- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -
Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. His definition fits America’s war on drugs, a multi-billion dollar, four-decade exercise in futility.
The war on drugs has helped turn the United States into the country with the world’s largest prison population. (Noteworthy statistic: The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population and around 25 percent of the world’s prisoners). Keen demand for illicit drugs in America, the world’s biggest market, helped spawn global criminal enterprises that use extreme violence in the pursuit of equally extreme profits.
Over the years, the war on drugs has spurred repeated calls from social scientists and economists (including three Nobel prize winners) to seriously rethink a strategy that ignores the laws of supply and demand.
Under the headline “The Failed War on Drugs,” Washington’s respected, middle-of-the-road Brookings Institution said in a November report that drug use had not declined significantly over the years and that “falling retail drug prices reflect the failure of efforts to reduce the supply of drugs.”
Cocaine production in South America stands at historic highs, the report noted.
Like other think tanks, Brookings stopped short of recommending a radical departure from past policies with a proven track record of failure such as spending billions on crop eradication in Latin America and Asia while allotting paltry sums in comparison to rehabilitating addicts.
Enter Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization started in 2002 by police officers, judges, narcotics agents, prison wardens and others with first-hand experience of implementing policies that echo the prohibition of alcohol. Prohibition, now widely regarded a dismal and costly failure of social engineering, came to an end 75 years ago this week.
As LEAP sees it, the best way to fight drug crime and violence is to legalize drugs and regulate them the same way alcohol and tobacco is now regulated. “We repealed prohibition once and we can do it again,” one of the group’s co-founders, Terry Nelson, told a Washington news conference on December 2. “We cannot arrest our way out of this problem.”
FROM AL CAPONE TO DRUG CARTELS
“In the 20s and 30s, we had Al Capone and his gangsters getting rich and shooting up our streets,” said Nelson, who spent a 32-year government career fighting drugs in the U.S. and Latin America. “Today we have criminal gangs, cartels, Taliban and al-Qaeda profiting from the prohibition of drug sales and wreaking havoc all over the world. The correlation is obvious.”
The before-and-after sequence is so obvious that the U.S. Congress passed a resolution in September noting that the 1933 repeal of alcohol prohibition had replaced a “dramatic increase” in organized crime with “a transparent and accountable system of distribution and sales” that generated billions of dollars in tax revenues and boosted the sick economy.
That’s where advocates of drug legalization want to go now, and some of them hope that the similarities between today’s deep economic crisis and the Great Depression will result in a more receptive audience for their pro-legalization arguments among lawmakers and government leaders.
The budgetary impact of legalizing drugs would be enormous, according to a study prepared to coincide with the 75th anniversary of prohibition’s end by Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron. He estimates that legalizing drugs would inject $76.8 billion a year into the U.S. economy — $44.1 billion through savings on law enforcement and at least $32.7 billion in tax revenues from regulated sales.
Miron published a similar study in 2005 looking only at the budgetary effect of legalizing marijuana, the most widely used illicit drug in the United States. That study was endorsed by more than 500 economists, including Nobel laureates Milton Friedman of Stanford University, George Akerlof of the University of California and Vernon Smith of George Mason University.
“We urge…the country to commence an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition,” the economists said in an open letter to President George W. Bush, congress, governors and state legislators. “At a minimum, this debate will force advocates of current policy to show that prohibition has benefits sufficient to justify the cost to taxpayers, foregone tax revenues and numerous ancillary consequences that result from marijuana prohibition.”
The advocates of current policy, led by outgoing President George W. Bush’s drug czar, John Walters, never took up the challenge to discuss cost-benefit equations. His Office of National Drug Control Policy has focused, with the single-minded determination of a moral crusader, on doing the same thing over and over again.
But the United States is not alone in pursuing drug strategies that are based more on wishful thinking than on sober analysis. If you put faith in declarations by the United Nations, a “drug-free world” is an attainable goal and the war on drugs all but over.
In 1998, a special session of the U.N. General Assembly forecast that the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy would be eliminated or significantly reduced by the year 2008, a deadline that also applied to “significant and measurable results in the field of demand reduction.”
