PARALYZED BY POLITICS

For Too Long, The American Drug Policy Debate Has Been Limited To The Poles
Of All-Out War And Complete Legalization. It's Time To Find A Middle Ground.

AS A RULE, American politics requires crafting compromises and avoiding
extremism. The War on Drugs shatters that rule. While the original Nixon-era
policy focused on treatment and prevention of drug abuse, the War on Drugs
now truly lives up to its name. It is a draconian program that sends our
military to the farthest reaches of the globe and police officers into the
most private spaces of the home. Worse, most people assume that the only
alternative to the status quo is complete legalization. Despite the American
tradition of political compromise, few regular citizens and even fewer
policymakers seem able to envision a drug policy between these extremes. As
a result, our federal drug policy remains paralyzed and shows little hope of
improvement.

Don't expect politicians to deal with this issue anytime soon. Thanks to
George W. Bush's alleged cocaine use in the '70s and Gore's freely admitted
marijuana smoking days at Harvard, neither presidential nominee can tackle
the drug issue with much moral authority. But the more general and
noticeable silence from Washington regarding the Drug War's problems
reflects a broader cultural stigma as well. No elected official can even
question the goals or methods of our current drug policy without fears of
being branded as a leftist legalization advocate. This strange
polarization-the idea that people can only support either invading Colombia
or selling heroin to second-graders-has stifled public discourse on drug
policy. Fighting the War on Drugs has become the only politically tenable
position.

Fighting a Losing Battle

But we're not winning the War. Use of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine has
ballooned since 1980, and the drugs themselves are stronger than ever.
Preteen use is rising, and drug-related crime continues to plague urban
areas. Mandatory sentencing laws have sent millions of non-violent,
first-time offenders to prison, most of them black and many of them arrested
for simple marijuana possession. Meanwhile, the U.S. prison population has
swelled to two million, but funding for treatment has dwindled to less than
one-third of the drug budget. Jail offers the only hope of real help for
most users, yet even there beds are limited, and drugs remain easily
accessible. Upon release, most addicts return to crime to support their
habits because our system doesn't deal with the underlying problem of
addiction.

Many who sense these problems in our current policy digress into debates
about the morality of drug use, about whether jail time is a fit punishment
for "victimless crimes." But these ethical issues are ancillary. We do not
have to make personal judgements about drug use itself to appreciate that
treatment is simply the most cost-effective way to stop it, as numerous
studies have demonstrated. Compare it to interdiction, for instance: if we
gave up the new helicopters Congress recently purchased to attack Colombia,
we could automatically afford treatment for almost 200,000 additional
substance abusers; alternatively, we could fund prevention efforts reaching
four million additional young citizens.

Meanwhile, Congress' new military toys (bought from contractors influential
on Capital Hill, incidentally) won't even dent the supply of drugs
inundating our country. Even if they did, it is uncertain that would
entirely solve the problem, or solve it most efficiently. Here the story of
cigarettes is instructive. After all, we've never invaded North Carolina as
we have Colombia. Our presidents and preachers have never characterized the
individual choice to smoke cigarettes as morally reprehensible. But we have
launched a massive education campaign about the health effects of smoking.
We have attached a cultural stigma of outright stupidity to smoking. And lo
and behold, smoking has declined-without more helicopters or prisons.

An Ounce of Prevention…

Several innovative state programs have also empirically demonstrated the
value of approaching drug use as a public-health problem rather than a
criminal-justice problem. Their successes should prompt a broader shift
toward drug treatment and away from automatic incarceration. Take Maryland
as an example. When officials there observed that many of its hard-drug
users were probationers or parolees, they instituted a "Break the Cycle"
program which subjects these at-risk individuals to a rigorous and random
drug-testing regimen which would have previously been impossible due to
limited testing resources and flexibility. The "Break the Cycle" initiative
establishes clear and escalating penalties for failed tests, with the
highest penalty being a return to jail. Such a system creates incentives for
seeking treatment and reduces incarceration rates, freeing up the resources
to provide treatment. Indeed, in only a few months, the number of positive
drug tests among Maryland's parolees and probationers dropped dramatically
from 40% to just 7.5%.

New York, meanwhile, has implemented a deferred sentencing model to deal
with its drug users. When individuals in New York are first convicted of a
drug-related crime and sentenced to prison time, they can opt for treatment
before incarceration. If the individual successfully completes treatment and
remains clean, the sentence is forgiven. However, if that person commits a
second drug-related crime, jail time is automatic. Like Maryland, New York
has successfully crafted a moderate policy between the extremes of harsh
incarceration and limitless treatment. Both programs ensure consequences for
continued drug use, but also provide resources for people who need medical
help coping with their addictions.

Arizona, too, has demonstrated the empirical success of a more moderate
policy. By offering treatment to first-time offenders in a program like New
York's, it has saved millions of dollars in incarceration costs. After all,
it takes an average of $150,000 to build a single prison cell and another
$20,000 a year to keep an inmate clothed and fed inside it. Plus, when
parents go to jail, the state has to pick up the tab for the children left
behind. Arizona is therefore reducing drug use and reducing spending
simultaneously-more evidence that moderate policies can succeed.

Time to Change Course

Though the rest of the nation has not yet caught on, the bloated spending
and shrinking effectiveness of the War on Drugs suggest the need for a
serious re-evaluation of federal policy. But is drug use morally
reprehensible or a victimless crime? Should we tell kids to "Just Say No" or
prevent them from having to saying anything at all by keeping drugs out of
the country? We are still wrapped up in this paralyzing ethical and
political uncertainty, and the polarizing rhetoric from the legalization
libertarians and the Colombia Congress is not helping.

To break the impasse, our guide must be the one point almost everyone will
concede: drug use does have certain negative effects on society, and we
should try to reduce them. Of course, even if we agree on this premise, we
can't expect to immediately rid our drug policy of its dependence on the
military and criminal-justice system. But we also cannot continue to ignore
the importance of treatment and prevention when they have shown such promise
at the state level. Expanding the types of integrated policies which have
been so successful in Maryland, New York, and Arizona would do a lot to help
reduce the harms of drug use. Most important, it would open a viable middle
ground between the extremes of legalization and the status quo.

The mere possibility of such moderation might in turn prompt some new and
even better answers to the stale questions of drug policy-if only because
people might finally feel safe discussing them.

Index for the Harvard Political Review's series:

"Smoke and Mirrors - America's Drug War"

The Thirty Years' War - (Part 1 of a 10 part series)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1084/a03.html

Editorial: From The Editor - (Part 2 of a 10 part series)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1084/a02.html

The Experts Speak Out - (Part 3 of a 10 part series)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1084/a05.html

Keep It Real - (Part 4 of a 10 part series)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1084/a04.html

The Colombian Conundrum - (Part 5 of a 10 part series)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1084/a06.html

Demystifying the Dutch - (Part 6 of a 10 part series)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1085/a03.html

Paralyzed by Politics - (Part 7 of a 10 part series)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1085/a01.html

An Unfortunate Hypocrisy - (Part 8 of a 10 part series)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1085/a02.html

Throwing Away the Key - (Part 9 of a 10 part series)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1085/a04.html

Beyond Good and Evil - (Part 10 of a 10 part series)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1085/a05.html