WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?

Losing The War On Drugs

If you say that drug prohibition is a terrible mistake and drugs should be
legalized, you will hear the inevitable, and understandable, objection:
"But what about the children?" Young people are vulnerable. Our laws must
protect them.

We couldn't agree more. That's one major reason we think drugs should be
legalized.

Legalization sounds like a strange way to protect kids from drugs, because
people commonly make the mistake of thinking that a criminal ban on drugs
is the highest form of drug control possible. Legalizing drugs, they
believe, means surrendering control, and giving our youth easier access to
substances that may harm them. In fact, exactly the opposite is true.

In the United States, the government has been surveying kids about how easy
it is for them to get drugs since the 1970s. In 1979, at the height of the
drug craze in the United States, 18 per cent of high school seniors said it
was "easy" or "fairly easy" to obtain heroin; in 1998, that figure was 35
per cent. In 1998, 90 per cent of high school seniors said marijuana was
"easy" or "fairly easy" to get.

In 1989, when Ecstasy was still a little-known drug, 21 per cent of
American teens said they could get the drug with little effort; in 1998,
that number was up to 38 per cent.

Many may choose to ignore these numbers. After all, the American government
recently announced that for the third year in a row, drug use among
teenagers was down. But what the government overlooked in its press
releases was that these modest declines come after years of major
increases. From 1990 to 1997, the use of most drugs by young people rose
alarmingly. Marijuana use hit levels not seen since the 1970s.

From 1972 to today, the U.S. has spent spectacular amounts of money to
enforce prohibition. When Ronald Reagan revved up the War on Drugs, the
anti-drug budget was $1 billion U.S.; today, it's almost $20 billion
U.S. Despite this, American teenagers find it easier to get their hands on
drugs now than ever before. Does that look like an effective way of
protecting children from drugs?

Canadians can learn lessons from this. The reason prohibition doesn't
protect kids is much the same reason it fails generally: economics. Banning
drugs makes them very expensive. That makes them very profitable. That
makes an unlimited number of people willing to do just about anything to
sell them. And to those people, selling drugs to minors is just the same
as selling to adults: illegal. The customer's age is meaningless; his cash
is what matters.

So what happens when a drug is legalized? Consider alcohol. It can be sold
legally to everybody but minors at legal market prices. That satisfies the
demand of the overwhelming majority of consumers. As a result, there's
little economic incentive for some one to risk prison by selling alcohol to
minors. It's highly unlikely anyone is standing outside your teenager's
school selling vodka. Marijuana, crack and Ecstasy, maybe. But not vodka.

And this situation exists despite the paltry efforts of governments to
enforce bans on sales of legal drugs, such as alcohol, to minors. Take
tobacco. The federal and provincial governments make an estimated $170
million a year on taxes from cigarettes sold illegally to minors.
Governments spend just a small fraction of that on spot-checks. In Ontario,
it is estimated that 115 million packs of cigarettes were sold to minors
over the last five years, yet just 3,000 charges for these sales were laid.
Imagine what could be accomplished if the resources devoted to busting
adults who share a joint in the privacy of their own homes were, instead,
used to enforce the ban on all drug sales to minors.

By criminalizing drugs, we gave up control of their sale. We handed it to
biker gangs and the neighbourhood dealer -- who are only too happy to sell
to your teenager. By legalizing drugs, we can take that control back. If
drugs are legalized, checks can be created to ensure there are no sales to
minors. If drugs are one day sold in private establishments (like
Holland's marijuana "coffee shops," or other private stores), tough
spot-checking could easily make it in the owner's self-interest to keep
minors out.

We're not deluding ourselves; determined teenagers will always be able to
get their hands on things they shouldn't. But the system can be tightened
to make it much more difficult. To do it, we have to take back control of
the drug trade. We have to talk about legalizing drugs.