalization libertarians was the provision restricting pot-related job discrimination. Anti-pot propagandists envisioned a wave of stoned school bus drivers zipping off bridges and zonked nurses passing out over patient’s beds, while libertarians argued that it was an unnecessary intrusion into employment contracts.
It’s also possible that many voters felt the issue was less pressing after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a month before Election Day, signed S.B. 1449, a measure that reduced possession of less than an ounce of marijuana from a misdemeanor to an infraction, similar to a traffic violation. Schwarzenegger’s move killed a great selling point for 19 proponents: Why burden so many tens of thousands of people a year with a searchable criminal record and get them embedded in a criminal justice system that could eventually lead to prison, just for dope? While it was already true that almost no one went to jail or prison in California for mere use or small possession, 1449 lowered the legal difficulties facing pot users even further.
Still, 1449 does not solve the problems of crime and corruption associated with black market sales of pot. And, as co-chair of the Prop. 19 legal committee Hanna Dershowitz points out, by eliminating court costs for the system, under 1449 the incentive for cops to waste lots of time targeting young minorities might be even higher. Dope law enforcement is now a pure cash cow, so even under 1449 police attention will still be mistargeted to harassing pot smokers. (And with a targeted class that won’t always be able to pay fines on time, even the new system could lead to real criminal consequences.)
But in truth, as Ethan Nadelmann says, “we have no hard evidence whatsoever that any one of the provisions helped or hurt and no really good evidence about whether any particular message helped or hurt.” Several legalization advocates suspect the voting was swayed more by general uneasiness with sudden, far-reaching change, and that when they have a second chance to think about legalization, they’ll come around.
What They’re Fighting For
All this talk of messaging, coalition building, and conventional electioneering is itself a sign that the politics of repealing prohibition underwent a significant shift during the Prop. 19 campaign. Outright legalization is now on the table in several states, with measures likely to reach the 2012 ballot in at least California, Colorado, and Nevada. Activists hope as many as half a dozen states may end up in play. California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has a legislative take on legalization ready to roll out again in 2011 as well (last year an earlier version became the first such bill in American history to get out of committee in the Assembly), though politicians are clearly more scared of legalization than are voters.
Although he is still a dark-horse candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, as the first major politician in America to make legalization a big part of his message, could turn up the volume on the national conversation if he gets anywhere in the primaries. So could Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) if he runs.
But even with all this hopeful talk, there is a darker side to the politics of pot, as I was reminded at an election night party where I ran into Stephanie Landa. Landa is a sweet, gentle woman who spent three years in federal prison for running a San Francisco marijuana growing operation that, with the full knowledge of local law enforcement officials, served the city’s medical market. When I first met her in November 2009, she was being forced to live in a grim halfway house with unpleasant, nutty neighbors. Her every move was monitored. She was legally prohibited from seeing the father of her child, since he was also arrested in the federal bust that sent her to prison.
Landa, a heroine and a martyr within the medical marijuana community, knows it well and understands its concerns. But for Landa, determining the right thing to do when it came to Prop. 19 did not require complicated guesses about how Attorney General Eric Holder might enforce federal law in California, or how counties would regulate and tax cannabis, or who might come out ahead in a legal marijuana market. As she put it, “I just don’t want anybody to go to prison anymore.”
Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of This is Burning Man (BenBella), Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs) and Gun Control on Trial (Cato Institute).
Resource: http://reason.com/archives/2011/01/18/just-a-matter-of-when
Cato Institute "U.S. in Slumber as Mexico Drug War Rages" (October 13, 2010)
By Ted Galen Carpenter
Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international affairs, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.
This article appeared in
USA Today on October 13, 2010.
It takes a brave person to be a reporter in Mexico these days if the intent is to cover the drug cartels. More than 30 journalists have been killed since 2006, making Mexico perhaps the most dangerous place in the world for members of that profession. The country is at least on a par with such countries as Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan. It has become so bad that several Mexican journalists have sought asylum in the United States, and at least one has been granted that status.
It is the latest sign that the danger of Mexico becoming a "failed state" — once an absurd notion — is no longer so far-fetched.
Drug gangs make it a point to either control media coverage of their activities, or to intimidate independent-minded outlets into silence. They've been especially successful on the latter front. Numerous newspapers, radio stations, and television stations no longer cover stories related to the drug war, or they provide only very brief, bland accounts.
