PERSPECTIVE ON LEGALIZING DRUGS

Don't Get Carried Away

There Must Be A New Approach That Is Grounded Not In Ignorance Or Fear But
In Common Sense.

"So you want to legalize drugs, right?" That's the first question I'm
typically asked when I start talking about drug policy reform. My short
answer is, marijuana, maybe. But 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. But also 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 violent and other 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;

* that top priority be given to public health policies proved 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, these statements of principles and objectives, 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 or all other drugs should be available over
the counter, like alcohol or cigarettes.

That's not what I'm fighting for, nor is it the ultimate aim of
philanthropist and financier George Soros, who has played a leading role in
funding drug policy reform efforts. Nor is it 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.

Friedman, Szasz and I agree on many points, among them that U.S. drug
prohibition, like alcohol Prohibition decades ago, generates extraordinary
harms. 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.

But I'm not ready to advocate for 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 that 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 only extend 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 it might be the corrections officer who
recalls the days when prisons housed "real" criminals, not the petty,
nonviolent offenders who fill jails and prisons these days. 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 nurse in the oncology or AIDS unit obliged to look the other way
while a patient wracked with pain or nausea smokes her forbidden medicine.
Both know, from their own experience, that smoked marijuana works better
than anything else for many sick people.

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.

Or the African American citizen repeatedly stopped by police for "driving
while black" or even "walking while black," never mind "running while black."

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 drug policy
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 both within our borders and beyond.

Most drug policy reformers I know don't want crack or methamphetamine sold
in 7-Elevens--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.