IT'S TWISTED LOGIC TO WANT TO LEGALIZE ILLICIT DRUGS

The siren song of drug legalizers seems so seductive. Legalize drugs, they
claim, and just watch crime drop and the prison population plummet, freeing
billions of dollars for use in such positive enterprises as schools.

Legalize drugs and America will climb to within a joint's length of
national bliss. A foggy nirvana, of course, with all those whackedout
druggies staggering around, but so much more peaceful than today's criminal
chaos.

To clinch their argument, the legalizers cite alcohol and Prohibition, as
if revealing a sacred truth. After beer, wine and whiskey became legal
again in 1933, didn't speakeasies vanish and gangland wars disappear?
Shouldn't we therefore do the same for cocaine, heroin and marijuana?

To puncture their arguments, I'll be wholly unfair. I'll let Robert L.
DuPont loose on them, with his vast experience, perceptive analyses and
knowledge of how drugs impact the human brain.

I'm almost embarrassed to stack the odds heavily on one side, because
legalizers and the sneaky ``harm reduction'' gang who conceal their
agenda to legalize by advocating a series of small steps have no chance
against DuPont. Almost embarrassed, but not really, not when I remember the
now recovering addicts whose lives and families were shattered by narcotics.

A Washington, D.C., psychiatrist who was the nation's first director of the
National Institute on Drug Abuse, DuPont demolished the legalizers'
arguments in an interview and in his new book, The Selfish Brain: Learning
from Addiction. First, he pointed out the history of drugs in the United
States, which teaches a much different lesson from the myth propounded by
legalizers.

It wasn't the legal prohibition of drugs in the U.S. that caused widespread
abuse. Instead, the reverse is true. When many addictive drugs were legally
available a hundred years ago in this country, an outraged public forced
the government to ban them.

Would crime drop if drugs were legalized? One answer is to see what really
happened after the end of alcohol prohibition.

Yes, bathtub gin and speakeasies are gone, but DuPont reminds us of the
role that today's cheap, legal alcohol plays in crimes from highway deaths
to murder and from rape to robbery. It's not the high price of illegal
drugs that's the largest factor in drugcaused crime, he argues
convincingly, but the harmful effects of narcotics on drug users' brains.

So, then, I try to envision positive changes in America the Stoned, as
legalizers would create it. Mass transit would flourish because all those
new and old junkies couldn't possibly get driver's licenses and would
shuffle toward the bus. Wages would shoot skyward because no one hires
addicts, and the job market would tighten as employers bid for the
remaining nonaddicted among us.

See, I told you. It will be bliss. Except of course, as DuPont says, for
recovering addicts who have worked so hard to shed their habit and who
would be demoralized by legalized drugs all around them, like huge piles of
candy bars.

It would make their continuing recovery much more difficult, probably
impossible, which is why recovering addicts oppose legalization nearly
unanimously. In Las Vegas years ago I came across a similar circumstance,
when Gamblers Anonymous kept trying to organize units there, only to see
them disintegrate because gambling on every corner was too powerful to resist.

Legalizers offer another grotesque argument, claiming it's hypocritcal to
legalize alcohol and not cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Wonderfully
coherent logic.

Alcohol, which is legal, kills 125,000 Americans a year and costs $98.6
billion in crime, death, medical care, lost productivity and AIDS. Illicit
drugs lag behind, shockingly, with just 14,000 deaths and $66.9 billion in
costs. The solution, therefore, is to make drugs legal so they can catch up?

Who would buy that addictive argument? Everyone, that's who, except perhaps
for a few skeptics with brains.

The main point, serious and powerful, is this: Legalizing drugs would lead
to a huge increase in addicts, with human and financial costs to American
society so large and debilitating that an advanced computer would be needed
to track the misery. Is that what Americans want?

Copyright © 1997, SunSentinel Company and South Florida Interactive, Inc.