Getting
Off Drugs: The Legalization Option
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By
Walter Wink
Friends Journal, February 1996
Walter Wink is Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn
Theological Seminary in New York City. He attends South Berkshire
(Mass.) Meeting.
The Quaker commitment to non-violence has direct implications for
the United States’ failed drug war. It is a spiritual law that
we become what we hate. Jesus articulated this law in the Sermon on
the Mount when he admonished, “Do not react violently to the
one who is evil” (Scholars’ Version). The sense is clear:
do not resist evil by violent means; do not let evil set the terms
of your response. Applied to the drug issue, this means, “Do
not resist drugs by violent means.”
When we oppose evil with the same weapons that evil employs, we commit
the same atrocities, violate the same civil liberties, and break the
same laws as those whom we oppose. We become what we hate. Evil makes
us over into its double. If one side prevails, the evil continues
by virtue of having been established through the means used. This
principle of mimetic opposition is abundantly illustrated in the case
of the disastrous U.S. drug war.
The drug war is over, and we lost. We merely repeated the mistake
of Prohibition. The harder we tried to stamp out this evil, the more
lucrative we made it, and the more it spread. Our forcible resistance
to evil simply augments it. An evil cannot be eradicated by making
it more profitable.
We lost that war on all three fronts: destroying the drug sources,
intercepting drugs at the border, and arresting drug dealers and users.
In the first place, we have failed to cut off drug sources. When we
paid Turkey to stop growing opium, production merely shifted to Southeast
Asia and Afghanistan. Crop substitution programs in Peru lead to increased
planting of coca, as farmers simply planted a small parcel of land
with one of the accepted substitute crops and used the bulk of the
funds to plant more coca. Cocaine cultivation uses only 700 of the
2.5 million square miles suitable for its growth in South America.
There is simply no way the United States can policy so vast an area.
Second, the drug war has failed to stop illicit drugs at our borders.
According to a Government Accounting Office study, the air force spent
$3.3 million on drug interdiction, using sophisticated AWACS surveillance
planes, over a 15-month period ending in 1987. The grand total of
drug seizures from the effort was eight. During the same period, the
combined efforts of the cost guard and navy, sailing for 2,512 ship
days at a cost of $40 million, resulted in the seizure of a mere 20
drug-carrying vessels. Hard drugs are so easy to smuggle because they
are so concentrated. Our entire country’s current annual import
of cocaine would fit into a single C-5A cargo plane.
As if the flood of imported drugs were not enough, domestic production
of marijuana continues to increase. It is the largest cash crop in
the nation, next only to corn. Methamphetamine, at two to three times
the cost of crack, sustains a high for 24 hours as opposed to crack’s
20 minutes. It can be manufactured in clandestine laboratories anywhere
for an initial cost of only $2000. Even if we sealed our borders we
could not stop the making of new drugs.
Third, the drug war calls for arresting drug dealers and users in
the United States. There are already 750,000 drug arrests per year,
and the current prison population has far outstripped existing facilities.
Drug offenders account for more than 60 percent of the prison population;
to make room for them, far more dangerous criminals are being returned
to the street. It is not drugs but the drug laws themselves that have
created this monster. The unimaginable wealth involved leads to the
corruption of police, judges, and elected officials. A huge bureaucracy
has grown dependent on the drug war for employment. Even the financial
community is compromised, since the only thing preventing default
by some heavily indebted Latin American nations or major money-laundering
banks is the drug trade. Cocaine brings Bolivia’s economy about
$600 million per year, a figure equal to the country’s total
legal export income. Revenues from drug trafficking in Miami, Fla.
are greater than those from tourism, exports, health care, and all
other legitimate businesses combined.
Drug laws have also fostered drug-related murders and an estimated
40 percent of all property crimes in the United States. The greatest
beneficiaries of the drug laws are drug traffickers, who benefit from
the inflated prices that the drug war creates. Rather than collecting
taxes on the sale of drugs, governments at all levels expend billions
in what amounts to a subsidy of organized crime. Such are the ironies
of violent resistance to evil.