The ability of the drug traffickers to cow the Mexican press is yet another indication that the country is in deep trouble.
The intimidation reached new heights in mid-September when El Diario, the leading newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, El Paso's sister city and the most violent arena in Mexico's drug war, published a front-page editorial asking the cartels for a truce, following the killing of one of its photographers. One plaintive passage in the editorial underscored just how bad the work environment has become. "We want you to explain to us what you want from us," the editorial pleaded with the traffickers. "What are we supposed to publish or not publish? You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city, because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling."
A news blackout
The intimidation problem is not confined to Juarez. Throughout northern Mexico, the news blackout reaches astonishing proportions. The border city of Reynosa and the surrounding area was a battlefield between two major drug gangs, the Zetas and the Gulf cartel, in early 2010. Gun fights and executions went on for days at time, producing hundreds of deaths. But Carlos Lauria, head of the Americas program for the Committee to Protect Journalists, points out that there was not a single report in newspapers or on radio and television about the bloodshed. In fact, the first media reports of the extent of the casualties appeared in a U.S. paper, the Dallas Morning News. A similar news void occurred in July following a terrifying gun and grenade battle in Nuevo Laredo.
Yet President Felipe Calderon rebuked El Diario for a willingness "to negotiate with criminals." The government offered a plan to provide greater security to journalists as they attempt to do their jobs. But most members of the news media seemed underwhelmed by that promise, and understandably so. After all, the Calderon government's other plans in the drug war haven't worked out, so why should anyone expect this latest measure to fare any better?
Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international affairs, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.
More by Ted Galen Carpenter
The ability of the drug traffickers to cow the Mexican press is yet another indication that the country is in deep trouble. There is a long litany of other depressing pieces of evidence. More than 28,000 people have perished in the fighting since Calderon launched his military-led offensive against the cartels in December 2006, and 2010 will set a new annual record. Once peaceful Monterrey, Mexico's economic heart, has become so dangerous that the U.S. State Department recently ordered diplomatic personnel at the consulate there to send their dependents home. American business executives, and even some Mexican ones, are sending their families to safe havens in the United States. Major shootouts and kidnappings have come to some of the most prominent resort areas, including Acapulco and Cancun.
What to do
Last month, President Obama rebuked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for suggesting that the drug violence had become a full-blown insurgency. He needs to wake up to the increasingly dire developments. The president should convene an immediate, comprehensive discussion of the security situation in Mexico, utilizing both his national security team and outside experts.
And all options need to be on the table. That includes the suggestion by Mexico's former president, Vicente Fox, that we contemplate ending drug prohibition to drastically reduce the cartels' vast source of black-market revenue. The current approach clearly is not working, and we must consider alternatives before we end up with either a failed state or a narco-republic on our southern border.
Resource: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12473
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) "Speaking Out Against Drug Legalization"
In many circles, U.S. drug policy is under attack. It is being criticized primarily by those who favor a legalization agenda. It is also being challenged by those who encourage certain trends in European drug policy, like decriminalization of drug use, “harm reduction” programs, and distinctions between hard and soft drugs.
Proponents of legalization are spending huge amounts of money to encourage a greater tolerance for drug use. A number of states have passed referendums to permit their residents to use drugs for a variety of reasons. The citizens who vote in these referendums too often have to rely on the information—or rather, misinformation—being presented by the sponsors of these expensive campaigns to legalize drugs.
This booklet, Speaking Out Against Drug Legalization, is designed to cut through the fog of misinformation with hard facts. The ten factual assertions, taken together, present an accurate picture of America’s experience with drug use, the current state of the drug problem, and what might happen if America chooses to adopt a more permissive policy on drug abuse.
Drug abuse, and this nation’s response to it, is one of the most important and potentially dangerous issues facing American citizens—and especially its youth—today. The unique freedoms of America have always depended on a well-informed citizenry. We hope you will use the facts you read in this booklet to help inform your friends and neighbors so that America can make a wise and well-considered decision on the future of its drug policy.
Summary of the Top Ten Facts on Legalization
Fact 1: We have made significant progress in fighting drug use and drug trafficking in America. Now is not the time to abandon our efforts.
