DRAWING THE LINE ON DRUGS

THE DRUG prohibition causes crime," proclaims Jerry Cameron to a room
filled with rapt libertarians. A former police chief with FBI and DEA
training, Cameron is doing "penance" for his seventeen-year law enforcement
career in the "war on drugs." He spends an hour setting forth the case for
the total decriminalization of all drugs to the Students for Individual
Liberty's delight.

Sadly, Cameron takes it too far. Although he spends most of his time
discussing the legalization of marijuana, he supports legalizing all drugs
and even wants the government to hand out free heroin.

It is these types of arguments that let people get away with ignoring the
case for legalizing marijuana.

Cameron's argument goes like this: Demand for drugs is highly inelastic
(i.e., the quantity of drugs people want is not very sensitive to price.)
The only thing drug enforcement accomplishes is a temporary shortage of
supply, either by catching shipments or locking up drug dealers. This
supply shortage, in turn, causes the price of drugs to increase. Since
demand is inelastic, drug users still want just as much; so, they end up
having to steal in order to afford their drug habit. Thus, the illegality
of drugs causes crime and "we can't arrest our way out of it."

Cameron doesn't stop there.

He follows up his arguments by pounding his audience over the head with
statistics. Although some of his numbers are a bit fudged (he conveniently
left out the massive crime drop of the 1990s, for example), he makes two
very good points.

First, the "war on drugs" is very expensive and an ineffective deterrent.

The United States spent $63 billion and the United Nations spent $500
billion on drug enforcement in 2003. Yet from 1991 to 2002, marijuana use
in all grades increased, including a staggering 88 percent jump among 8th
graders. According to last year's Center for Alcohol and Substance
Education Survey, 28.4 percent of University students have used marijuana
in the last year. Cameron concludes that it's "easier to buy drugs than
beer or cigarettes."

Second, drug enforcement is racist.

On this point, Cameron makes hackneyed points bemoaning mandatory minimums
for crack cocaine and the much higher felony conviction rates for black
people (This doesn't make them any less right, though). He did have one
chilling stat: In South Africa, at the height of apartheid, the black
incarceration rate was 851 per 100,000. In the United States in 2004, it
was 4,919 per 100,000. And Cameron blames it all on the drug prohibition.

"Whatever you leave illegal and don't regulate, you get a black market
[in]." By keeping drugs illegal, "we've turned the drug trade over to the
criminals." Cameron envisions a vicious cycle where poor, inner-city kids,
who are disproportionately black, receive poor education and end up dealing
drugs.

The fear of arrest and the money in drugs attracts gangs, which bring guns
and violence.

Arresting these drug dealers results in prison overcrowding and, after the
drug dealers are released, they go back to dealing since they still have no
job skills.

The solution, Cameron says, is to "remove the profit motive" from the black
market by legalizing drugs.

Cameron lays out a two-pronged plan to end drug prohibition: government
clinics and education.

Cameron speaks very highly of the Swiss Model in which government-run
clinics provide free heroin and monitor usage to ensure users do not overdose.

He notes that street crime, homelessness, AIDS, hepatitis and the rate of
new users all dropped.

But again, Cameron is playing with the numbers.

The recent economic prosperity of the European Union and Switzerland's
proximity to EU countries probably explains much of this. He also seems to
have forgotten that users can easily become physically addicted to heroin
after just trying it once. His second point, on the other hand, has much
more merit.

Cameron argues that "we've never tried honest education." He believes that
educators try to scare kids out of pot so badly that they lose credibility.
As a result, kids don't understand the serious harms associated with hard
drugs.

By finally drawing a distinction between marijuana and hard drugs, Cameron
starts sounding sensible.

Criminalizing marijuana is simply indefensible. It has no serious
ill-effects, is not physically addictive and to overdose you have to smoke
about your own body weight in pot (which is impossible because you will
pass out long before that). Conversely, current drug laws end up resulting
in increased crime, racist enforcement, and overcrowded prisons. This is
not the case for hard drugs.

They are highly addictive and have been proven to cause serious, long-term
medical problems, but Cameron wants the government to hand them out for
free. As long as libertarians support the legalization of all drugs,
they'll continue to be pigeonholed as a one-issue party.

What's worse, people will continue to ignore the need to legalize marijuana.