The clock is ticking towards midnight, December 31, 2008.
— You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com. For more columns by Bernd Debusmann, click here. —
Want to debate? Send in your written submissions to debate@thomsonreuters.com.
Why should pot be illegal? Because the only companies poised to grow, package and sell it are the tobacco companies. Look at how they bastardized tobacco by adding so many additives and chemicals that American cigarettes have been banned in many countries. If Marlboro is allowed to sell joints we will end up with marijuana that is addictive and cancerous.
I'll take mine home-grown, thank you.
Trackback
344 comments so far
Previous | 18 … | 16 | 15 | 14 | 13 | 12 | … 1 | Next
Oh by the way, marijuana is already socially accepted despite the Federal Gov.’s best efforts
why not?
Smoke Rasta ……. Ski Fasta
or
Smoke Marijuana……..Ski where ya wanna
or
Smoke Pot………Ski Hot
Einstein also said “Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence”. Those who try to outlaw things that tear society apart - based on intelligence - are opposed on the grounds that, it would just be easier and net a better payoff if we let it go.
This is yet another discussion that starts so far beyond the limits of reason that it is impossible to drag it all the way back and start over. It seems to imply that the best way to get rid of a problem is simply to declare that it is not a problem anymore and suddenly everyone is rich and happy. Wow! Why have we not done this sooner. We could pay for the bailout with drug tax money… cocaine is not harmful to people or society, we just overreacted… Hey, now all the drug offenders will have to be let out on the street… Wait, are we going to use all the tax money to pay for their care and feeding or to rehab all the people lying in the gutter because they simply had too much fun? Are all the drug dealers going to get licenses now? Will the money be used to fund all the underfunded addiction-treatment programs? Will the cyclical nature of such a things ever catch up with itself. Does a dog ever catch his tail?
“How can people - like Warwick an others here - argue that legalizing addictive/harmful substances is somehow a moral failure when the two biggest killers BY FAR (alcohol and tobacco) are legal? Why not criminalize those substances?” - stevelo
Yes, the 2 biggest killers are alcohol and tobacco - is it because of their lethal potential or the fact that it is available to and used by a much wider part of society due to their legal nature? What I was trying to say was that it’s a lot easier to repeal prohibition that it is to implement it. If we legalise drugs and get it wrong, it is going to be one huge task of getting us back to where we are.
Why can’t a well-funded public education and awareness campaign along with effective rehabilitation services policy be implemented as an initial step to tackling drugs. While you never stand a chance of removing every user, it would at least provide some preventitive health care - which tends to be a lot cheaper in the long term than reactionary health care.
Government regulation of the drug trade won’t stop the black market because there will always be someone who is willing to do it cheaper - look at media piracy and illegal tobacco for example. Regulation will merely end up with a less expensive method of obtaining drugs for existing users and the removal of existing barriers which may have prevented potential future users from using. The profit margins aren’t going to be as big but the market will have grown significantly.
You will never remove the drug trade and whether the penalties are effective is of much doubt - but making improvements in terms of better rehabilitation and education programs, you could at least provide a better approach than what is being offered now. Tackling the social reasons behind drug use and related crime would be much more effective than just spending money making the same old mistakes known as this war on drugs.
The consultant in San Antonio must be on the take to advocate doing the same thing forever when it accomplishes NOTHING. In fact, the problem worsens daily and the world wide problem affects us directly also. Jose sounds like he is saving the country from drug use. I got news Jose–they are buying MORE every day!!
Making the US gummit the ONLY buyer, who could play the cartels against each other for price, selling it cheaply to individuals through the pharmacies, logging the buyer as a user, would go a LONG way toward eliminating much of the problem. It would still require keeping a border patrol and drug forces to capture the illegal entry of drugs and it would take some time to carry it out. Eventually the drug force on ALL the police districts in the country could be cut down to a coupla officers. It didn’t happen overnight and it won’t be cured overnight.
But, think of all of the officials that the drug money couldn’t buy anymore? Think of all of the robberies, the muggings and the murders, committed for money to buy drugs, that could be eliminated!!! Think of all of the young women that might be saved from the prostitution world through the temptation of drug use.
