How do we deal with the drug problem
How Do We Deal with the Drug Problem?
1.Drugs
It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect the drug will have on the taker. This will require heroic honesty. Don’t say that marijuana is addictive and dangerous when it is neither----unlike “speed,”which kills most unpleasantly, or heroin, which is addictive and difficult to kick.
For the record, I have tried almost every drug and liked none, disproving the popular theory that a whiff of opium will enslave the mind. Nevertheless many drugs are bad and they should be told why in a sensible way.
Along with exhortation and warning, it might be good for our citizens to recall that the United States was the creation of men who believed that each man has the right to do what he wants with his own life as long as he does not interfere with his neighbor’s pursuit of happiness.
Now one can hear the warning rumble begin: If everyone is allowed to take drugs everyone will and we shall end up a race of Zombies. Alarming thought. Yet, it seems most unlikely that any reasonably sane person will become a drug addict if he knows in advance what addiction is going to be like.
Is everyone reasonably sane? No. some people will always become drug addicts just as some people will always become alcoholics, and it is just too band. Every man, however, has the power (and should have the legal right ) to kill himself if he chooses. But since most men don’t, they won’t be mainliners either. Nevertheless, forbidding people things they like or think they might enjoy only makes them want those things all the more. This psychological insight is, for some mysterious reason, always denied our governors.
It is a lucky thing for the American moralist that we have no public memory of anything that happened last Tuesday. No one in Washington today recalls what happened during the years alcohol was forbidden to the people by a Congress that thought it had a divine mission to stamp out Demon Rum---launching, in the process, the greatest crime wave in the country’s history, causing thousands of deaths from bad alcohol, and creating a general ( and persisting ) contempt among the citizenry for laws of the United States.
The same thing is happening today. But the government has learned nothing from past attempts at prohibition.
Last year when the supply of marijuana was slightly reduced by the Feds, the pushers got the kids hooked on heroin and deaths increased dramatically. Whose fault? I think the Government of the United States was responsible for those deaths. The bureaucratic machine has a vested interest in playing cops and robbers. Both the Bureau of Narcotics and the Mafia want strong laws against the sale and use of drugs because if drugs are sold at cost there would be no money in it for anyone.
If there was no money in it for the Mafia, there would be no friendly playground pushers. And addicts would not commit crimes to pay for the next fix. Finally, if there was no money in it, the Bureau of Narcotics would wither away, something they are not about to do without a struggle. Will anything sensible be done? Of course not. The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money----and fighting drugs is nearly as big a
business as pushing them. Therefore the situation will only grow worse.
2. The Trouble with Legalizing Drugs
If you can’t win the game, change the rules. Such is the deliciously convenient reasoning that the drug problem can be resolved by legalizing it. Unfortunately, legalization sounds too good to be true and probably is.
It sounds good because it’s simple. It would immediately remove the immense profits drugs now pump into the criminal underworld, it would reduce the forbidden-fruit attraction drugs have for young people and it would take away the criminal stigmas that prevents many addicts from seeking help. You even could tax the sale of now-illegal drugs and use the money to build more treatment centers, which are desperately needed.
Deep thinkers have long advocated lifting the prohibition on drugs. Last year the debate was stirred anew when Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke called for a serious national debate on the subject.
Schmoke’s advocacy was based on his experience as a drug prosecutor. He felt as though he was bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon. Prohibition of drugs is working no better than prohibition of liquor worked earlier this century, he told Congress. It increases crime without eliminating addiction. So let’s change the rules.
He was not alone in his sentiments. “Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse—for both the addict and the rest of us ,”wrote Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in 1972, after President Nixon declared a “war” on drugs.
The simplicity of this prescription has proved irresistible to many. Unfortunately, the simple beauty of such logic has an ugly gaping hole. There is considerable evidence to suggest that with legalization drug use and its social costs would increase. Sharply.
Keeping drugs illegal may not eliminate them, but it almost surely reduces their use.
