GETTING OFF DRUGS: THE LEGALIZATION OPTION

The Quaker commitment to nonviolence has direct implications for the United
States' failed drug war. It is a spiritual law that we become what we hate.
Jesus articulated this law in the Sermon on the Mount when he admonished,
"Do not react violently to the one who is evil" (Scholars' Version). The
sense is clear: do not resist evil by violent means; do not let evil set
the terms of your response. Applied to the drug issue, this means, "Do not
resist drugs by violent methods."

When we oppose evil with the same weapons that evil employs, we commit the
same atrocities, violate the same civil liberties, and break the same laws
as those whom we oppose. We become what we hate. Evil makes us over into
its double. If one side prevails, the evil continues by virtue of having
been established through the means used. This principle of mimetic
opposition is abundantly illustrated in the case of the disastrous U.S.
drug war.

The drug war is over, and we lost. We merely repeated the mistake of
Prohibition. The harder we tried to stamp out this evil, the more lucrative
we made it, and the more it spread. Our forcible resistance to evil simply
augments it. An evil cannot be eradicated by making it more profitable.

We lost that war on all three fronts: destroying the drug sources,
intercepting drugs at our borders, and arresting drug dealers and users.

In the first place, we have failed to cut off drug sources. When we paid
Turkey to stop the growth of opium, production merely shifted to Southeast
Asia and Afghanistan. Crop substitution programs in Peru led to increased
planting of coca, as farmers simply planted a small parcel of land with one
of the accepted substitute crops and used the bulk of the funds to plant
more coca. Cocaine cultivation uses only 700 of the 2.5 million square
miles suitable for its growth in South America. There is simply no way the
United States can police so vast an area.

Second, the drug war has failed to stop illicit drugs at our borders.
According to a Government Accounting Office study, the air force spent $3.3
million on drug interdiction, using sophisticated AWACS surveillance
planes, over a 15-month period ending in 1987. The grand total of drug
seizures from that effort was eight. During the same period, the combined
efforts of the coast guard and navy, sailing for 2,512 ship days at a cost
of $40 million, resulted in the seizure of a mere 20 drug-carrying vessels.
Hard drugs are so easy to smuggle because they are so concentrated. Our
entire country's current annual import of cocaine would fit into a single
C-5A cargo plane.

As if the flood of imported drugs were not enough, domestic production of
marijuana continues to increase. It is the largest cash crop in ten states,
and the second largest cash crop in the nation, next only to corn.
Methamphetamine, at two to three times the cost of crack, sustains a high
for 24 hours as opposed to crack's 20 minutes. It can be manufactured in
clandestine laboratories anywhere for an initial cost of only $2,000. Even
if we sealed our borders we could not stop the making of new drugs.

Third, the drug war calls for arresting drug dealers and users in the
United States. There are already 750,000 drug arrests per year, and the
current prison population has far outstripped existing facilities. Drug
offenders account for more than 60 percent of the prison population; to
make room for them, far more dangerous criminals are being returned to the
streets. It is not drugs but the drug laws themselves that have created
this monster. The unimaginable wealth involved leads to the corruption of
police, judges, and elected officials. A huge bureaucracy has grown
dependent on the drug war for employment. Even the financial community is
compromised, since the only thing preventing default by some of the heavily
indebted Latin American nations or major money-laundering banks is the drug
trade. Cocaine brings Bolivia's economy about $600 million per year, a
figure equal to the country's total legal export income. Revenues from drug
trafficking in Miami, Fla., are greater than those from tourism, exports,
health care, and all other legitimate businesses combined.

Drug laws have also fostered drug-related murders and an estimated 40
percent of all property crime in the United States. The greatest
beneficiaries of the drug laws are drug traffickers, who benefit from the
inflated prices that the drug war creates. Rather than collecting taxes on
the sale of drugs, governments at all levels expend billions in what
amounts to a subsidy of organized criminals. Such are the ironies of
violent resistance to evil.

