Pubdate: Thu, 05 Apr 2012
Source: Buffalo News (NY)
Copyright: 2012 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/GXIzebQL
Website: http://www.buffalonews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/61
Author: George F. Will, Washington Post Writers Group

THE DRUG LEGALIZATION DILEMMA

WASHINGTON - 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 policymakers against extravagant 
hopes as they cope with America's drug problem.

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. 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. Legalization of cocaine and heroin would cut their 
prices, too. 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. So there is no 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.

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