Tracknum: 29081.v04220801b51b8dd02ced
Pubdate: Thu, 13 Apr 2000
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Section: A Page: 20
Contact:  (212) 416-2658
Address: 200 Liberty Street, New York, NY 10281
Website: http://www.wsj.com/
Author: James Q. Wilson
Note: Mr. Wilson is a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University 
and author of "The Moral Sense," available in paperback from Free Press.

A NEW STRATEGY FOR THE WAR ON DRUGS

Neither Legalizing Drugs, Nor Trying To Block Supply, Is Likely To Work. 
There Is A Third Way: Reduce Demand Through Manditory Testing.

The current Senate deliberation over aid to Colombia aimed at fighting 
narcotics reminds us that there are two debates over how the government 
ought to deal with dangerous drugs. The first is about their illegality and 
the second is about their control. People who wish to legalize drugs and 
those who wish to curtail their supply believe that their methods will 
reduce crime. Both these views are mistaken, but there is a third way. 
Advocates of legalization think that both buyers and sellers would benefit. 
People who can buy drugs freely and at something like free market prices 
would no longer have to steal to afford cocaine or heroin; dealers would no 
longer have to use violence and corruption to maintain their market share. 
Though drugs may harm people, reducing this harm would be a medical problem 
not a criminal justice one. Crime would drop sharply.

Prices Would Fall

But there is an error in this calculation. Legalizing drugs means letting 
the price fall to its competitive rate (plus taxes and advertising costs). 
That market price would probably be somewhere between one third and 1/20th 
of the illegal price. And more than the market price would fall. As 
Harvard's Mark Moore has pointed out, the "risk price"—that is, all the 
hazards associated with buying drugs, from being arrested to being ripped 
off—would also fall, and this decline might be more important than the 
lower purchase price.

Under a legal regime, the consumption of low priced, low risk drugs would 
increase dramatically. We do not know by how much, but the little evidence 
we have suggests a sharp rise. Until 1968 Britain allowed doctors to 
prescribe heroin. Some doctors cheated, and their medically unnecessary 
prescriptions helped increase the number of known heroin addicts by a 
factor of 40. As a result, the government abandoned the prescription policy 
in favor of administering heroin in clinics and later replacing heroin with 
methadone.

When the Netherlands ceased enforcing laws against the purchase or 
possession of marijuana, the result was a sharp increase in its use. 
Cocaine and heroin create much greater dependency, and so the increase in 
their use would probably be even greater.

The average user would probably commit fewer crimes if these drugs were 
sold legally. But the total number of users would increase sharply. A large 
fraction of these new users would be unable to keep a steady job. Unless we 
were prepared to support them with welfare payments, crime would be one of 
their main sources of income. That is, the number of drug related crimes 
per user might fall even as the total number of drug related crimes 
increased. Add to the list of harms more deaths from overdose, more babies 
born to addicted mothers, more accidents by drug influenced automobile 
drivers and fewer people able to hold jobs or act as competent parents.

Treating such people would become far more difficult. As psychiatrist Sally 
Satel has written on this page, many drug users will not enter and stay in 
treatment unless they are compelled to do so. Phoenix House, the largest 
national residential drug treatment program, rarely admits patients who 
admit they have a problem and need help. The great majority are coerced by 
somebody—a judge, probation officer or school official—into attending. 
Phoenix House CEO Mitchell Rosenthal opposes legalization, and for good 
reason. Legalization means less coercion, and that means more addicts and 
addicts who are harder to treat.

Douglas Anglin, drawing on experiences in California and elsewhere, has 
shown that people compelled to stay in treatment do at least as well as 
those who volunteer for it, and they tend (of necessity) to stay in the 
program longer. If we legalize drugs, the chances of treatment making a 
difference are greatly reduced. And as for drug use prevention,. forget it. 
Try telling your children not to use a legal substance.

But people who want to keep drugs illegal have problems of their own. The 
major thrust of government spending has been to reduce the supply of drugs 
by cutting their production overseas, intercepting their transfer into the 
U.S. and arresting dealers. Because of severe criminal penalties, 
especially on handlers of crack cocaine, our prisons have experienced a 
huge increase in persons sentenced on drug charges. In the early 1980s, 
about 1/12th of all prison inmates were in for drug convictions; now well 
over one third are.

No one can be certain how imprisoning drug suppliers affects drug use, but 
we do know that an arrested drug dealer is easily replaced. Moreover, the 
government can never seize more than a small fraction of the drugs entering 
the country, a fraction that is easily replaced.

Emphasizing supply over treatment is dangerous. Not only do we spend huge 
sums on it; not only do we drag a reluctant U.S. military into the 
campaign; we also heighten corruption and violence in countries such as 
Colombia and Mexico. The essential fact is this: Demand will produce supply.

We can do much more to reduce demand. Some four million Americans are 
currently on probation or parole. From tests done on them when they are 
jailed, we know that half or more had a drug problem when arrested. Though 
a lot of drug users otherwise obey the law (or at least avoid getting 
arrested), probationers and parolees constitute the hard core of dangerous 
addicts. Reducing their demand for drugs ought to be our highest priority. 
Mark Kleiman of UCLA has suggested a program of "testing and control": 
Probationers and parolees would be required to take frequent drug 
tests—say, twice weekly—as a condition of remaining on the street. These 
tests are inexpensive and show immediate results. If you failed the test, 
you would spend more time in jail; if you passed it, you would remain free. 
This approach would be an inducement for people to enter and stay in treatment.

This would require some big changes in how we handle offenders. Police, 
probation and parole officers would be responsible for conducting these 
tests, and more officers would have to be hired. Probation and parole 
authorities would have to be willing to sanction a test failure by 
immediate incarceration, initially for a short period (possibly a weekend), 
and then for longer periods if the initial failure were repeated. Treatment 
programs at little or no cost to the user would have to be available not 
only in every prison, but for every drug dependent probationer and parolee. 
These things are not easily done. Almost every state claims to have an 
intensive community supervision program, but few offenders are involved in 
them, the frequency with which they are contacted is low, and most were 
released from super vision without undergoing any punishment for violating 
its conditions.

But there is some hope. Our experience with drug courts suggests that the 
procedural problems can be overcome. In such courts, several hundred of 
which now exist, special judges oversee drug dependent offenders, insisting 
that they work to overcome their habits. While under drug court 
supervision, offenders reduce drug consumption and, at least for a while 
after leaving the court, offenders are less likely to be arrested. Our goal 
ought to be to extend meaningful community supervision to all probationers 
and parolees, especially those who have a serious drug or alcohol problem. 
Efforts to test Mr. Kleiman's proposals are under way in Connecticut and 
Maryland.

If this demand reduction strategy works, it can be expanded. Drug tests can 
be given to people who apply for government benefits, such as welfare and 
public housing. Some critics will think this is an objectionable intrusion. 
But giving benefits without conditions weakens the character building 
responsibility of society.

Prevent Harm to Others

John Stuart Mill, the great libertarian thinker, argued that the only 
justifiable reason for restricting human liberty is to prevent harm to 
others. Serious drug abuse does harm others. We could, of course, limit 
government action to remedying those harms without addressing their causes, 
but that is an uphill struggle, especially when the harms fall on unborn 
children. Fetal drug syndrome imposes large costs on infants who have had 
no voice in choosing their fate.

Even Mill was clear that full liberty cannot be given to children or 
barbarians. By "barbarians" he meant people who are incapable of being 
improved by free and equal discussion. The life of a serious drug 
addict—the life of someone driven by drug dependency to prostitution and 
crime—is the life of a barbarian.'"