Drugwar A Failure Time To Return To Norml

Last week, the WSN did a feature on one of NYU's newest clubs: the NYU
chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or
NORML. This organization represents political activism of the best kind. It
is a campaign for more freedoms, less regulation and fewer government
intrusions into our daily lives. The drug war is one of the most foolish
legislative adventures in U.S. history. I don't use illegal drugs; however,
I do oppose the grossly unfair inquisition that our government is
conducting. Without further ado, here are four good reasons why everyone
should oppose the War on Drugs:

1. Alcohol and tobacco kill far more people than illegal drugs, yet we
trust American adults to regulate their own use of those products.

According to the Schafer Library, tobacco kills about 390,000 people every
year, and alcohol kills about 80,000. By comparison, heroin kills about
2,000 people a year, 195 times fewer than tobacco and 40 times fewer than
alcohol. Aspirin kills the same number. Cocaine kills about 2,200 people a
year. There has never been a recorded marijuana-related death in U.S.
medical history.

Why are alcohol and cigarettes allowed while these other drugs are
prohibited? Alcohol and tobacco are the favored drugs of the powerful:
Congressmen and lobbyists drink gin and tonics and smoke cigars, but they
rarely drop acid or smoke a joint. Moreover, alcohol and tobacco have been
socially accepted in our society since its founding (despite Prohibition,
which did little to change social mores). It is the worst kind of hypocrisy
that tobacco and alcohol are sold at every corner, but people who wish to
smoke marijuana are treated like criminals.

Some might argue that the reason tobacco and alcohol kill more people every
year is because they are legal, and therefore more readily available. This
claim is patently false. Fatalities through alcohol usage increased during
the Prohibition years, due to the lack of quality control on alcoholic
beverages; when going to a speakeasy, one could never be sure if the
alcohol he or she was drinking was safe for consumption. Similarly, users
of illegal drugs today can never be sure if the joints they're about to
light are laced with crack cocaine, or the heroin they're about to use has
been cut with rat poison to increase the profit margin. More than anything
else, the illegality of drugs makes them dangerous to consume.

2. The drug war is unconstitutional.

Not only unconstitutional, but spectacularly unconstitutional. When the
U.S. Congress decided to enact Prohibition in 1919, they had to pass a
constitutional amendment to do so. Why? Because Congress is not granted
powers to regulate what people put into their bodies. The current anti-drug
laws are based on the flimsy justification that any use of illegal
substances comes about as a result of interstate commerce, which Congress
is empowered to regulate in Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution.

The U.S. government accomplished this outrageous manhandling of the law of
our land by first legislating anti-drug laws as licensing and tax laws,
which penalized sellers if they didn't have the appropriate authorization.
Then the federal bureaucracies that were empowered to issue such licenses
simply never gave them out. Ending the drug war would restore the ideal of
properly limited government, sorely lacking in today's society.

3. The drug war disproportionately affects minorities.

Although the modern drug war is probably not racist in intent, it affects
minorities disproportionately. According to studies by the U.S. Department
of Justice, one quarter of all the young black men in America are either in
prison or on parole, most of them for non-violent drug offenses. According
to a study by the Sentencing Project, black inmates make up 73.3 percent of
drug offenders in some states, and these felony convictions on their
records will follow them throughout their lives, making it difficult for
them to find employment and interact with society. The high prices of
controlled substances provide a quick, high-payoff, high-risk way to make a
lot of money for themselves and their families, driving young black men in
the inner cities to crime. It's clear that the drug war is crushing these
communities, adding one more barrier in the way of success for minorities
in America. Ending the drug war would remove this burden, and then we could
focus on repairing the damage it has done to these communities.

4. The drug war is costing us billions, and having no discernible positive
effect.

The former chief of the Planning Branch of the National Institutes of
Mental Health, Theodore R. Vallance, spent his career researching the costs
of various health programs. His study on the costs of the drug war,
published in the National Review, estimated that legalization of currently
illegal drugs would save the U.S. taxpayers $37 billion. $37 billion is a
lot of money. It could pay for treatment programs for addicts, it could go
to help the current victims of the war on drugs or it could just be
returned to the taxpayers. Regardless, for that kind of money, we should be
seeing some sort of positive return. Instead, all we see is the destruction
of our minority communities, the incarceration of our nation's youth and
the criminalization of the more than 40 million Americans who have used
illegal substances in the past year. Like Prohibition, the drug war is a
huge financial and social burden to our nation, and all we get in return
are such lovely institutions as gang warfare and police corruption.

Our country's experiment with the War on Drugs is a failure. Despite this,
our government continues this foolish endeavor due to a mix of Puritanism,
a nanny-state mentality and plain old legislative overkill. Back in the
1930s, when laws didn't work we had the courage and common sense to repeal
them. Now, we just throw more money and lives toward an ineffective solution.

Shankar Gupta is a columnist at Washington Square News.