THE RIGHT DOPE

Fight addiction, and facile solutions.

It is the editorial position of National Review that narcotics should
be legalized in the United States. In 1996, National Review's editors
declared, "it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that
it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the
problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is
encouraging civil, judicial and penal procedures associated with
police states."

Five years later, little has changed to make that conclusion any less
reasonable. We spend billions more dollars, we incarcerate millions
more people, we consume, if not more, than certainly as many, massive
(and unknowable) quantities of drugs as ever. But that doesn't mean
that the editors of National Review were necessarily right.

Personally, I don't much like arguing about drug legalization. Almost
all of my reasons are personal. First, I've known more than my fair,
or unfair, share of people who have been hurt (and even killed) by
drugs or drug users. Second, I have little desire to offer a public
inventory of what substances I've used and which ones I haven't. And,
alas, it is almost impossible to argue against drug legalization with
many legalization proponents without them in turn demanding precisely
such an inventory to prove your authenticity and/or level of hypocrisy.

At the same time, there is something dismayingly Ivory Towerish about
people who have no first-hand experience with drugs or the damage
drugs do pontificating about how the free market can solve our drug
problems in a flash.

Trafficking in Easy Answers

The film Traffic, surprisingly, has
dragged the legalization argument out of college dorms and California
split-level salons into the mainstream again. I was shocked by how
much I liked the movie -- which isn't to say it's cheery. Because of
the sophomoric smugness of so many legalization types, I expected the
film to be a druggie version of The Day After. It turns out that
director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan have
crafted a very nuanced and balanced story with much less sermonizing
than I expected. Yes, it is a deeply political movie but it isn't the
propaganda I expected. There are no illusions about how bad drugs can
be. The implausible moments do not minimize the horrors of addiction,
and the pious rhetoric usually comes from the least sympathetic characters.

Nevertheless, the smugness of many pro-legalization types can be found both
in the film, and in abundance in the writer himself. Gaghan said in an
interview on ABC's This Week: "You know, we have so polarized the semantics
of this debate that to say legalization out loud brands you a revolutionary."

In one sense, this is absurd. There are plenty of people who say
legalization out loud all the time. Would Gaghan brand the editors of
National Review "revolutionaries"? How about Milton Friedman? Or Kurt
Schmoke? Most of the mature advocates of legalization do so not
because of any revolutionary zeal but instead out of a certain
exhaustion at how an essentially noble and worthwhile effort has
failed. I don't know this, but I would guess that most of the
pro-legalization editors at National Review would be in favor of
winning the drug war if they thought it was winnable.

But in another way Gaghan is right. If you come out in favor of
legalization you are "branded" a revolutionary. But the people doing
the branding are other legalization advocates. I can't tell you how
many campus conservatives I've met who want to show off their
radicalism by saying they're in favor of legalization. Indeed, there
are few things that make some pro-legalization conservatives,
libertarians, and libertines of a certain ilk and age more offensive
to me than their arrogant, effete braggadocio -- which is little more
than a desire to justify their own drug use and sound avant-garde at
the same time.

For a Republican kid, talking about the racism of the drug war is the
rough equivalent of a Young Democrat putting on a black armband in
solidarity with Castro; it provides the frisson of a firebrand almost
cost free.

Gaghan says the drug war and former Drug Czar Bill Bennett have
created a climate that brands drug addicts as criminals. "It's easy to
raise your hand and say, 'Hey, I have a health care problem. I need
some help,' than to say, 'Hey, I'm a criminal. I need some jail.'"

Maybe so, but I've never known a drug addict to fear coming forward
because he was afraid of getting arrested for past drug use or refuse
treatment because he was afraid people would discover he'd violated
drug laws. Still, this raises the question left unclear by Gaghan and
his movie. Should drug use -- legal or not -- be stigmatized?

Let's Be Honest

Gaghan is no innocent on the evils of drug addiction.
He was an addict himself who didn't turn clean until his three main
drug dealers were arrested. But Gaghan says the reason people don't
get help is because people like Bill Bennett have put too much stigma
on being a drug addict. OK. But we've also been told time and again by
many legalizers that in a free and lawful marketplace a climate of
stigma will naturally evolve to help regulate addiction, like it seems
to be doing with cigarettes and, to a much lesser extent, with booze.

Well, which is it? If addictive narcotics are legal, won't we need
more stigma, not less, if we want to reduce addiction? And if there's
more shame and guilt directed at drug users and sellers, how will
legalization make it easier for people to find treatment?