To me, the reasons for repealing the prohibition of drugs overwhelms the reasons to keep on the same non-effective path.
BTW, when drugs were legal about the only ones using were little old ladies on cough medicine and the coca cola drinkers. Occassionally the pharmacist had a problem and THAT is dangerous but could be stopped by random testing.
The benefits seem huge to me. One thing is for absolute certain: It couldn’t be any worse than it is.
[...] http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/20 08/12/03/einstein-insanity-and-the-war-o n-drugs/ « Truth Before Your Eyes [...]
Financial arguments alone do not provide sufficient reason to repeal criminal drug laws and legalize their sale. There are many arguments (of similar importance) beyond the financial - and, further, I’m sure that the economic analyses performed in the past don’t account for a plethora of other problems associated with drug legalization. There are political principles, economic factors, and moral issues encapsulated within our collective responsibility in making drug policy.
Yes! Drugs may have severe impacts on the individual, and on our communities that are detrimental - and may be exacerbated by legalization. However, legalization of drugs may help remove the criminal stigma of their use; instead, social pressure will become the ultimate (and most appropriate) conduit for controlling these substances in our communities. Of course, the free use of drugs in the privacy of one’s home may not have any detrimental effect on any other person not located in that home - where may I step in to initiate the use of force against my neighbor, where her actions have no detrimental consequence to my health or property? Heavy addiction to legalized drugs, and the correlated increase in availability may mean that far more people are tempted by and succumb to their overuse. Just as alcohol has claimed many happy families and created a negative pall in many communities; excessive drug use may do the same.
Would rehabilitation cure these issues? probably not, but maybe! More likely, legalization will bring to the surface many issues of addiction, and provide additional (effective) avenues for handling and curing addiction.
Lost in looking at the forest is the very obvious tree that continued prohibition against soft drugs feeds what are billions into the coffers of those “enforcement” is after. Exactly who came up with the logic of making your adversaries stronger to defeat them? Remove their funding, and more than half the problems are gone.
Well, after spending many years in doing Gang & Street Work, being a Juvenile and Adult Probation-Parole Officer and supervisor in a correctional facility before being an investigator of state and local governments, I buy the argument that we should end the prohibition on drugs just as we did on Alcohol.
I think that legalizing drugs and maybe even taxing them would go a long way towards ending the illegal drug trade and violence that we experience on the border. There would be little profit to be made by the drug cartels if there were legally accessible and affordable drugs available to those who chose to use them. While I agree that there are some hard drugs that can addict and mess folks up, for the most part this is a medical issue not unlike alcoholism and I believe should be treated that way.
The article mentioned the high number of incarcerated folks in the US. That is an accurate description of our Correctional State of Affairs.
And we as a public pay dearly for the choice our society has made on the handling and treatment of the violators of our drug laws. Jailing folks is an extremely uncost-effective way to punish most folk. In fact most jailed folks could do well in medium or low custody facilities thereby decreasing our care and custody costs. (In 2007, as an example Minnesota paid an average of $47.12 to $78.78 per day depending on the custody level or $17,198.80 to $28,754.70 per year per inmate. If your curious there is a 2004 DOJ report that recaps the expenses for 2001 at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/spe 01.pdf )
(As a side note it is even less cost effective to impose capital punishment not even counting the numbers of folk who may have been wrongly executed. A Study showed the Maryland spent on the average of $37 million for each of the death sentences it fulfilled. An Indiana study showed that it cost them 37% more to execute a prisoner than to have them serve life without parole. See: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-de ath-penalty
Personally I like life without parole anyway as a better punishment that lasts for years rather than seconds. And, if there was an error in the case, you can rectify it.)
Inaddition, when we incarcerate those folk, I have rarely seen good or even adequate treatment programs in institutions that have high rates of “cure” or non-recidivism. I have seen better and more effective programs in the free world
In my opinion, we would find it cheaper as a society to let the addicts stay on the street and have access to legal drugs and treatment which would remove most reasons that cause them to break laws to feed a habit. But it is our Christian/puritan ethos that does not allow that approach, so we pay and pay and see no progress other than increased jail populations and gang drug wars over turf and money.
