DRUGS: BALANCE THE PAIN

PALM HARBOR - History teaches that relaxing prohibitory drug laws
diminishes the combined net damage caused by the drugs and by their
enforcement.

In the 1920s, federal alcohol prohibition caused more societal damage
than it prevented. In 1933, we ended it and tossed the ball to the
states. Most of them began some form of regulation, and the
lawlessness of Prohibition stopped.

At the other extreme was tobacco, promoted in an unfettered free
market until the mid-1960s. Tobacco's regulation has reduced its
damage to public health without criminalizing those who sell it.
There have been no serious proposals to go back, either for alcohol
or for tobacco, two drugs as intoxicating (alcohol), and as addictive
(tobacco) as any illegal drug.

Today we promote some drugs and prohibit others, with almost no drugs
in between. It is the worst possible situation. The challenge is to
put them all in between and find their optimum point of regulation,
that point where the pain of the drug balances the pain of its enforcement.

John Chase