The Legalization Lobby claims that the fight against drugs cannot be won. However, overall drug use is down by more than a third in the last twenty years, while cocaine use has dropped by an astounding 70 percent. Ninety-five percent of Americans do not use drugs. This is success by any standards.
Fact 2: A balanced approach of prevention, enforcement, and treatment is the key in the fight against drugs.
A successful drug policy must apply a balanced approach of prevention, enforcement and treatment. All three aspects are crucial. For those who end up hooked on drugs, there are innovative programs, like Drug Treatment Courts, that offer non-violent users the option of seeking treatment. Drug Treatment Courts provide court supervision, unlike voluntary treatment centers.
Fact 3: Illegal drugs are illegal because they are harmful.
There is a growing misconception that some illegal drugs can be taken safely. For example, savvy drug dealers have learned how to market drugs like Ecstasy to youth. Some in the Legalization Lobby even claim such drugs have medical value, despite the lack of conclusive scientific evidence.
Fact 4: Smoked marijuana is not scientifically approved medicine. Marinol, the legal version of medical marijuana, is approved by science.
According to the Institute of Medicine, there is no future in smoked marijuana as medicine. However, the prescription drug Marinol—a legal and safe version of medical marijuana which isolates the active ingredient of THC—has been studied and approved by the Food & Drug Administration as safe medicine. The difference is that you have to get a prescription for Marinol from a licensed physician. You can’t buy it on a street corner, and you don’t smoke it.
Fact 5: Drug control spending is a minor portion of the U.S. budget. Compared to the social costs of drug abuse and addiction, government spending on drug control is minimal.
The Legalization Lobby claims that the United States has wasted billions of dollars in its anti-drug efforts. But for those kids saved from drug addiction, this is hardly wasted dollars. Moreover, our fight against drug abuse and addiction is an ongoing struggle that should be treated like any other social problem. Would we give up on education or poverty simply because we haven’t eliminated all problems? Compared to the social costs of drug abuse and addiction—whether in taxpayer dollars or in pain and suffering—government spending on drug control is minimal.
Fact 6: Legalization of drugs will lead to increased use and increased levels of addiction. Legalization has been tried before, and failed miserably.
Legalization has been tried before—and failed miserably. Alaska’s experiment with Legalization in the 1970s led to the state’s teens using marijuana at more than twice the rate of other youths nationally. This led Alaska’s residents to vote to re-criminalize marijuana in 1990.
Fact 7: Crime, violence, and drug use go hand-in-hand.
Crime, violence and drug use go hand in hand. Six times as many homicides are committed by people under the influence of drugs, as by those who are looking for money to buy drugs. Most drug crimes aren’t committed by people trying to pay for drugs; they’re committed by people on drugs.
Fact 8: Alcohol has caused significant health, social, and crime problems in this country, and legalized drugs would only make the situation worse.
The Legalization Lobby claims drugs are no more dangerous than alcohol. But drunk driving is one of the primary killers of Americans. Do we want our bus drivers, nurses, and airline pilots to be able to take drugs one evening, and operate freely at work the next day? Do we want to add to the destruction by making drugged driving another primary killer?
Fact 9: Europe’s more liberal drug policies are not the right model for America.
The Legalization Lobby claims that the “European Model” of the drug problem is successful. However, since legalization of marijuana in Holland, heroin addiction levels have tripled. And Needle Park seems like a poor model for America.
Fact 10: Most non-violent drug users get treatment, not jail time.
The Legalization Lobby claims that America’s prisons are filling up with users. Truth is, only about 5 percent of inmates in federal prison are there because of simple possession. Most drug criminals are in jail—even on possession charges—because they have plea-bargained down from major trafficking offenses or more violent drug crimes.
Resource: http://www.justice.gov/dea/demand/speakout/index.html
Drug Free Australia "Arguments Against Drug Legalisation"
The Success of Prohibition
Prohibition has a successful track record suppressing illicit drug use since it was introduced 100 years ago22 in that licit drugs have current (last 12 months) user rates as high as 80-90% in populations over 14 years of age,23 and tobacco has historically had current use rates up to 60% of adult populations,24 the percentages currently using illicit drugs in OECD countries are generally below 1% of the population excepting cannabis where most are between 3% and 10%, with six countries between 11% and 17%.25
In the 50 year period following the first 1912 international convention restricting use of opium, heroin and cocaine, the United States’ use of illicit drugs other than cannabis was consistently below 0.5% of the population, and cannabis at 1-2% of the population between 1955 and 1965.26 With the advent of the counter-culture movement from the late 1950s, where illicit drug use was characterized as mind-expanding and relatively harmless,27 illicit drug use rose sharply. These new generations were quite obviously distanced from those generations which had first witnessed first-hand the harms of the illicits at the turn of the previous century and which had fought for their prohibition.