The war on drugs creates other casualties beyond those arrested. There are
the ones killed in fights over turf; innocents caught in crossfire;
citizens terrified of city streets; escalating robberies; children given
free crack to get them addicted and then enlisted as runners and dealers;
mothers so crazed for a fix that they abandon their babies, prostitute
themselves and their daughters, and addict their unborn. Much of that, too,
is the result of the drug laws. Dealing is so lucrative only because it is
illegal.

The media usually portray cocaine and crack use as a black ghetto
phenomenon. This is a racist caricature. There are more drug addicts among
middle- and upper-class whites than any other segment of the population,
and far more such occasional drug users. The typical customer is a single,
white male 20-40 years old. Only 13 percent of those using illegal drugs
are African American, but they constitute 35 percent of those arrested for
simple possession and a staggering 74 percent of those sentenced for drug
possession. It is the demand by white users that makes drugs flow.
Americans consume 60 percent of the world's illegal drugs. That is simply
too profitable a market to refuse.

Increasing the budget for fighting drugs is scarcely the answer. As Francis
Hall, former head of the New York City Police Department's narcotics
division, put it, "It's like Westmoreland asking Washington for two more
divisions. We lost the Vietnam War with a half-million men. We're doing the
same thing with drugs." The drug war is the United States' longest war, our
domestic Vietnam.

We Are The Addicts

This nation is addicted to the use of force, and its armed resistance to
the drug trade is doomed to fail precisely because the drug trade perfectly
mirrors our own values. We condemn drug traffickers for sacrificing their
children, their integrity, and their human dignity just to make money or
experience pleasure -- without recognizing that these are the values
espoused by the society at large. In the drug war, we are scapegoating
addicts and blacks for what we have become as a nation. Drugs are the
ultimate consumer product for people who want to feel good now without
benefit of hard work, social interaction, or making a productive
contribution to society. Drug dealers are living out the rags-to-riches
American dream as private entrepreneurs desperately trying to become
upwardly mobile. That is why we could not win the war on drugs. We are the
enemy, and we cannot face that fact. So we launched a half-hearted,
half-baked war against a menace that only mirrors ourselves.

The uproar about drugs is itself odd. Illicit drugs are, on the whole, far
less dangerous than the legal drugs that many more people consume.

Alcohol is associated with 40 percent of all suicide attempts, 40 percent
of all traffic deaths, 54 percent of all violent crimes, and 10 percent of
all work-related injuries. Nicotine, the most addictive drug of all, has
transformed lung cancer from a medical curiosity to a common disease that
now accounts for 3 million deaths a year worldwide, 60 million since the
1950s. Smoking will kill one in three smokers eventually.

None of the illegal drugs is as lethal as tobacco or alcohol. If anyone has
ever died as a direct result of marijuana, no one seems to be able to
document it. Most deaths from hard drugs are the result of adulteration or
unregulated concentrations. Many people can be addicted to heroin for most
of their lives without serious health consequences. It has no known side
effects other than constipation. Cocaine in powder form is not as addictive
as nicotine; only 3 percent of those who try it become addicted. Most
cocaine users do not become dependent, and most who do eventually free
themselves. Crack is terribly addictive, but its use is a direct
consequence of the expense of powdered cocaine, and its spread is in part a
function of its lower price.

We must be honest about these facts, because much of the hysteria about
illegal drugs has been based on misinformation. All addiction is a serious
matter, and Quakers are right to be most concerned about the human costs.
But many of these costs are a consequence of a wrong- headed approach to
eradication. Our tolerance of the real killer-drugs (nicotine and alcohol)
and our abhorrence of the drugs that are far less lethal is hypocritical,
or at best a selective moralism reflecting passing fashions of indignation.

Drug addiction is singled out as evil, yet ours is a society of addicts. We
project on the black drug subculture all our profound anxieties about our
own addictions (to wealth, power, sex, food, work, religion, alcohol,
caffeine, and tobacco) and attack addiction in others without having to
gain insight about ourselves. New York City councilman Wendell Foster
illustrated this scapegoating attitude when he suggested chaining addicts
to trees so people could spit on them. Instead of nurturing compassion in
order to help addicts, our society targets them as pariahs and dumps on
them our own shadow side.

