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Original article by Lou Dobbs
Why legalizing drugs is dopey idea
by Lou Dobbs
NY Daily News (August 10, 2003)
We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars in law enforcement, prevention and treatment since former President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971. Yet the use of illicit substances continues to plague our country.
The federal government spends nearly $1 billion a month on this war, but users spend more than five times that much to buy drugs.
Beyond the horrific human toll of 20,000 drug-induced deaths each year, illegal drugs cost our economy more than $280 billion annually, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Incredibly, there are those who choose to ignore drugs' human devastation and economic cost. Many of them are pseudo-sophisticate baby boomers who consider themselves superior and hip in their wry, reckless disregard of the facts.
They also may smoke marijuana, advocate its legalization and rationalize cocaine as what they call a recreational drug.
And there is a surprising list of libertarians and conservatives, including William Buckley and Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, who also advocate the legalization of drugs.
Another Nobel laureate, Gary Becker, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, told me, "It would certainly save a lot of resources for society. We could tax drug use so it could even lead to government revenue."
He also said, "We would be able to greatly cut the number of people in prison, which would save resources for state and local government."
But the cost of drug abuse goes well beyond the expense of controlling supply and demand. Drug users cost the country $160 billion each year in lost productivity. Parental substance abuse is responsible for $10 billion of the $14 billion spent nationally each year on child welfare. And drugs are involved in seven out of 10 cases of abuse and neglect.
Pete Wilson, former governor of California, is a strong opponent of drug legalization. Wilson said the problem that advocates of legalization fail to acknowledge is that drugs are addictive and, therefore, not just another commodity.
"Drugs did not become viewed as bad because they are illegal," Wilson said. "Rather, they became illegal because they are clearly bad."
Although the war on drugs certainly has not captured the American public's attention, there has been success in efforts to curb drug use and supply.
According to the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future Study, the percentage of high school seniors who reported using any drug in the past month decreased to 26% in 2001 from 39% in 1978.
Crop report
There are 9 million fewer drug users in America than there were in 1979. And coca cultivation was 15% lower in Colombia in 2002, thanks to the combined efforts of the U.S. and Colombian governments.
John Walters, national drug control policy director, is optimistic about the war on drugs. Walters told me, "We have to remember that, since we got serious in the '80s, overall drug use is half of what it was. And that's progress."
I would say that is quite a lot of progress, but the job is only half done.
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Guest Rant response to Lou Dobbs,
by Ethan Straffin
Dear Lou,
As an activist in the areas of drug policy and criminal justice, I generally make an honest effort to treat my ideological opponents with respect. However, maybe once or twice a year, a commentator comes along who is so willfully and destructively ignorant that it is all I can manage not to jump right down his throat and build a little house in his abdominal cavity for my dogs to play in. Congratulations! In one fell swoop, you have managed to beat out such prestigious candidates as Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter in the battle for my (admittedly not all that lucrative just yet) Village Idiot Award for the latter half of 2003.
In all fairness, you did make at least a token effort last week to present both sides of the story in your CNN segments on the drug war. Tragically, though, your column in the New York Daily News officially places you among those most lamentable of public figures: those who may well have been in a position to do something real for a cause in which they believed, but whose unchallenged ignorance instead played right into the hands of savvier parties who have an active interest in ensuring that the outcome that you desire is not what will happen.
In your case, some of these parties are drug traffickers. Others are hypocritical addicts like Bill Bennett, and still others are slavering, sycophantic mini-Bennetts (such as our present "drug czar" John Walters) who have no real ideas of their own -- but who recognize power when they see it and have concluded that it suits them.
It is not too late for you to figure this out, and to stop inflicting damage by cheering an agenda that has nothing to do with preventing drug abuse and everything to do with our nation's accelerating transformation into a police state. If you believe that I exaggerate, I urge you to read Drug Warriors and Their Prey by Richard Lawrence Miller (or any of the other books on the suggested reading list that I've enclosed) while asking yourself the following two questions:
1) Does the historical and economic evidence truly suggest that the interdiction- and enforcement-based policies for which you're presently banging the drum will do a damn thing to keep people from abusing, to any significant degree, these substances that you don't happen to like?
2) And, even if you remain convinced that the answer to (1) is "yes," are you sufficiently convinced that the collateral damage of this war on your own countrymen is compatible with the ideals of a free society that you are willing to take personal responsibility for your share in it, when the drug-war equivalent of the Nuremberg trials inevitably come around?
If you can honestly answer both of these questions in the affirmative without flinching, then I've failed in my efforts today and will be forced to either escalate them or write them off. If you cannot, however, you owe it to yourself and to your country to do one of two things: either turn your back on the Bennettistas and join those of us who are fighting an uphill battle to create new polices that address the problem of drug abuse with reason and compassion rather than with scattershot brutality, or shut the hell up. It really is that simple.