With illicit drug use peaking in the 1970’s in the United States, the ‘Just Say No’ campaign, initiated under the patronage of Nancy Reagan, coincided with recent (past month) illicit drug use dropping from 14.1% in 1979 to 5.8% in 1992, a drop of 60%.28 In 2009, despite increases in illicit drug use since the 1990s, levels are nevertheless 40% below 1979 levels. Rising levels of drug use across the Western world have coincided with the bankrolling of the drug legalization lobby particularly by billionaire financiers from the US and UK since 1991.29 George Soros, perhaps the most central billionaire financier for drug legalisation worldwide is clearly not opposed to illicit drug use, as per his autobiography where he asserts that ” I would establish a strictly controlled distribution network through which I would make most drugs, excluding the most dangerous ones like crack, legally available.”30 The drug legalization lobby’s vigorous promotion in media and schools of a ‘safe use of illegal drugs’ message31 indicates that drug prohibition has been in the midst of a pitched battle waged by those who are accepting not only of the drug user but who also promote an acceptance of drug use itself.
With extremely low expenditures spent on illicit drug control by countries worldwide until the mid ‘60s, it can be argued that the counter-culture message that illicit drugs can and should be used ‘safely’, backed by the multi-million dollar inputs by drug legalisation financiers, is to a great extent responsible for the heavy increases in drug control expenditures since that time.
Those seeking the legalization and consequent regulation of illicit drugs have proposed that prohibition does not work, despite its 100 years of successful suppression of illicit drug harms, and use a variety of erroneous arguments to support their view.
Their argument that “Prohibition promotes drug use” sharply conflicts with a 2001 Australian study of 18-29 year olds by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research which shows that Prohibition does indeed deter illicit drug use.32 29% of those who had never used cannabis cited the illegality of the substance as their reason for never using the drug, while 19% of those who had ceased use of cannabis cited its illegality as their reason. 91% of those currently using cannabis weekly said they would use more cannabis if it were made legal, while 14% of the total sample of 579 interviewees said they ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ would use the substance more frequently. The Director of the Bureau, Don Weatherburn, said,
“Cannabis use may be widespread but the critical question for policy is whether its use would become even more widespread if the drug were legalised. The present findings suggest that it would.”
The criticism that the ‘war on drugs’ can never be won (and therefore is of no value) is no more true than the argument that police ‘blitzes’ on highway speeding should be curtailed because they fail to eradicate speeding. While blitzes on speeding very successfully reduce and contain the behaviour, policing of illicit drug use does exactly the same. Removing policing of speeding drivers will have precisely the same effect as removing policing of illicit drugs. No one would suggest legalizing stealing because it has never been eradicated.
It is contended that prohibition causes greater drug use by making drugs so expensive that users must become dealers and continually recruit new users to support their habit. This contention is deficient on two grounds a. higher prices levied by governments on alcohol and tobacco inevitably
reduce demand, and so it is with illicit drugs,33 and b. taking the 1,000,000 young people in the US per year who start smoking tobacco,34 prohibiting tobacco would not conceivably swell their numbers, only decrease them. Of course, legalizing drugs will make drugs cheaper and thus increase use as with the experience of cheaper crack cocaine in the US.35
The view that prohibition makes a prohibited item lucrative for criminals is indeed correct, after all this is an inherent dynamic that drives criminality. But capitulating to illicit drug use on these grounds makes no more sense than capitulating to those who continue to traffic in human lives, a more expensive business because of its illegality and therefore more lucrative for the criminal, but necessary for the rights of vulnerable citizens.