The war on drugs creates other casualties beyond those arrested. There
are the ones killed in fights over turf; innocents caught in the crossfire;
citizens terrified of city streets; escalating robberies; children
given free crack to get them addicted and then enlisted as runners
and dealers; mothers who crazed for a fix that they abandon their
babies, prostitute themselves and their daughters, and addict their
unborn. Much of that, too, is the result of the drug laws. Dealing
is so lucrative only because it is illegal.
The media usually portray cocaine and crack use as a black ghetto
phenomenon. This is a racist caricature. There are more drugs addicts
among middle- and upper-class whites than any other segment of the
population, and far more such occasional drug users. The typical customer
is a single, white male 20-40 years old. Only 13 percent of those
using illegal drugs are African American, but they constitute 35 percent
of those arrested for simple possession and a staggering 74 percent
of those sentenced for drug possession. It is the demand by white
users that makes the drugs flow. Americans consume 60 percent of the
world’s illegal drugs. That is simply too profitable a market
to refuse.
Increasingly the budget for fighting drugs is scarcely
the answer. As Francis Hall, former head of the New York Police Department’s
narcotics division put it, “It’s like Westmoreland asking
Washington for two more divisions. We lost the Vietnam War with a
half-million men. We are doing the same thing with drugs.” The
drug war is the United States’ longest war, our domestic Vietnam.
We are the addicts
This nation is addicted to the use of force, and its armed resistance
to the drug trade is doomed to fail precisely because the drug trade
perfectly mirrors our own values. We condemn drug traffickers for
sacrificing their children, their integrity, and their human dignity
just to make money or experience pleasure—without recognizing
that these are the values espoused by the society at large. In the
drug war, we are scapegoating addicts and blacks for what we have
become as a nation. Drugs are the ultimate consumer product for people
who want to feel good now without benefit of hard work, social interaction,
or making a productive contribution to society. Drug dealers are living
out the rags-to-riches American dream as private entrepreneurs desperately
trying to become upwardly mobile. That is why we could not win the
war on drugs. We are the enemy, and we cannot face that fact. So we
launch a half-hearted, half-baked war against a menace that only mirrors
ourselves.
The uproar about drugs is itself odd. Illicit drugs are, on a whole,
far less dangerous than the legal drugs that many more people consume.
Alcohol is associated with 40 percent of all suicide attempts, 40
percent of all traffic deaths, and 10 percent of all work-related
injuries. Nicotine, the most addictive drug of all, has transformed
lung cancer from a medical curiosity to a common disease that now
accounts for 3 million deaths a year worldwide, 60 million since the
1950s. Smoking will kill one in three smokers eventually.
None of the illegal drugs is as lethal as tobacco or alcohol. If anyone
has ever died as a direct result of marijuana, no one seems to be
able to document it. Most deaths from hard drugs are the result of
adulteration or unregulated concentrations. Many people can be addicted
to heroin for most of their lives without serious health consequences.
It has no known side effects other than constipation. Cocaine in powder
form is not as addictive as nicotine; only 3 percent of those who
try it become addicted. Most cocaine users do not become dependent,
and most who do eventually free themselves. Crack is terribly addictive,
but its use is a direct consequence of the expense of powdered cocaine,
and its spread is in part a function of its lower price.
We must be honest about these facts, because much of the hysteria
about illegal drugs has been based on misinformation. All addiction
is a serious matter, and Quakers are right to be most concerned about
the human costs. But many of these costs are a consequence of a wrongheaded
approach to eradication. Our tolerance of the real killer-drugs (nicotine
and alcohol) and our abhorrence of the drugs that are far less lethal
is hypocritical, or at best a selective moralism reflecting passing
fashions of indignation.
Drug addiction is singled out as evil, yet ours is a society of addicts.
