UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR SPEAKS OUT ON THE DRUG WAR

To the Cigar,

This fall, the Cigar has published several articles and letters pertaining
to the so-called War on Drugs. Most of these pieces are critical of
America's drug policy - as well they ought to be.

The War on Drugs is indeed racist, tragic in its consequences and largely
ineffective. Unfortunately, however, it is easier to recognize a problem
than to identify a workable solution. The only "solution" thus far
articulated by the critics of the War on Drugs is "de-criminalization" or
legalization of some or all drugs that are currently illicit.

The two major drugs of abuse that are currently legal (at least for adults)
- - tobacco and alcohol - represent two devastatingly tragic failings of our
society. Tobacco is the number one cause of premature mortality, killing
over 400,000 Americans annually and about 6 million people worldwide. It is
estimated that tobacco will kill one billion people worldwide in the current
century. Tobacco-related illnesses are also relatively expensive to treat
and add enormously to healthcare costs in America, adding to the difficulty
for America to get to universal health insurance coverage.

Alcohol, on the other hand, kills over 100,000 Americans annually and is
involved in half of fatal automobile accidents, and approximately half of
violent crimes, including rapes and murders. On college campuses, alcohol is
involved in 95% of sexual assaults and 90% of all violent crimes.

Thus, the evidence from this experience with legal drugs of abuse is that we
have not yet found a successful way to manage drugs of abuse legally. What
we have, currently, in modern American society are two distinct tragedies in
how we manage drugs of abuse: the illegal drugs of abuse and the legal drugs
of abuse.

And by the way - there are also distinct elements of racism in the way that
the legal drugs of abuse are marketed.

Tobacco companies, for example, spend twice as much per capita marketing
cigarettes in areas were the population is predominantly black than in
locales where the population is predominantly white.

The fact of the matter is that the tragic consequences of alcohol and
tobacco greatly exceed the consequences of all of the illicit drugs combined
(including both the effects of the drugs themselves and the effect of the
War on Drugs, such as incarceration).

Nevertheless, I gladly concede that a tragedy is not lessened simply because
another tragedy is even greater. It makes no sense, however, to advocate
merely substituting one tragically failed approach for another. The use of
tobacco and alcohol in America greatly exceeds the use of illicit drugs.

It is erroneous to claim, as Tom Angell does in his recent article, that
illegality does not act as a deterrent simply because a significant amount
of use persists in spite of the law. The more important issue is how the
level of use of illicit drugs compares with what it would become if they
were legal.

Our experience with tobacco and alcohol suggest that the level of drug use
would be far greater if drugs such as marihuana, heroin, cocaine, or ecstasy
were made legal.

America - all of us in America - need to evolve a third approach to
management of drugs of abuse, since neither of the current approaches is
remotely successful. In my judgment, that third approach would need to be
based on understanding the difference between free choice and choice/demand
artificially pumped up by the influence of advertising and promotion.

The combination of legality and billions of dollars spent encouraging drug
use is utterly deadly. We are lagging behind the efforts in Europe at
getting to a sensible drug policy based on the principle of strict controls
on advertising.

Until America makes significant progress in effective management of legal
drugs of abuse, I can't support adding more drugs to the tragedies that
alcohol and tobacco represent, regardless of the huge problems inherent in
the War on Drugs.

Alvin K. Swonger, Ph.D. Department of Biomedical Sciences