The idea that criminals will be put out of business by legalization fails to recognize that the most productive recruiting pool to illicit drug use has always been amongst secondary school-aged young people,36 an age group that would still be prohibited from buying drugs even in a regulated framework, as with alcohol or tobacco. Consequently, criminal effort will be more concentrated on this vulnerable age group even moreso than currently. Further, a large number of studies have shown that criminal careers are embarked on before the onset of drug use, while drug use intensifies this criminal behaviour.37
Criminal behaviour can importantly be the direct result of drug use which can cause emotional/brain damage, mental illness and anti-social behaviour.38 Psychoactive drugs can have a powerful impact on behavior which may influence some people to commit crimes that have nothing to do with supporting the cost of their drug use.39 The use of drugs changes behavior and causes criminal activity because people will do things they wouldn=t do if they were rational and free of the drug=s influence. Cocaine-related paranoia is an example. If drug use increases with legalization, so will such forms of related violent crime as assaults, drugged driving, child abuse, and domestic violence.
It is sometimes argued that the harms of prohibition outweigh the harms to users and their community. Given that prohibition has so demonstrably suppressed the harms from illicit drug use, as previously outlined, the harms to users and society, also previously outlined, under legalization/regulation would clearly far outweigh the current harms of prohibition.
The argument that drug addicts are forced into crime by prohibition should first and foremost highlight the fact that this argument presupposes and underlines the addictive nature of illicit drugs (which legalization proponents often downplay), addictive enough to create a viable criminal supply industry. Secondly, the harms of increased drug use, which as previously outlined would be a consequence of legalization and its cheaper prices, far outweigh the current crime harms of prohibition.
Drug legalization advocates spuriously claim that US prisons are overflowing with people convicted for only simple possession of marijuana. This claim is aggressively pushed by groups seeking to relax or abolish marijuana laws. A more accurate view40 is that the vast majority of inmates in prison for marijuana have been found guilty of more than simple possession. They were convicted for drug trafficking, or for marijuana possession along with other offences. Many of those in prison for marijuana entered a guilty plea to a marijuana charge to avoid a more serious charge. In the
US, just 1.6 percent of the state inmate population were held for offences involving only marijuana, and less than one percent of all state prisoners (0.7 percent) were incarcerated with marijuana possession as the only charge. An even smaller fraction of state prisoners were first time offenders (0.3 percent). The numbers on the US federal prisons are similar. In 2001, the overwhelming majority of offenders sentenced for marijuana crimes were convicted for trafficking and only 63 served time for simple possession.
The proposal that countries must capitulate to the ‘overwhelming flood of illicit drug use’ by deserting prevention and rehabilitation for a more enlightened policy of harm reduction is shown to be without support when the example of Sweden is considered.41 Sweden had the highest levels of illicit drug use in the 1970’s but has long had the lowest levels of drug use in the developed world due to a sustained emphasis on education and rehabilitation. When Sweden reduced spending on these elements its drug use rose as it did in the 1990s42, but restoring expenditure from 2002 again sharply decreased drug use as per student surveys.43 In 2001, a poll run by TEMO for the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, found that 96% of Swedes are strongly supportive of their restrictive drug policy.44
Under a purely harm reduction model it is inevitable that more people will try illicit drugs and become addicted. The Netherlands policy of taking a soft line on cannabis use to create a ‘separation of markets’ between cannabis dealers and hard drug dealers failed to stem the initiation to drugs such as heroin, cocaine and amphetamines. In the EMCDDA’s 2000 report Annex (shown below but no longer available from EMCDDA on the internet) in the year 1998 the Netherlands had the third highest cannabis and cocaine use in Europe. This level of cannabis use negates any argument that the Netherland’s soft approach on cannabis, which by 1998 had been in place for decades, creates lower drug use. Dutch tolerance has allowed the Netherlands to become a criminal epicentre for illicit synthetic drug manufacture, as well as a home for the production and export of strains of cannabis with THC 10 times higher than normal.45
However, where there were once thousands of cannabis cafes there are now only several hundred.46 Levels of cannabis use, in 2005 only marginally higher than in 1998, while other European countries have accelerated past them, are more likely the result of this evident growing intolerance of cannabis in the Netherlands rather than a growing tolerance. British reductions in cannabis use after softer legislation may be moreso the result of heavy UK media exposure of the stronger evidence of links between cannabis and psychosis.47 The UK has since toughened its laws on cannabis.
Resource: http://www.drugfree.org.au/fileadmin/Media/Global/Taskforce_Arguments_for_Prohibition.pdf (pages 3-7)