Do you remember, Lou, when we tried to "prohibit" the most lethal recreational drug of all? (Okay, so this would technically be tobacco rather than alcohol, but work with me here.) While at least -- back then if not today -- we had enough basic human decency not to throw the users in jail, we nonetheless handed the keys to our cities over to thugs, black-market entrepreneurs of all stripes, corrupt cops, and cynical politicians. Yet even as violent crime predictably skyrocketed, alcohol consumption didn't decline to any significant degree. In fact, more kids started drinking, and the need for discretion pushed drinkers away from beer and toward more concentrated poisons such as the infamous bathtub gin (which was basically the thirties' equivalent of crack cocaine).
Of course, such horrific results provided all the fodder that the Lou Dobbses of the day needed in order to pump their fists and demand that more be done about the demon rum. (As a wise man once wrote: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.") In the end, fortunately, Pauline Sabin of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform -- a woman who was as much ahead of her time as you appear to be behind yours -- came along and drove a stake through the heart of a terrible policy with her immortal words on the floor of Congress: "Women played a large part in the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment. They are now realizing with heart burning and heart aching that if the spirit is not within, legislation can be of no avail. They thought they could make prohibition as strong as the Constitution, but instead have made the Constitution as weak as prohibition."
I raise these issues because, after either three or seven long decades (depending on how you choose to count), the parallels between Prohibition I and Prohibition II should be blindingly obvious to anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex -- let alone someone with the understanding of supply and demand that I frankly should be allowed to expect from someone with your vaunted economic background. When noted antiprohibitionist Albert Einstein defined insanity as "continuing to do the same things and expecting different results," he was talking about you, Lou. So, let's get a few things straight:
It is partly because of ignorant commentators like you that prominent author and AIDS/cancer patient Peter McWilliams choked to death on his own vomit in his bathroom, shortly after a federal judge denied him access to the single medication -- cannabis -- that was making his condition bearable and arguably keeping him alive.
It is partly because of ignorant commentators like you that millionaire Donald Scott was shot to death in a bogus drug raid by law enforcement officers whose government employers badly wanted his land.
It is partly because of ignorant commentators like you that children in Colombia are showing up for school with lungs burning from the effects of the chemicals that we're spraying with reckless abandon in an effort to destroy that nation's coca crop. Out of curiosity: as you laud our "progress" in Colombia, do you happen to care if we irrevocably damage its public health (and what's left of its environment) right along with the coke? In one of a great many dark parallels I could point out with respect to your ideology, the coca growers certainly don't care: they'll simply move elsewhere, since there is approximately 5,000 times as much land in Central and South America that is well-suited to coca cultivation as is needed to satisfy the entire U.S. market. In fact, the coca exodus back into Bolivia -- which nation was once considered a rare U.S. "victory" in the drug war -- has already begun. Tell me, Lou: knowing these things now that you should have taken it upon yourself to know before you opened your big yap, are you quite as prepared to throw a parade in celebration of your beloved 15% decline in Colombian cultivation?
And, most of all...in the end, it is partly because of ignorant commentators like you that our supposedly "free" country hosts 5% of the world's population but 20% of its prisoners, due primarily to the War on Some Drugs. When you write that "the job is only half done," I have to wonder what percentages might accomplish the Final Solution that you appear to crave, when it comes to preventing people from doing things with their own bodies that you don't happen to like. If we were to address your concerns about our national productivity by locking up 49% of our citizens at the behest (and expense) of the other 51% who don't approve of their consensual choices, would our economy be saved and drug abuse finally thwarted? I wouldn't count on it. The despair faced by the prisoners in question would ensure the demand, and the corruption that inevitably results from a half-trillion-dollar illicit industry would continue to ensure that the supply is as ubiquitous in prison as it is anywhere else. End of story. We've already seen it, and there is no earthly reason to imagine that it will turn itself around just because you're willing to clap your hands in support of Tinkerbell while performing the journalistic equivalent of fellatio on Bill Bennett.
You call the increasingly widespread support for legalization and regulation "surprising." Indeed, rather than giving credit to Bill Buckley or Milton Friedman for just maybe being at least as smart as you are, you choose to join the rest of the drug-war dinosaurs in looking to the sky and wondering how it can be that large chunks of matter appear to be raining down. Even as most of the rest of the world has been starting to figure out that the ultra-violent approach that your country and mine has chosen as a "solution" to drug abuse is even worse than no solution at all, you continue to wave your pathetic little drug-war flag. So be it. I can only lament the sorry spectacle, mourn its hundreds of millions of victims, and pray for your soul.