Legalization: Not Capitulation But A Better Strategy

I'm not advocating giving up the war on drugs because we can't win. I'm
saying that we lost because we let drugs dictate the means we used to
oppose them. We have to break out of the spiral of mimetic violence. The
only way to do so is to ruin the world market price of drugs by legalizing
them. We have to repeal this failed Second Prohibition. The moment the
price of drugs plummets, drug profits will collapse -- and with them, the
drug empires.

I am not advocating no laws at all regulating drugs, no governmental
restraints on sales to minors, no quality controls to curtail overdose, and
no prosecution of the inevitable bootleggers. Legalization, by contrast,
means that the government would maintain regulatory control over drug
sales, possibly through state clinics or stores. It would be the task of
the Food and Drug Administration to guarantee purity and safety, as it does
for alcoholic beverages. Shooting up would be outlawed in public, just as
drinking liquor is. Advertising would be strictly prohibited, selling drugs
to children would continue to be a criminal offense, and other evasions of
government regulations would be prosecuted. Driving, flying, or piloting a
vessel under the influence would still be punished. Taxes on drugs would
pay for enforcement, education, rehabilitation, and research (a net benefit
is estimated of at least $10 billion from reduced expenditures on
enforcement and new tax revenues).

Legalization would lead to an immediate decrease in murders, burglaries,
and robberies, paralleling the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933 -- though
the spread of powerful weapons in U.S. society and the proliferation of
youth gangs has led to an addiction to gun violence that will not soon go
away. Cheap drugs would mean that most addicts would not be driven to crime
to support their habit, and that drug lords would no longer have a turf to
fight over. Legalization would force South American peasants to switch back
to less lucrative crops; but that would be less devastating than
destruction of their crops altogether by aerial spraying or biological
warfare. Legalization would enable countries like Colombia, Bolivia, and
Peru to regularize the cocaine sector and absorb its money-making capacity
into the taxable, legal, unionized economic world. Legalization would be a
blow to dealers, who would be deprived of their ticket to riches. It would
remove glamorous Al Capone-type traffickers who are role-models for the
young, and it would destroy the "cool" status of drug use. But it would
leave us with a monolithic problem: how to provide decent jobs for
unemployed youths. Indeed, until the root economic factors that contribute
to drug use are addressed, drug addiction will continue.

Drug legalization would cancel the corrupting role of the drug cartels in
South American politics, a powerful incentive to corruption at all levels
of our own government, and a dangerous threat to our civil liberties
through mistaken enforcement and property confiscation. It would free law
enforcement agencies to focus on other crimes and reduce the strain on the
court and prison systems. It would scuttle a multibillion dollar
bureaucracy whose prosperity depends on not solving the drug problem. It
would remove a major cause of public cynicism about obeying the laws of the
land. It could help check the spread of aids and hepatitis through a free
supply of hypodermic needles.

Legalization would also free up money wasted on interdiction of illicit
drugs that is desperately needed for treatment, education, and research.

Legalization: The Risks

The worst prospect is that legalization might lead to a short-term increase
in the use of drugs due to easier availability, lower prices, and the
sudden freedom from prosecution. The repeal of Prohibition seems to have
had that result, then alcohol use gradually declined. Drugs cheap enough to
destroy their profitability would also be in the range of any schoolchild's
allowance, just like beer and cigarettes. Cocaine is easily concealable and
its effects less overt than alcohol. The possibility of increased teenage
use is admittedly frightening.

On the other hand, ending the drug war would free drug control officers to
concentrate on protecting children from exploitation, and here stiff
penalties would continue to be in effect. The alarmist prediction that
cheap, available drugs could lead to an addiction rate of 75 percent of
regular users simply ignores the fact that 95 percent of people in the
United States are already using some form of drugs when nicotine, caffeine,
alcohol, and prescription drugs are included. We can learn from the
mistakes made with the repeal of Prohibition, when the lid was simply
removed with virtually no education or restriction on advertising and
little government regulation. A major educational program would need to be
in effect well before drug legalization took effect. Anti-alcohol and
anti-tobacco ad campaigns have already proven effective in restricting use.
In Canada, for example, cigarettes sell for about three times the U.S.
price, and vigorous campaigns against smoking have had some success,
especially among the young.

