Pubdate: Sun, 02 Mar 2014
Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock, AR)
Copyright: 2014 Washington Post
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Author: Charles Lane, Washington Post

HYPERBOLE IS HEFTY FOR LEGALIZING DRUGS

A new conventional wisdom is on the rise: Drug prohibition, or "the 
war on drugs," is a costly flop. It not only failed to cut drug use 
and associated social ills significantly but has also imposed 
additional social costs-or "catastrophic harm," as my colleague 
Radley Balko put it-far exceeding the benefits. Those costs include 
violent crime linked to the black-market drug trade as well as the 
mass arrest and incarceration of small-time users, a disproportionate 
number of whom are African American.

It follows that the only solution is legalization, at least of 
marijuana and maybe other substances. Apropos of Philip Seymour 
Hoffman's death, for example, former congressman Barney Frank 
suggested legalizing heroin. Then we could abandon the fool's errand 
of prohibition and concentrate on "harm reduction" strategies such as 
treatment.

There's one problem: the tendency of legalization advocates to 
counter anti-drug hyperbole with hyperbole of their own. The data 
don't actually show that drug prohibition is futile, that its 
negative side effects are worsening or that legalization would 
eliminate the social-policy dilemmas and trade-offs posed by drug abuse.

Does drug prohibition achieve its main goal, which is to discourage 
drug use and abuse? We can't know what would have happened if drugs 
had been legal for the past few decades or, for that matter, if the 
United States had waged a war on drugs half as harshly as Singapore, 
where a 15-gram heroin stash can merit the death penalty.

But the data do make one thing clear: If the goal of the war on drugs 
is to limit demand for drugs, then you can't say the authorities are 
losing. According to federally sponsored surveys that track drug 
usage, the rate of current-month powder and crack cocaine use dropped 
by half in the past 10 years. Meth use fell by a third; heroin use 
has remained flat.

Marijuana use rose slightly overall. But it fell among 12- to 
17-year-olds, a result that even legalizers should applaud since they 
generally don't favor allowing minors to smoke.

Meanwhile, even as drug prohibition continued, violent crime and 
property crime fell dramatically. Not only did the number of murders 
in the United States decrease from 24,703 in 1991 to 14,612 in 2011, 
but drug-related murders declined from 1,607 to 505, according to 
Justice Department statistics. Some 6.5 percent of murders were 
related to drugs in 1991, but only 3.4 percent were in 2011.

The drug arrest rate fell from 142.1 per 100,000 in 1991 to 97.8 per 
100,000 in 2011. Blacks were still 3.9 times more likely to be busted 
for drugs than whites in 2011, but that ratio was down nearly 50 
percent from the one recorded 20 years earlier.

Marijuana arrests account for a bigger share of drug arrests these 
days, 44.3 percent in 2011 versus 22.4 percent in 1991. But when you 
compare marijuana arrests to actual days of marijuana usage-busts per 
toke, so to speak-the story's different. By this measure, 
"enforcement intensity" fell 42 percent between 2007 and 2012, 
according to drug-policy expert Keith Humphreys of Stanford University.

Some "war." It's a myth that prisons are full of low-level pot 
smokers. Less than 1 percent of the state and federal prison 
population is doing time for pot possession alone; most of these 
prisoners are dealers who pleaded guilty to possession in return for 
a lesser sentence, according to the 2012 study "Marijuana 
Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know," published by Oxford 
University Press.

America's worst new drug-abuse problem involves a legal substance, 
opioid painkillers, that's supposedly available only by prescription. 
OxyContin and other government-approved pills were linked to 15,500 
overdose deaths in 2009.

Legalizers might say the opioid epidemic proves, once again, the 
futility and hypocrisy of drug control. But then what's the point of 
banning underage use of marijuana, as most pot-legalization statutes 
do? Washington state's law threatens a 10-year sentence for selling 
pot to a minor. Talk about filling prisons with nonviolent drug offenders!

And if drug abusers so widely misuse scientifically manufactured 
opioids, how realistic is it to say, as some legalizers do, that 
legalization would protect heroin addicts from impurities and overdoses?

I don't mean to suggest that there are no good arguments for 
legalizing any currently illicit substance. The case for 
decriminalizing pot is strong, as long as accompanying limitations on 
use by minors and other regulations have real teeth.

But let's discuss the issue on its actual merits and not pretend that 
legalization is a panacea for drug abuse, and its related social 
ills, any more than prohibition was, or is.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom