Why The War On Drugs Has Failed: Does Prohibition Keep Drug Use Down?, Part 12

YOU CAN'T KEEP A BANNED DRUG DOWN

Evidence shows no link between the law and rate of drug use.

Most Canadians, I am sure, strongly support the criminal prohibition of
drugs such as cocaine and heroin. I am equally sure those Canadians share
one assumption about drugs that, more than anything else, is the reason
they want drugs banned. It is the idea that criminal prohibition keeps the
rate of drug use and addiction down.

Prohibition may not stop all drug use, people think, but if it were lifted,
drugs would be much cheaper. Users wouldn't fear arrest. Inevitably, drug
use and addiction would soar and society would suffer.

That's certainly the view of most government officials. Drug legalization
is "an inane policy," according to Robert Weiner, chief press spokesman for
the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. "It's chaos and
anarchy. It creates hugely greater demand for drugs to have legalization.
It's a no-brainer that if there's a legal barrier against it, people don't
want to get in trouble."

Brockville police chief Barry King chairs a committee established by the
Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police to advise the federal government
on drug policy. The police chiefs, he says, "are opposed to the
legalization of any illicit drugs in Canada." If any drug were legalized,
he says, its use would greatly increase.

Chief King is wrong. So are Mr. Weiner and most Canadians. There is no
credible evidence that the criminal prohibition of drugs keeps drug use and
abuse down. In fact, although it may seem counter-intuitive, experience
from all over the world shows that drug use rises and falls with
surprisingly little regard for the legal status of drugs. Drug prohibition
has not kept drug use down. Removing prohibition is unlikely, in itself, to
cause drug use to rise.

This suggestion might seem jarring. We have faith in the power of criminal
law to shape behaviour. But consider this statement by UN Secretary-
General Kofi Annan in his introduction to the United Nation's 1997 World
Drug Report: "Although the consumption of drugs has been a fact of life for
centuries, addiction has mushroomed over the last five decades." Mr. Annan
might have added that rates of drug use, not just addiction, have exploded
over the last five decades. He might also have mentioned that drug
prohibition became fully entrenched in international law and aggressively
enforced about five decades ago.

The unsettling truth is that the most frightening jumps in drug use the
world has seen have happened after the introduction -- or escalation -- of
drug prohibition. In the United States, the country that invented
prohibition, Richard Nixon coined the phrase "War on Drugs" in 1968. He
backed up this rhetoric with major new spending on prohibition that
launched the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973.

And drug use? It exploded like never before in American history. Between
1974 and 1982, cocaine use quadrupled. That growth peaked at the beginning
of the 1980s and there has been a gradual decline in the use of many drugs
- -- but not all -- since then. But 30 years later, drug-use rates are still
vastly higher than before Nixon declared war.

That pattern can be seen all over the world. In Canada, marijuana was
banned in 1923. At the time, the weed was so little used in this country
that anyone could have smoked a joint on the steps of most police
stations. Despite anti-marijuana hysteria and an unforgiving attitude
among law enforcers in those years, there were only 25 marijuana
convictions up to 1946. In 1962, when an even tougher marijuana law was
passed, the drug was still little known. But immediately after the law
passed -- in the same year, in fact -- marijuana use began to grow
exponentially. Now, almost one in four Canadians has inhaled.

China's struggle with opium addiction in the 19th century is often held up
as a contrary example, a country where drug abuse soared during a period of
legal availability. In fact, during much of the period in which China
wrestled with opium, the Chinese government forbade the importation, sale
or use of opium; dealers were executed and at least a few users had their
top lip cut off to prevent further smoking. But more importantly,
throughout this era China suffered social, political and economic
disintegration. These are fertile conditions for drug abuse.

India, the source-country of much of the opium that entered China, is
illustrative. India was the world's biggest producer of opium in the 19th
century, yet a British Royal Commission investigating opium addiction in
India reported in 1896 that "the use of opium in India resembles that of
liquor in the West, rather than that of an undesirable substance."

Moreover, at the same time that China endured its problems with opium,
drugs of all kinds, not just opium, were freely available in Canada, the
United States, Britain and most other countries. In fact, drugs were
absurdly available right up until they were banned early in the 20th
century. They could be had over the counter, or in the mail. They were
advertised with outlandish claims of health benefits. They were added to
medicines, quasi-medicinal syrups and cordials, and beverages such as
Coca-Cola -- often without the presence of the drug being mentioned on the
label. Children were commonly given what are now considered dangerous
street drugs. One popular cough syrup promised it would "suit the palate of
the most exacting adult or the most capricious child" thanks to its special
ingredient: heroin.

Obviously, the potential for abuse was enormous. Yet Western countries did
not suffer epidemics of addiction. Many individuals became dependent users,
to be sure. But historians agree that their numbers did not steadily rise.
(And those who were addicted were generally able to continue their lives as
they had lived them, unlike the walking dead in modern drug ghettoes, such
as Vancouver's Downtown Eastside).

States with higher rates of drug incarceration experience higher rates of
drug use.

Crude opium imports to the U.S., which grew throughout much of the second
half of the 19th century, dropped almost by half over a 15-year period
beginning in the mid-1890s. Opium was legal throughout that period, but
growing awareness of the health risks it posed convinced people to avoid
it. Right up until drugs were banned in the early part of the 20th century,
the overwhelming majority of people simply chose not to use drugs, or they
took drugs in modest quantities that neither damaged their health nor led
them to addiction.

In 1905, a U.S. Congressional committee studied cocaine and opiate (opium,
morphine and heroin) use and concluded there were some 200,000 dependant
users in the United States. That's about 0.25 per cent of the population of
the day. Other researchers put the number somewhat higher. David Musto,
professor of History at Yale University, says there were "perhaps 250,000"
addicts in the U.S. -- or 0.3 per cent of the population.

How do those numbers compare to the U.S. today, after 84 years of fiercely
enforced prohibition? In 1998, according to the U.S. government, there were
4,323,000 "hardcore" users (meaning they use these drugs at least weekly)
of cocaine and heroin. That's about 1.6 per cent of the population --
around six times the proportion at the beginning of the century.

The U.S. government considers about five million Americans to be hardcore
users of any illegal drug. That's almost 1.8 per cent of the population.

The numbers from early in the 20th century are little more than educated
guesswork. There are also serious problems with the modern figures -- for
one, they omit drug users among the two million prisoners in the U.S. and
therefore seriously understate the reality; they also leave out the
undoubtedly large number of people abusing prescription drugs such as
Valium. But taking these figures as broad indicators, they paint a
startling picture: In the 20th century, when American drug policy went from
extreme laissez-faire to extreme prohibition, the proportion of the
population that abuses drugs dramatically increased.

Today, American states vary substantially in how readily they punish drug
crimes with imprisonment. Some states are quite liberal; others have given
life sentences for mere possession. If punishment is an effective
deterrent, there should be more drug use in states with lighter
punishments, less in states that punish drugs brutally. But a study
released this year by the Justice Policy Institute, an American think tank,
found a statistical correlation linking more severe drug punishments with
more drug use. "States with higher rates of drug incarceration experience
higher, not lower, rates of drug use," the report concluded.

The other American experiment in prohibition wasn't much more positive. In
the decade before alcohol was banned in 1920, consumption dropped steadily.
That drop continued for two years after Prohibition became law. Then
consumption started to rise rapidly and would almost certainly have
surpassed the pre-Prohibition level if alcohol hadn't been legalized in
1933. This happened despite the fact that Prohibition pushed up the price
of beer by 700 per cent and that of spirits by 270 per cent. Higher prices
didn't make Americans give up the bottle, they only took more money from
their pockets.

So there's little evidence that prohibition keeps drug use down. But what
if we look at that question from the opposite direction? Once criminal
prohibition is in place, would easing or lifting it cause greater drug use?

Again, international experience says no. The Australian state of South
Australia decriminalized marijuana in 1987, and although there was some
rise in marijuana use subsequently, it was no greater than that in two
neighbouring states that didn't change their laws.

The same thing happened in 11 American states that decriminalized marijuana
in the 1970s. There were rises in use, but they were the same as in
neighbouring states that didn't change their laws. (And when several of
these states re-criminalized marijuana, this did not reduce consumption.)
In fact, American states with the most severe anti-marijuana laws
experienced the sharpest rises in marijuana use.

Then there is the justly famous case of Holland. Marijuana possession was
made de facto legal in 1976 and "coffee shops" selling marijuana under
tightly regulated circumstances were permitted in 1980. When these policies
were introduced, there was no increase in use. There were, however,
increases in use after 1984, but equal or greater increases occurred in the
U.S., Britain and many other countries that stuck with criminal
prohibition. The Dutch rate of marijuana use continues to be one of the
lowest in the western world.

Holland also made the possession of small amounts of other drugs, including
heroin and cocaine, de facto legal. Yet Dutch consumption of these drugs,
far from exploding when the criminal law was pulled back, stayed fairly
stable. Methodologically rigorous surveys of international drug usage rates
haven't been done, but most Western countries do have good domestic
research whose outlines provide grounds for broad comparisons. These
comparisons show the Dutch use of illegal drugs is far lower than in the
U.S. The Dutch rate of heroin addiction is a fraction of that in the U.S.,
and is lower than in most European countries. The Dutch rate of
drug-related deaths is the lowest in Europe, leading to a uniquely Dutch
problem: finding housing for senior-citizen addicts.

Not surprisingly, many European countries are now moving toward the
decriminalization or de facto legalization of mere possession of drugs.
Some states and cities in Germany chose this policy in the early 1990s.
Italy and Spain have formally adopted this approach. Critics in each case
insisted drug use would soar, and in each case it didn't happen. Impressed
by these results, Portugal voted in July to follow suit.

Obviously these facts do not mean that liberalized drug laws "cause" lower
rates of drug use. Culture, not law and government policy, is the crucial
factor in pushing use up or down. But the data show that removing the
criminal ban on drugs will not in itself cause drug use and addiction to soar.

It's not hard to understand why: People can think for themselves. They can
make rational choices and, since most people are not self-destructive, they
usually do. That's something prohibition's supporters too often
ignore. Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa lawyer and a director of the Canadian
Foundation for Drug Policy, notes that "we can all go out right now and get
ourselves totally blotto on any number of legal drugs but the vast majority
of us don't do that. We have our own internal control mechanisms. So the
fact that a drug is going to be decriminalized or regulated in a way that
is different than now and the price may fall doesn't mean there's going to
be an explosion in use. Not by any means."

The very fact that a great majority of Canadians want drugs to be
criminally prohibited is a good indication that they personally don't want
to use them. Would these people suddenly want to shoot heroin or snort
cocaine if the legal status of these drugs changed? I've put that question
to many people who passionately disagree with legalization but I've never
met anyone who answered yes.

So who is it that will start using drugs if they're no longer banned by
criminal law? It's not you, of course. And it's not me. It's those other
people -- the masses who have to be protected from their own mindless impulses.

"It all depends on what you believe of society," says Mr. Oscapella. "Are
we just a bunch of uncontrolled people who need the criminal law to go
ahead and dictate our behaviours?" For prohibition to make sense, that
bleak view of humanity is exactly what you have to believe.

The evidence, happily, does not support that belief. It's clear that our
fellow men and women are capable of making intelligent decisions about
their own lives. Perhaps we might put a little more trust in them, and a
lot less in criminal law.