We project on the black drug subculture all our profound anxieties
about our own addictions (to wealth, power, sex, food, work, religion,
alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco) and attach addiction in others without
having to gain insight about ourselves. New York City councilman Wendell
Foster illustrated this scapegoating attitude when he suggested chaining
addicts to trees so people could spit on them. Instead of nurturing
compassion in order to help addicts, our society targets them as pariahs
and dumps on them our own shadow side.
Legalization: not capitulation but a better strategy
I am not advocating giving up the war on drugs because we can’t
win. I’m saying that we lost because we let drugs dictate the
means we used to oppose them. We have to break out of the spiral of
mimetic violence. The only way to do so is to ruin the world market
price of drugs by legalizing them. We have to repeal this failed second
Prohibition. The moment the price of drugs plummets, drug profits
will collapse—and with them, the drug empires.
I am not advocating no laws at all regulating drugs, no governmental
restraints on sales to minors, no quality controls to curtail overdose,
and no prosecution of the inevitable bootleggers. Legalization, by
contrast, means that the government would maintain regulatory control
over drug sales, possibly through state clinics or stores. It would
be the task of the Food and Drug Administration to guarantee purity
and safety, as it does for alcoholic beverages. Shooting up would
be outlawed in public, just as drinking liquor is. Advertising would
be strictly prohibited, selling drugs to children would continue to
be a criminal offense, and other evasions of government regulations
would be prosecuted. Driving, flying, or piloting a vessel under the
influence would still be punished. Taxes on drugs would pay for enforcement,
education, rehabilitation, and research (a net benefit is estimated
of at least $10 billion from reduced expenditures on enforcement and
new tax revenue).
Legalization would lead to an immediate decrease in murders, burglaries,
and robberies, paralleling the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933—though
the spread of powerful weapons in U.S. society and the proliferation
of youth gangs has led to an addiction to gun violence that will not
soon go away. Cheap drugs would mean that most addicts would not be
driven to crime to support their habit, and that drug lords would
no longer have a turf to fight over. Legalization would force South
American peasants to switch back to less lucrative crops; but that
would be less devastating than destruction of their crops altogether
by aerial spraying or biological warfare. Legalization would enable
countries like Columbia, Bolivia, and Peru to regularize the cocaine
sector and absorb its money-making capacity into the taxable, legal,
unionized economic world. Legalization would be a blow to dealers,
who would be deprived of their ticket to riches. It would remove glamorous
Al Capone-type traffickers who are role-models for the young, and
it would destroy the “cool” status of drug use. But it
would leave us with a monolithic problem: how to provide decent jobs
for unemployed youth. Indeed, until the root economic factors that
contribute to drug use are addressed, drug addiction will continue.
Drug legalization would cancel the corrupting role of the drug cartels
in South American politics, a powerful incentive to corruption at
all levels of our own government, and a dangerous threat to our civil
liberties through mistaken enforcement and property confiscation.
It would free law enforcement agencies to focus on other crimes and
reduce the strain on the courts and prison system. It would scuttle
a multibillion dollar bureaucracy whose prosperity depends on not
solving the drug problem. It would remove a major cause of public
cynicism about obeying the laws of the land. It could help check the
spread of AIDS and hepatitis through a free supply of hypodermic needles.
Legalization would also free up money wasted on interdiction of illicit
drugs that is desperately needed for treatment, education, and research.
Legalization: the risks
The worst prospect is that legalization might lead to a short-term
increase in the use of drugs due to easier availability, lower prices,
and the sudden freedom from prosecution. The repeal of Prohibition
seems to have had that result, then alcohol use gradually declined.
Drugs cheap enough to destroy their profitability would also be in
the range of any schoolchild’s allowance, just like beer and
cigarettes. Cocaine is easily concealable and its effects less overt
than alcohol. The possibility of increased teenage use is admittedly
frightening.
On the other hand, ending the drug war would free drug control officers
to concentrate on protecting children from exploitation, and here
stiff penalties would continue to be in effect. The alarmist prediction
that cheap, available drugs could lead to an addiction rate of 75
percent of regular users simply ignores the fact that 95 percent of
people in the United States are already using some form of drug when
nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, and prescription drugs are included.