We already have some evidence that legalization works. In the 11 U.S.
states that briefly "decriminalized" marijuana in the 1970s, the number of
users stayed about the same. In the Netherlands, legal tolerance of
marijuana and hashish has led to a significant decline in consumption and
has successfully prevented kids from experimenting with hard drugs. Eleven
times as many U.S. high school seniors smoked pot daily in 1983 as did
students the same age in the Netherlands. The Dutch discovered that making
the purchase of small amounts of marijuana freely available to anyone over
16 cuts the drug dealer out; as a result, there is virtually no crime
associated with the use of marijuana. Treatment for addiction to hard drugs
is widely available there; 75 percent of the heroin addicts in Amsterdam
are on methadone maintenance, living relatively normal, crime-free lives.
Since the needle exchange program was first introduced almost ten years
ago, the HIV infection rate among injecting drug users in cities like
Amsterdam has dropped from 11 percent to 4 percent and is now one of the
lowest in the world. All this still falls short of legalization, and
problems still abound, but the experience of the Netherlands clearly points
in the right direction. The Dutch see illicit drug use as a health problem,
not as a criminal problem.

Fighting the drug war may appear to hold the high moral ground, but this is
only an illusion; in fact it increases the damage drugs do to the whole
society by making it so lucrative. Some have argued that legalization would
legitimate or place the state's moral imprimatur on drugs, but we have
already legalized the most lethal drugs, and no one argues that this
constitutes governmental endorsement. Sale of Valium, alcohol, cigarettes,
pesticides, and poisons are all permitted and regulated by the state,
without anyone assuming that the state encourages their use. Legalization
would indeed imply that drugs are no longer being satanized, like "demon rum."

Some people argue that legalization represents a daring and risky
experiment, but it is prohibition that is the daring and risky experiment,
argues drug researcher Jonathan Ott. Inebriating drugs have been mostly
legal throughout the millennia of human existence. The drastic step was
taken in the second decade of this century in the United States when for
the first time large-scale, comprehensive legal control of inebriating
drugs was implemented. It is safe to say as we approach the end of the
eighth decade of federal control of inebriating drugs that the experiment
has been a dismal and costly failure. Human and animal use of inebriants is
as natural as any other aspect of social behavior; it is the attempt to
crush this normal drive that is bizarre and unnatural. Already 95 percent
of our adult population is using drugs, and the vast majority do so
responsibly. Most people who would misuse drugs are already doing so.
Public attitudes have swung against drunkenness and driving while
intoxicated; now anti-smoking sentiments are burgeoning. We have every
reason to believe that the public will continue to censure addiction to drugs.

No one wants to live in a country overrun with drugs, but we already do. We
should at the very least commit ourselves to a policy of "harm reduction."
We cannot stop drug violence with state violence. Addicts will be healed by
care and compassion, not condemnation. Dealers will be curbed by a ruined
world drug market, not by enforcement that simply escalates the
profitability of drugs. A nonviolent, nonreactive, creative approach is
needed that lets the drug empire collapse of its own deadly weight.

We have been letting our violent resistance to drugs beget the very thing
we seek to destroy. When our nonviolent Quaker tradition offers an
alternative to our failed drug war, shouldn't we consider trying it?

U.S. Drug Use (among the 200 million people over age 12) caffeine: 178
million or 89% alcohol: 106 million or 53% nicotine: 57 million or 28%
marijuana: 12 million or 6% cocaine: 3 million or 1.5% heroin: 2 million or 1%

U.S. Drug Deaths (per year) nicotine: 320,000 to 500,000 alcohol: 100,000
to 200,000 illicit drugs: 6,000 to 30,000