Pubdate: Thu, 05 Apr 2012
Source: Daily Item (Sunbury, PA)
Copyright: 2012 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.dailyitem.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1045
Author: George F. Will, Washington Post Writers Group

THE DRUG LEGALIZATION DILEMMA

The human nervous system interacts in pleasing and addictive ways 
with certain molecules derived from some plants, which is why humans 
may have developed beer before they developed bread. Psychoactive - 
consciousness-altering - and addictive drugs are natural, a fact that 
should immunize policy makers against extravagant hopes as they cope 
with America's drug problem, which is convulsing some nations to our south.

The costs - human, financial and social - of combating (most) drugs 
are prompting calls for decriminalization or legalization. America 
should, however, learn from the psychoactive drug used by a majority 
of American adults - alcohol.

Mark Kleiman of UCLA, a policy analyst, was recently discussing drug 
policy with someone who said he had no experience with illegal drugs, 
not even marijuana, because he is of "the gin generation."

Ah, said Kleiman, gin: "A much more dangerous drug." Twenty percent 
of all American prisoners - 500,000 people - are incarcerated for 
dealing illegal drugs, but alcohol causes as much as half of 
America's criminal violence and vehicular fatalities.

Drinking alcohol had been a widely exercised private right for 
millennia when America tried to prohibit it.

As a public health measure, Prohibition "worked": Alcohol-related 
illnesses declined dramatically.

As the monetary cost of drinking tripled, deaths from cirrhosis of 
the liver declined by a third. This improvement was, however, paid 
for in the coin of rampant criminality and disrespect for law.

Prohibition resembled what is today called decriminalization: It did 
not make drinking illegal; it criminalized the making, importing, 
transporting or selling of alcohol. Drinking remained legal, so 
oceans of it were made, imported, transported and sold.

Another legal drug, nicotine, kills more people than do alcohol and 
all illegal drugs - combined.

For decades, government has aggressively publicized the health risks 
of smoking and made it unfashionable, stigmatized, expensive and 
inconvenient. Yet 20 percent of every rising American generation 
becomes addicted to nicotine.

So, suppose cocaine or heroin were legalized and marketed as 
cigarettes and alcohol are. And suppose the level of addiction were 
to replicate the 7 percent of adults suffering from alcohol abuse or 
dependency. That would be a public health disaster. As the late James 
Q. Wilson said, nicotine shortens life, cocaine debases it.

Still, because the costs of prohibition  interdiction, mass 
incarceration, etc. - are staggeringly high, some people say, "Let's 
just try legalization for a while."

Society is not, however, like a controlled laboratory; in society, 
experiments that produce disappointing or unexpected results cannot 
be tidily reversed.

Legalized marijuana could be produced for much less than a tenth of 
its current price as an illegal commodity. Legalization of cocaine 
and heroin would cut their prices, too; they would sell for a tiny 
percentage of their current prices. And using high excise taxes to 
maintain cocaine and heroin prices at current levels would produce 
widespread tax evasion - and an illegal market.

Furthermore, legalization would mean drugs of reliable quality would 
be conveniently available from clean stores for customers not risking 
the stigma of breaking the law in furtive transactions with unsavory 
people. So there is reason to think today's levels of addiction are 
anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization.

Regarding the interdicting of drug shipments, capturing "kingpin" 
distributors and incarcerating dealers, consider data from the book 
"Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know" by Kleiman, 
Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken. Almost all heroin comes from 
poppies grown on 4 percent of the arable land of one country - 
Afghanistan. Four South American countries  Colombia, Ecuador, Peru 
and Bolivia - produce more than 90 percent of the world's cocaine. 
But attempts to decrease production in source countries produce the 
"balloon effect."

Squeeze a balloon in one spot, it bulges in another. Suppress 
production of poppies or coca leaves here, production moves there. 
The $8 billion Plan Colombia was a melancholy success, reducing coca 
production there 65 percent, while production increased 40 percent in 
Peru and doubled in Bolivia.

In the 1980s, when "cocaine cowboys" made Miami lawless, the U.S. 
government created the South Florida Task Force to interdict cocaine 
shipped from Central and South America by small planes and cigarette 
boats. This interdiction was so successful the cartels opened new 
delivery routes.

Tranquility in Miami was purchased at the price of mayhem in Mexico.

America spends 20 times more on drug control than all the world's 
poppy and coca growers earn. A subsequent column will suggest a more 
economic approach to the "natural" problem of drugs.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom