Page 4 A fourth effect is the creation of stronger drugs. Richard Cowan in National Review has promulgated what he calls the iron law of prohibition: The more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the drugs will become. If a dealer can only smuggle one suitcase full of drugs into the United States or if he can only drive one car full of drugs into Baltimore, which would he rather be carrying--marijuana, coca leaves, cocaine, or crack? He gets more dollars for the bulk if he carries more potent drugs. An early example of that is that a lot of people turned to marijuana when alcohol became more difficult to get during Prohibition. A few years after Prohibition began in the 1920s there began to be pressures for laws against marijuana. When one advocates drug legalization, one of the standard questions is, "Well, marijuana is one thing, maybe even cocaine, but are you seriously saying you would legalize crack?" And the answer is that crack is almost entirely a product of prohibition. It probably would not have existed if drugs had been legal for the past 20 years. The fifth effect of prohibition is civil liberties abuses. We have heard a lot recently about Zero Tolerance and the seizure of cars and boats because a small amount of marijuana or cocaine is allegedly found. I recall a time in this country when the government was only allowed to punish someone after he got convicted in a court of law. It now appears that the drug authorities can punish an American citizen by seizing his Page 5 car or his boat, not even after an indictment--much less a conviction--but after a mere allegation by a police officer. Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence? There is an inherent problem of civil liberties abuses in victimless crimes. Randy Barnett wrote about this in the Pacific Research Institute book Dealing with Drugs; the problem is that with victimless crimes, such as buying drugs, there is no complaining witness. In most crimes, say robbery or rape, there is a person who in our legal system is called the complaining witness: the person who was robbed or raped, who goes to the police and complains that somebody has done something to him or her. In a drug purchase, neither party to The sixth effect of prohibition is futility. The drug war simply isn't working. Some say that much of today's support for legalization that we're seeing from politicians and others is merely a sign of frustration. Well, frustration is a rational response to futility. It's quite understandable why people have gotten frustrated with the continuing failure of new enforcement policies. Page 6 If a government is involved in a war and it isn't winning, it has two basic choices. The first is escalation, and we've seen a lot of proposals for that. New York Mayor Ed Koch has proposed to strip-search every person entering the United States from South America or Southeast Asia. Members of the D.C. City Council have called for the National Guard to occupy the capital city of the United Congress has bravely called for the death penalty for States. drug sellers. Jesse Jackson wants to bring the troops home from Europe and use them to ring our southern border. The police chief of Los Angeles wants to invade Colombia. The White House drug adviser and the usually sensible Wall Street Journal editorial page have called for arresting smalltime users. The Journal, with its usual spirit, urged the government to "crush the users"; that's 23 million Americans. The Justice Department wants to double our prison capacity even though we already have far more people in prison as a percentage of our population than any other industrialized country except South Africa. Former attorney general Edwin Meese III and others want to drug test all workers. The Customs Service has asked for authorization to "use appropriate force" to compel planes suspected of carrying drugs to land. It has clarified, in case there was any doubt, that yes, it means that if it can't find out what a plane is up to, Page 7 it wants the authority to shoot the plane down and then find out if it's carrying drugs. These rather frightening ideas represent one response to the futility of the drug war. The more sensible response, it seems to me, is to decriminalize--to de-escalate, to realize that trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was. A lot of people use drugs recreationally and peacefully and safely and are not going to go along with Zero Tolerance. They're going to keep trying to get drugs. The problems caused by prohibition are not going to be solved by stepped-up enforcement. So how exactly would we legalize drugs? Defenders of drug prohibition apparently consider that a devastating question, but it doesn't strike me as being particularly difficult. Our society has had a lot of experience with legal dangerous drugs, particularly alcohol and tobacco, and we can draw on that experience when we legalize marijuana, cocaine, and heroin--as we will, fairly soon, when more Americans come to understand the costs of prohibiting them. Some critics of prohibition would legalize only "soft" drugs--just marijuana in many cases. That policy would not eliminate the tremendous problems that prohibition has created. As long as drugs that people very much want remain illegal, a Page 8 black market will exist. If our goal is to rid our cities of crime and corruption, it would make more sense to legalize cocaine and heroin while leaving marijuana illegal than vice versa. The lesson of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and the prohibition of other drugs today is that prohibition creates more problems than it solves. We should legalize all recreational drugs. It Then what? When we legalize drugs, we will likely apply the alcohol model. That is, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin would be sold only in specially licensed stores--perhaps in liquor stores, perhaps in a new kind of drugstore. Warning labels would be posted in the stores and on the packages. would be illegal to sell drugs to minors, now defined as anyone under 21. It would be illegal to advertise drugs on television and possibly even in print. Committing a crime or driving under the influence of drugs would be illegal, as with alcohol. It is quite possible that such a system would be less effective in attracting young people to drug use than the current system of schoolyard pushers offering free samples. Teenagers today can get liquor if they try, and we shouldn't assume that a minimum purchasing age would keep other drugs out of their hands. But we don't see many liquor pushers peddling their wares on playgrounds. Getting the drug business out of our schoolyards and streets is an important benefit of legalization. |