ABOUT COCAINE AND BANANAS

We Need More Sensible Standards For Deciding If Drug Policies Are, Or
Are Not, `Working'

Asa Hutchinson cannot be accused of skating across the pond of life
in search of easy jobs. While a congressman from Arkansas, he was a
manager of the House impeachment case against a popular president
from Arkansas. Now Hutchinson is head of the Drug Enforcement
Administration, and when he leaves that position many people will
say, "Well, that didn't work."

No matter what this wise and experienced man does--no matter how
imaginative his mixture of measures to dampen demand for drugs and
disrupt the supply of them--a decade from now there will be
complaints that drug policy has not "worked" because the "war" on
drugs has not been "won." (The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 promised
"a drug-free America by 1995.") Then, as now, many will say that
legalization would do less harm than current policies do.

We do need some new policies--but we also need a more sensible notion
of what constitutes "working." Here success comes only in shades of
gray, but is not for that reason derisory.

The problem is an estimated $60 billion American market for
commodities cheaply made from agricultural extracts (from poppies and
coca leaves) or chemical compounds (Dutch chemists make much of the
world's supply of ecstasy; methamphetamines are cooked in simple
labs, often in rural America). A kilo of opium that will become
heroin earns a Pakistani grower $90; it retails on American streets
at 40 percent purity for $290,000.

The number of source countries is not fixed; suppressing production
in one (e.g., Bolivia) can displace production to, and destabilize,
another (e.g., Colombia). Some source countries (Afghanistan, Iran)
are hostile to the United States. Some governments of source
countries (Thailand, Burma, Colombia) are too weak to suppress
production even if they want to.

Interdiction sometimes seems like bailing an ocean with a
thimble--no, a sieve. In May the capture off California's coast of 13
metric tons of cocaine, the largest seizure ever, closely followed
one of eight tons. The 21 tons could have supplied 21 million street
sales. But there was no noticeable effect on the street price of the
commodity. James Kitfield of National Journal reports that maritime
seizures as a percentage of drugs in the supply pipeline are
declining.

In 1997 about a million trucks and railroad cars entering the country
from Mexico were searched. Drugs were found in six. A few hundred
dealers handle most of the 500 tons of cocaine entering the country,
but arrest all of them today, and tomorrow there will be a few
hundred others.

Legalization of drugs would decrease the "transaction costs" of drug
use--there would be lower prices, improved confidence in quality,
easier access. This would increase the number of users, probably in
the regressive pattern of tobacco use.

But legalizers who say, correctly, that the social costs of drugs are
less than those of alcohol and tobacco must explain why we should
treat other dangerous substances the way we treat alcohol and
tobacco. Smoking is a "regressive" problem, increasingly concentrated
down the social scale, among persons impervious to public-health
information. Legalization of drugs would decrease the "transaction
costs" of drug use--there would be lower prices, improved confidence
in quality, easier access. This would increase the number of users,
probably in the regressive pattern of tobacco use.

The Economist magazine, which favors legalization, notes that every
country that can produce bananas does so, but not every country that
could produce heroin or cocaine does. However, legalization, which
would entail legitimation in the world's biggest market, the United
States, would surely increase the number of source countries.

Hutchinson speaks of the DEA as an enforcement agency "with a
demand-reduction segment," and of new options within "the confines of
the criminalized-conduct approach" and "the incarceration model for
users." But he is not just being sensitive about the "discouragement"
of his 9,000 employees when he insists that interdiction of supply
and other enforcement measures are not futile. He says drug use
surged between 1992 and 1997, after some interdiction assets were
diverted to the Gulf War, and after President Clinton concentrated on
the drug office in fulfilling his pledge to shrink the White House
staff.

Hutchinson admires California's "drug courts," which administer
heavily monitored treatment regimes, and he says: "Why did Robert
Downey Jr. go to treatment? Because he was arrested." And just as
demand elicits supply, supply stimulates demand: "Access to drugs has
something to do with a teenager making the decision" to use drugs.
And drug use is like smoking: Almost no one starts after age 21. And
the social cues communicated by law matter: Many people avoid drugs
because they avoid lawbreaking. And Hutchinson asks: If child abuse
is not declining, should we stop trying to prevent or prosecute it?

As more becomes known about the biological mechanisms of addiction,
neuroscience may contribute pharmacologies that block addicts'
cravings. But even if there is such a thing as a genetic
vulnerability to addiction, it is irrelevant until someone chooses to
use drugs. So although drug use does produce cellular changes in the
brain, beware of the modern proclivity for medicalizing moral
failings. The notion that addiction is a "disease" suggests, falsely,
that it is a constantly controlling condition. People can choose to
recoil from the consequences of self-destructive choices.

Legalizers who say the 13 years of alcohol Prohibition "didn't work"
must concede that consumption declined up to 50 percent and did not
reach pre-Prohibition per capita levels until the 1970s. The number
of heroin addicts has plateaued at 900,000, and the number of chronic
cocaine users (3.3 million) is below the 1988 peak (3.8 million). And
legalizers should ponder this warning from UCLA's Mark Kleiman:
"Imagine Philip Morris and the Miller brewery with marijuana to play
with."

Actually, the legalizers' logic would not restrict merchandisers to
marijuana. So any assessment of whether the current cocktail of drug
policies is "working" should start from this axiom: Things can always
be made worse.