“Prof. James Q. Wilson tells us that during the years in which heroin could be legally prescribed by doctors in Britain, the number of addicts increased forty-fold,”wrote drug czar William Bennett in the Sept. 19 Wall Street Journal in a rebuttal to an open letter economist Friedman had directed to him in an earlier issue. “And after the repeal of Prohibition---an analogy favored but misunderstood by legalization advocates---consumption of alcohol soared by 350 percent.”Unfortunately, Bennett’s approach also misses the boat. Drugs are a symptom of deeper ills in certain segments of our society, particularly the impoverished segments. You can call in all the troops you want and build more jails and drug boot camps, but as long as demand remains, the traffic will find ways to get through. And demand will remain as long as the social ills that feed it remain.
Bennett is right to say the nation’s drug problem is too multifaceted to be destroyed with a “magic bullet.” But he is wrong to limit his targets. The proverbial quick fix that legalization would seem to provide is illusory. But so is the slow fix offered by further criminalization.
3. Legalize? No. Deglamorize
Legalization sounds like a cheap and easy solution. It works instantly. By redefining drug use as legal, it eliminates all drug-related crimes.
Now. legalization does solve the drug enforcement problem. If drugs are legal, there are no profits to be made from smuggling, no mafias and drug cartels to be enriched by the trade. No
one goes to jail. We save billions in law enforcement and reduce corruption to boot.
What legalizers minimize is the catastrophic effect that legalization would have on public health, and effect that would far outweigh the savings in law enforcement.
Well, you ask ,if alcohol is now legal, what is the logic of prohibiting cocaine and heroin? No logic, just history, alcohol use is so ancient and so universal a practice that it cannot be repealed. The question is not: Which is worse, alcohol or cocaine? The question is: Which is worse, alcohol alone or alcohol plus cocaine and heroin? Alcohol is here to stay. To legalize other drugs is to declare that the rest of the pharmacy is here to stay too.
Do we really want the additional and permanent burden of the other intoxicants, some of which are infinitely more addictive that alcohol? Since 1987 there have been 37 railroad accidents involving drug use. With cocaine and heroin readily available, additional transportation deaths alone would dwarf the current number of drug-related deaths.
Even legalization proponents admit that it would increase drug use. First, legalization gives a social sanction. Second, it makes drugs available without risk. Third, it makes them available at a price that must match or undercut the street price---otherwise, the whole rationale for legalization is defeated. All three effects would increase consumption. What we save in law enforcement we would have to spend many times over in traffic deaths, lost productivity and hospital costs.
What to do? For any problem that is ultimately cultural, there can be no quick fix. The answer has to be cultural, too, and changing attitudes takes decades. But it can be done. The great paradigm is the success of the now 25-year-old antismoking campaigns.
When I was a kid, the most glamorous image one could imagine was Bogie with a cigarette dangling from his lips. No more. Tobacco advertising is banned on TV, a clear violation of free speech and a good one. A relentless government campaign, finally picked up by Hollywood and the rest of culture industry, has thoroughly deglamorized cigarettes: It is considered a confession of personal weakness. This is not the image a person wants to project, and projecting an image is why people start to smoke in the first place.(Addiction is why they continue.)
The combination of moral persuasion, deglamorization and mild repression—segregating smokers, banning TV ads—has led to a dramatic decline in tobacco usage in one generation. It was 40 percent when the surgeon general’s first report was issued in 1964. It is 30 percent today. Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No to drugs campaign drew ridicule, but it recognized the only nonrepressive way to go after drugs. Do to them what was done to tobacco: deglamorize. The only way to reduce consumption is to reverse a cultural impression. That cannot be easy. But there is no other way.
You must start cracking down hard on users. Not by putting them all in jail. There aren’t enough cells to go around, but by imposing stiff sanctions against property---heavy fines and confiscation. When a user has to calculate the price of coke at $100 per gram plus, say, a $10,000 premium thrown in, he might start looking for cheaper forms of recreation.
There you have it: four solutions. If you are desperate for a quick fix, either legalize drugs or repress the users. If you want a civilized approach, mount a propaganda campaign against drugs on the scale of the antismoking campaign. And if you are just a politician looking for reelection, send in the Marines and wave to the cameras.