THERE'S NO JUSTICE IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

STANFORD -- Twenty-five years ago, President Richard M. Nixon announced a
"War on Drugs." I criticized the action on both moral and expediential
grounds in my Newsweek column of May 1, 1972, "Prohibition and Drugs":

"On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of
government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug
addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified
yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, would answer no. Reason with
the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and
with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly
or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone
from drinking alcohol or taking drugs."

That basic ethical flaw has inevitably generated specific evils during the
past quarter century, just as it did during our earlier attempt at alcohol
prohibition.

1. The use of informers. Informers are not needed in crimes like robbery
and murder because the victims of those crimes have a strong incentive to
report the crime. In the drug trade, the crime consists of a transaction
between a willing buyer and willing seller. Neither has any incentive to
report a violation of law. On the contrary, it is in the self-interest of
both that the crime not be reported. That is why informers are needed. The
use of informers and the immense sums of money at stake inevitably generate
corruption -- as they did during Prohibition. They also lead to violations
of the civil rights of innocent people, to the shameful practices of
forcible entry and forfeiture of property without due process.

As I wrote in 1972: ". . . addicts and pushers are not the only ones
corrupted. Immense sums are at stake. It is inevitable that some relatively
low-paid police and other government officials -- and some high-paid ones
as well -- will succumb to the temptation to pick up easy money."

2. Filling the prisons. In 1970, 200,000 people were in prison. Today, 1.6
million people are. Eight times as many in absolute number, six times as
many relative to the increased population. In addition, 2.3 million are on
probation and parole. The attempt to prohibit drugs is by far the major
source of the horrendous growth in the prison population.

There is no light at the end of that tunnel. How many of our citizens do we
want to turn into criminals before we yell "enough"?

3. Disproportionate imprisonment of blacks. Sher Hosonko, at the time
Connecticut's director of addiction services, stressed this effect of drug
prohibition in a talk given in June 1995:

"Today in this country, we incarcerate 3,109 black men for every 100,000 of
them in the population. Just to give you an idea of the drama in this
number, our closest competitor for incarcerating black men is South Africa.
South Africa -- and this is pre-Nelson Mandela and under an overt public
policy of apartheid -- incarcerated 729 black men for every 100,000. Figure
this out: In the land of the Bill of Rights, we jail over four times as
many black men as the only country in the world that advertised a political
policy of apartheid."

4. Destruction of inner cities. Drug prohibition is one of the most
important factors that have combined to reduce our inner cities to their
present state. The crowded inner cities have a comparative advantage for
selling drugs. Though most customers do not live in the inner cities, most
sellers do. Young boys and girls view the swaggering, affluent drug dealers
as role models. Compared with the returns from a traditional career of
study and hard work, returns from dealing drugs are tempting to young and
old alike. And many, especially the young, are not dissuaded by the bullets
that fly so freely in disputes between competing drug dealers -- bullets
that fly only because dealing drugs is illegal. Al Capone epitomizes our
earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one.

5. Compounding the harm to users. Prohibition makes drugs exorbitantly
expensive and highly uncertain in quality. A user must associate with
criminals to get the drugs, and many are driven to become criminals
themselves to finance the habit. Needles, which are hard to get, are often
shared, with the predictable effect of spreading disease. Finally, an
addict who seeks treatment must confess to being a criminal in order to
qualify for a treatment program. Alternatively, professionals who treat
addicts must become informers or criminals themselves.

6. Undertreatment of chronic pain. The Federal Department of Health and
Human Services has issued reports showing that two-thirds of all terminal
cancer patients do not receive adequate pain medication, and the numbers
are surely higher in nonterminally ill patients. Such serious
undertreatment of chronic pain is a direct result of the Drug Enforcement
Agency's pressures on physicians who prescribe narcotics.

7. Harming foreign countries. Our drug policy has led to thousands of
deaths and enormous loss of wealth in countries like Colombia, Peru and
Mexico, and has undermined the stability of their governments. All because
we cannot enforce our laws at home. If we did, there would be no market for
imported drugs. There would be no Cali cartel. The foreign countries would
not have to suffer the loss of sovereignty involved in letting our
"advisers" and troops operate on their soil, search their vessels and
encourage local militaries to shoot down their planes. They could run their
own affairs, and we, in turn, could avoid the diversion of military forces
from their proper function.

Can any policy, however high-minded, be moral if it leads to widespread
corruption, imprisons so many, has so racist an effect, destroys our inner
cities, wreaks havoc on misguided and vulnerable individuals and brings
death and destruction to foreign countries?

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company