I mean, come on, Lou. You correctly identify Nixon as the founder of our modern drug war, so would it be wrong of me to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know that Nixon inaugurated said war over the strident objections of the bona-fide scientists whom he commissioned to study the matter -- and who recommended blanket legalization? If so, can I at least trust that you are capable of typing "Shafer Commission" into Google? For that matter, do you or do you not support the motives that Nixon expressed, on tape, as discussed here:
www.cannabis.net/politics/richard-nixon.html
If this document surprises you, then it's all the more reason that you should either educate yourself, keep your mouth shut, or prepare to be taken on publically by a gathering army of outspoken individuals who don't care for racism or antisemitism any more than you care for certain substances.
Because, Lou, the awful truth is this: ever since we criminalized opium to get back at Asian immigrants, and ever since we criminalized marijuana to get back at Mexican farm laborers and African-American jazz musicians, the drug war has been first and foremost a war upon people who are less privileged, less white, and/or less Christian than you or I. Today, it accomplishes its modern-day Jim Crow mission with breathtaking efficiency. In fact, one in three African-American males can now expect to find themselves guests of the prison-industrial complex within their lifetimes, due in large part to the drug war -- even as the statistics clearly demonstrate that black people don't use illicit drugs any more than white people do.
I assume that you are familiar with the verb "decimate," which was coined long ago in recognition of the evidence that any undesirable populace can be kept down quite effectively by taking just one in ten of its members out of the loop? If the drug war continues to proceed at its current pace, we're going to need to coin a whole new word that better reflects our modern-day refinements of this strategy.
Meanwhile, with all this going on, you busy yourself by granting a forum to genuine howlers like the following quote from an ex-governor whose incompetent stewardship of my state has been surpassed only by that of Gray Davis: "Drugs did not become viewed as bad because they are illegal. Rather, they became illegal because they are clearly bad." Is Pete Wilson truly prepared to debate the goodness-to-badness ratio of the legal drug alcohol as compared to the illegal drug marijuana, with respect to their comparative death tolls and effects on mind and body? Is he prepared to defend the use of your tax dollars and mine to arrest an astonishing 750,000 American citizens a year on marijuana charges? And, given that the man clearly fancies himself a scholar on the subject of how and why certain drugs became illegal, is he prepared to stand in solidarity with the unconscionably racist statements made by Harry Anslinger on the floor of Congress as Anslinger argued successfully for marijuana prohibition -- and as the American Medical Association, which opposed Anslinger's initiative vociferously, found itself distinctly uninvited to the proceedings?
Of course he isn't. He doesn't need to be, because our rapidly decaying Fourth Estate has failed dismally in its duty not to allow the likes of Pete Wilson to get away with saying mind-bogglingly stupid things. (And yes, Lou: this means you.)
Sheriff Bill Masters of Colorado has referred to the drug war as "America's #1 Policy Disaster." There is a strong preponderance of evidence -- a great deal of which was federally funded -- that supports his conclusion, and I am proud to be part of a growing community of reformers who will be more than happy to place it before you to whatever extent is necessitated by futher braindead diatribes on your part.
Most likely, of course, you will continue to write off my kind as "pseudo-sophisticate baby boomers who consider themselves superior and hip in their wry, reckless disregard of the facts." I can only warn you that you have already scored a fairly dismal 33% in your attempt to stereotype this particular reformer, which doesn't bode well for your future attempts to pigeonhole me. To wit: I am no baby boomer, and I honestly couldn't care less whether you or anyone else considers me hip. On the other hand, I am quite certain that -- far from disregarding the facts -- I am indeed far superior to you in my grasp of them. So bring your prohibitionist lunacy on, Lou, and watch out for the comets.
Sincerely yours,
Ethan Straffin
Palo Alto, CA
"A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring
one another; shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own
pursuits of industry and improvement."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"You can be active with the activists or sleep in with the sleepers /
While you're waiting for the great leap forwards." -- Billy Bragg
Suggested Reading:
Sheriff Bill Masters, Drug War Addiction
Steven Young, Maximizing Harm: Losers and Winners in the Drug War
Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War On Drugs and the Politics of Failure
Eva Bertram (Editor), et al., Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial
Robert H. Dowd, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF (Ret), The Enemy Is Us: How to Defeat Drug Abuse and End the "War on Drugs"
Dirk Chase Eldredge, Ending the War on Drugs
Milton Friedman and Thomas Szasz, Friedman and Szasz on Liberty and Drugs: Essays on the Free Market and Prohibition
Judge James P. Gray, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs
Mike Gray, Drug Crazy : How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get Out
Mike Gray (Editor), et al., Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords and Washington's War on Drugs
Richard Lawrence Miller, Drug Warriors and Their Prey
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