NEW APPROACH TO DRUGS THAT'S GROUNDED NOT IN IGNORANCE
OR FEAR BUT COMMON SENSE

So you want to legalize drugs? That's the first question I'm typically
asked when I start talking about drug-policy reform. My short answer
is: marijuana, maybe. And I'm not suggesting we make heroin, cocaine
or methamphetamine available the way we do alcohol and cigarettes.

What am I recommending? Here's the long answer:

Drop the "zero-tolerance" rhetoric and policies and the illusory goal
of a drug-free society. Accept that drug use is here to stay and that
we have no choice but to learn to live with drugs so they cause the
least possible harm and the greatest possible benefit.

More specifically, I'm recommending:

- - That responsible doctors be allowed and encouraged to prescribe
whatever drugs work best, notwithstanding the feared and demonized
status of some drugs in the eyes of the ignorant and the law;

- - That people not be incarcerated for possessing small amounts of any
drug for personal use and that people who put their fellow citizens at
risk by driving while impaired be treated strictly and punished
accordingly;

- - That employers reject drug-testing programs that reveal little about
whether people are impaired in the workplace but much about what they
may have consumed over the weekend;

- - That those who sell drugs to other adults not be treated by our
criminal laws as the moral equivalents of predatory criminals;

- - That marijuana be decriminalized, taxed and regulated, even as we
step up our efforts to provide honest and effective drug education
rather than feel-good programs like DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education);

- - That top priority be given to public-health policies proven to
reduce the death, disease, crime and suffering associated with
injection drug use and heroin addiction--in other words, expanded
methadone maintenance treatment, heroin maintenance trials, ready
access to sterile syringes and other harm-reduction policies that have
proved effective abroad and that can work just as well here.

These beliefs represent a call for a fundamentally different drug
policy. It's not legalization, but it's also not simply a matter of
spending more on treatment and prevention and less on interdiction and
enforcement. Some call it "harm reduction"--an approach that aims to
reduce the negative consequences of both drug use and drug
prohibition, acknowledging that both will likely persist for the
foreseeable future.

Most "drug legalizers" aren't really drug legalizers at all. A
"legalizer," as most Americans apparently understand the term, is
someone who believes that heroin, cocaine and most all other drugs
should be available over the counter, like alcohol or cigarettes.

That's not the aim of the great majority of people who devote their
time, money and energies to ending the drug war.

This is not to say there is no such thing as a "legalizer." Milton
Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, and Thomas Szasz, the
famed libertarian psychiatrist, have argued that total drug
legalization is the only rational and ethical way to deal with drugs
in our society. Most libertarians and many others agree with them.
Szasz and others have even opposed the medical marijuana ballot
initiatives, arguing that they retard the repeal of drug
prohibition.

U.S. drug prohibition, like Prohibition decades ago, generates
extraordinary harm. It, not drugs per se, is responsible for creating
vast underground markets, criminalizing millions of otherwise
law-abiding citizens, corrupting both governments and societies at
large, empowering organized criminals, increasing predatory crime,
spreading disease, curtailing personal freedom, disparaging science
and honest inquiry and legitimizing public policies that are both
extraordinary and insidious in their racially disproportionate
consequences.

I'm not ready to advocate over-the-counter sale of heroin and cocaine,
and not just because that's not a politically palatable argument in
1999. I'm not convinced that outright legalization is the optimal
alternative.

The fact is there is no drug-legalization movement in America. What
there is is a nascent political and social movement for drug-policy
reform. It consists of the growing number of citizens who have been
victimized, in one way or another, by the drug war, and who now
believe our current drug policies are doing more harm than good.

Most members of this movement barely perceive themselves as such, in
part because their horizons extend only to one or two domains in which
the harms of the drug war are readily apparent to them.

It might be the judge who is required by inflexible, mandatory minimum
sentencing laws to send a drug addict, or small-time dealer, or
dealer's girlfriend or Third World drug courier to prison for longer
than many rapists and murderers serve.

Or the addict in recovery--employed, law-abiding, a worthy citizen in
every respect--who must travel 50 or 100 miles each day to pick up her
methadone, i.e., her medicine, because current laws do not allow
methadone prescriptions to be filled at a local pharmacy.

Or the teacher or counselor warned by school authorities not to speak
so frankly about drug use with his students lest he violate federal
regulations prohibiting anything other than "just-say-no" bromides.

Or the doctor who fears to prescribe medically appropriate doses of
opiate analgesics to a patient in pain because any variations from the
norm bring unfriendly scrutiny from government agents and state
medical boards.

Or the employee with an outstanding record who fails a drug test on
Monday morning because she shared a joint with her husband over the
weekend--and is fired.

Or the struggling farmer in North Dakota who wonders why farmers in
Canada and dozens of other countries can plant hemp, but he cannot.

Or the political conservative who abhors the extraordinary powers of
police and prosecutors to seize private property from citizens who
have not been convicted of violating any laws and who worries about
the corruption inherent in letting law enforcement agencies keep what
they seize.

Some are victims of the drug war, and some are drug-policy reformers,
but most of them don't know it yet. The ones who know they're
reformers are the ones who connect the dots--the ones who see and
understand the panoply of ways in which our prohibitionist policies
are doing more harm than good.

We may not agree on which aspect of prohibition is most
pernicious--the generation of crime, the corruption, the underground
market, the spread of disease, the loss of freedom, the burgeoning
prisons or the lies and hypocrisies--and we certainly don't agree on
the optimal solutions, but we all regard our current policy of
punitive drug prohibition as a fundamental evil.

Most drug-policy reformers I know don't want crack or methamphetamine
sold in convenience stores, to quote one of the more pernicious
accusations hurled by federal drug czar Barry McCaffrey. What we're
talking about is a new approach grounded not in the fear, ignorance,
prejudice and vested pecuniary and institutional interests that drive
current policies, but rather one grounded in common sense, science,
public health and human rights.

That's true drug-policy reform.