Unless, of course, you aren't concerned with the level of drug use at
all. This is a principled position held by many, though not all,
libertarians. Some say shame and social stigma as opposed to
government intervention are the more appropriate means of regulating a
free society. Others argue that freedom is freedom and nobody can or
should legitimately judge anybody else so long as no crimes are broken
and everybody's rights are respected.

We can talk more about libertarian schisms another day, but the fact is
that many of the libertarian proponents of legalization either want more
people to do drugs or simply don't care if they do. Cato Institute Vice
President David Boaz, one of the best and brightest of the libertarian
ideologists, writes in his book, Libertarianism: A Primer, that he would
rather see drugs sold in liquor stores and "produced by reputable firms."
He correctly says that under legalization there would be fewer violent
crimes because addicts wouldn't "have to commit crimes to pay for a habit
that would be easily affordable (and safer) if it were legal."

Now, Boaz is consistent -- consistency being the chief advantage
libertarians have over all other ideologies. Boaz doesn't want to
judge social behavior as long as rights are respected and people face
the consequences of their actions.

But, many people subscribe to Boaz's proposal without recognizing that
he and those like him are not proposing a war by another means. They
propose complete and total surrender. In Boaz's better world your firm
could be "reputable" if it sold heroin and PCP (so much for cultural
stigma). In his better world your dealer would be replaced by a corner
store. In his better world, legal drugs could be sold alongside the
beef jerky and Pokemon cards. And, in his better world these narcotics
would be more, not less, likely to get you both really, really, high
and also really, really addicted.

In short, under the libertarian paradigm it would be easier for more
people to get hooked on drugs for longer periods of time.

So What?

As I understand it, National Review's argument in favor of
legalization is not a libertarian one. The editors wrote of drugs in
1996, "we deplore their use; we urge the stiffest feasible sentences
against anyone convicted of selling a drug to a minor." I must assume
and hope that if drugs are legalized, National Review would still
reserve the right to judge people harshly who use drugs, sell drugs,
or who endorse either. What Reason magazine would do, I have no idea.

But, one might ask, why maintain prohibition for minors? The answer,
is, of course, obvious. Minors are not rational actors, like adults.
Children have never fit easily in the libertarian paradigm.

Well, my problem with legalizing, say, heroin or cocaine is that for
an irreducible minority of people these drugs render citizens into
something less than a rational adult. Therefore the normal rules that
permit the market to work -- self-interest rightly understood, the
importance of delayed gratification, hell, the rules of law and
decency that preclude most consumers from robbing, killing, and
cheating people -- are suspended. A Hayekian world becomes a Hobbesian
one when enough people freely choose to try crack, because, for many
of them, it's a one-way trip.

The market paradigm assumes that people can rationally define their
own self-interest. But for some people, drugs are like a computer
virus or a misfired gene that re-writes your programming to give you a
misguided concept of self-interest. So this suggestion that because
Betty Crocker brand speedballs will be cheaper, purer, and more
available, somehow fewer people will ruin their lives taking drugs,
seems difficult for me to accept. And, let me say as an aside, that
when I hear liberals who normally have nothing but disdain or distrust
for the market -- for everything from garbage pickups to the sales of
rubber shower shoes -- suddenly embrace the wisdom of the market in
the case of crank and heroin, my confidence only surges.

The Right Direction All of the above notwithstanding, the drug war is
of course a failure. I am in favor of decriminalizing and probably
legalizing marijuana. While I think pot is certainly psychologically
addictive for some people, it's not anything like heroin or crack. The
gateway-drug arguments about pot don't persuade me. And, if we are
going to try decriminalization we have to start somewhere and pot is
certainly the best candidate for a whole slew of reasons -- including
a surge in sales for the snack-food industry, which might just help
get us out of a recession faster.

But beyond that, my hope lies in the area of science. Public education
and the intelligent application of police power are important, but
clearly they are insufficient. The responsible libertarians and
pro-legalization conservatives are also surely right that expanding
the scope of individual freedom, and thereby de-romanticizing the
outlaw appeal of narcotics, will surely encourage more personal
responsibility and social self-regulation. But the truth is, I don't
think either side is right because drug addiction is not a soluble
problem through social policy in a free society, though it is a problem.

So that's why I look to science. Not only do I hope that it will
create better, safer, drugs. I keep hope alive that science will
create cures to addiction. Without addiction, the case for
legalization is vastly more persuasive because, sans addiction, people
will behave rationally. Until that day, the national game of
whack-a-mole will continue.