We can learn from the mistakes made with the repeal of Prohibition,
when the lid was simply removed with virtually no education or restriction
on advertising and little government regulation. A major educational
program would need to be in effect well before drug legalization took
effect. Anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco ad campaigns have already proven
effective in restricting use. In Canada, for example, cigarettes sell
for about three times the U.S. price, and vigorous campaigns against
smoking have had some success, especially among the young.
We already have some evidence that legalization works. In the 11 U.S.
state that briefly “decriminalized” marijuana in the 1970s,
the number of users stayed about the same. In the Netherlands, legal
tolerance of marijuana and hashish has led to a significant decline
in consumption and has successfully prevented kids, from experimenting
with hard drugs. Eleven times as many U.S. high school seniors smoked
pot daily in 1983 as did students the same age in the Netherlands.
The Dutch discovered that making the purchase of small amounts of
marijuana freely available to anyone over 16 cuts the drug dealer
out; as a result, there is virtually no crime associated with the
use of marijuana. Treatment for addiction to hard drugs is widely
available there; 75 percent of the heroin addicts in Amsterdam are
on methadone maintenance, living relatively normal, crime-free lives.
Since the needle exchange program was first introduced almost ten
years ago, the HIV infection rate among injecting drug users in cities
like Amsterdam has dropped from 11 percent to 4 percent and is now
one of the lowest in the world. All this still falls short of legalization,
and problems still abound, but the experience in the Netherlands clearly
points in the right direction. The Dutch see illicit drug use as a
health problem, not a criminal problem.
Fighting the drug war may appear to hold the high moral ground, but
this is only an illusion; in fact it increases the damage drugs do
to the whole society by making it so lucrative. Some have argued that
legalization would legitimate or place the state’s moral imprimatur
on drugs, but we have already legalized the most lethal drugs, and
no one argues that this constitutes governmental endorsement. Sale
of Valium, alcohol, cigarettes, pesticides, and poisons are all permitted
and regulated by the state, without anyone assuming that the state
encourages their use. Legalization would indeed imply that drugs are
no longer being satanized, like “demon rum.”
Some people argue that legalization represents a daring and risky
experiment, but it is prohibition that is the daring and risky experiment,
argues drug researcher Jonathan Ott. Inebriating drugs have been mostly
legal throughout the millennia of human existence. The drastic step
was taken in the second decade of this century in the United States
when for the first time large-scale, comprehensive legal control of
inebriating drugs was implemented. It is safe to say as we approach
the end of the eighth decade of federal control of inebriating drugs
that the experiment has been a dismal and costly failure. Human and
animals use or inebriating drugs is as natural as any other aspect
of social behavior; it is the attempt to crush this normal drive that
is bizarre and unnatural. Already 95 percent of our adult population
is using drugs, and a vast majority do so responsibly. Most people
who would misuse drugs are already doing so. Public attitudes have
swung against drunkenness and driving while intoxicated; now anti-smoking
sentiments are burgeoning. We have every reason to believe that the
public will continue to censure addiction to drugs.
No one wants to live in a country overrun with drugs, but we already
do. We should at the very least commit ourselves to a policy of “harm
reduction.” We can not stop drug violence with state violence.
Addicts will be healed by care and compassion, not condemnation. Dealers
will be curbed by a ruined world drug market, not by enforcement that
simply escalates the profitability of drugs. A nonviolent, nonreactive,
creative approach is needed that lets the drug empire collapse of
its own deadly weight.
We have been letting our violent resistance to drugs beget the very
thing we seek to destroy. When our nonviolent Quaker tradition offers
an alternative to our failed drug war, shouldn’t we consider
trying it?
Interfaith
Drug Policy
Initiative, P.O. Box 6299, Washington,
D.C. 20015
Phone: 301-933-7681 Fax:301-933-7682 |
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