DRUG WAR HERETIC

Few topics generate more bad trips than drug policy, with prohibitionists
often acting like the wigged-out PCP users who still haunt
drug-czar-approved TV scripts. For their part, legalizers sometimes
substitute outrage for command of the relevant facts. Into such a trippy
arena comes Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places
(Cambridge University Press).

Written by Robert I. MacCoun and Peter Reuter - professors of public policy
at the University of California and the University of Maryland - the book
is a detailed and dispassionate discussion of how the U.S. might best
decide the legal status of drugs. Whether drug warriors will respect the
authors' conclusion that current drug policies need to be rethought - and
whether legalizers will applaud the relatively modest reforms supported by
MacCoun and Reuter - is anybody's guess. But both camps would do well to
come to terms with the wealth of information and analysis in Drug War Heresies.

Reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie spoke with Peter Reuter in December

Q: What other vices, times, and places are most relevant to current U.S.
drug policy?

A: Vices include alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and prostitution. Times
include America when cocaine was legal. And places include Western Europe,
where over the past two decades there has been a shift from very tough
prohibition to some notably different regimes.

The question with all of these is, What can we learn from these different
experiences? There are different tradeoffs with all policies, and there
should be some experiments here.

Q: You and your co-author strive for balance but admit that your own
sympathies are with the reform effort, at least in its best intentioned.
least dogmatic form. Why?

A: The string of negative adjectives to describe current policies is
endless. Maybe we are better off with current policies than with
legalization. But surely there are other, more effective ways of limiting
or prohibiting drug use or its negative outcomes. We're not all that
concrete on what those things are, but they include, for example. arresting
fewer people.

Q: Where do you see drug policy going?

A: Until a year or so ago, unrelenting pessimism toward any change was
warranted. Polls suggest that there is enough popular discontent that you
can imagine a change to more freedom in some areas, especially related to
medical uses of marijuana. The public believes nothing works, but they
don't necessarily want to try something very different. It was a six-year
struggle to change the strict Rockefeller laws in New York, and there's
still an extraordinarily harsh regime in place. On the federal level, can't
see any change for a very long time.