Now I am not saying that we should not prosecute and jail folks who break our laws. We do need to do that to keep order in our society.
But we choose what laws are on the books and how or if they are enforced and what the penalties are.
We can save our secure and costly institutional space for those dangerous violent offenders. And put minimum and medium security cases in community correctional facilities and save tons of taxpayer dollars.
By decriminalizing drug use we would also find that there would be relief for the Courts, Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys. We would have to increase the number of community mental health resources, something we promised to do when we closed the mental institutions in our country but never funded.
I guess I could go on and on about this subject including how medical staff who were taking care of my son-in-law’s mother who was dying of pancreatic cancer encouraged her to get some marijuana to help with pain. But she being a very religious person could never bring herself to use it as she thought it was “wrong”
The prohibition of marijuana came about because lawmakers in California wanted an easy means of arresting and detaining Mexicans who were coming over the border to do farm labor and were being used as a vehicle to sew fear among voters.
Now the prohibition has taken on a life of it’s own, supported mostly by the Religious Right.
The Drug War has ruined our inner cities, promoted the growth of gang culture throughout the United States and broken up millions of families over the years by subjecting millions of Americans to cruel and unusual terms in prison.
Telling someone what they can and cannot put in their own bodies is the ultimate invasion of privacy. It goes against everything our Constitution represents. It’s evil and it’s kiling us.
Another convuleted antiseptic, academic arguement in favor of the legitimization, NOT LEGALIZATION, of some of the MOST DANGEROUS AND HARMFUL CHEMICALS EVERY USED BY THE HUMAN RACE. Quite frankly, to have a supply and demand discussion and rationalize the use and distribution of these letal chemicals is outraageoius. I would invite the author to do some due dillience on the effects of these drugs on the users, these are toxic in every sense of the word. The riciculous assumption of the captial poured into our economy would be mroe than offset by the avoidable health consequences of exapnded usage of these substances, including Marijuana.
People like this author should learn tha true sulutions to every day problems are not contained within the arms length discussions of academic eggheads with not clue what it is like to face drug abuse issues face to face with addicted familieis and indviduals.
It is not insanity to try ot prevent the more widespread usage of these drugs, until a better efforts is made by the American Public that continues to consume and pay for the violence and death associated with it, we have to keep doing the same thing,
Jose Marquez is a Drug Prevention Consultant in San Antonio TX and may be reached at jmarquez@pagpllc.cm
Why not start with legalizing marijuana? We could gauge the results in increased tax revenues, reduced law enforcement costs, and health and social impact.
If the results are favorable and the negative consequences few, we could then legalize safer cuts of cocaine–maybe like the original Coca Cola… or a new drink at Starbucks?
This is something I have given a lot of thought to recently. I was a Customs officer on the Mexican border in Arizona and just finished writing a book on my border experiences. In my border world statistics had flesh and blood faces. I was personally involved in hundreds of people being busted and eventually sent to prison for marijuana smuggling. The vast majority of them did not seem to me to be really criminal types. The genuine bad dudes did pop up from time to time. But many of the hapless smugglers were just poor Mexicans hopelessly caught in that country’s grinding poverty. And the rest were more like the guy next door down on his luck or some kid with more guts that sense, or, very often,just some lazy schmuck looking to made an easy fast buck.
I think it would have made more sense to sentence them to a job than to prison.
This has nudged me off the fence. I’m joining LEAP.
Score one more vote for repealing prohibition.
Marijuana has been sold legally under governmental control on the open market and at a fair price for more than a decade in both Switzerland and The Netherlands. Neither country has seen an increase in harder drug use as a result, and the coffers of both nations have been handsomely increased as a result of the taxes obtained from marijuana sales. America could learn something from their example.
There are a number of misconceptions about the health effects of illegal drugs and narcotics compared to the popular legal drugs.
For example, how many of the commentators realize that:
(1) Nicotine is the most addictive of all drugs and it’s use results in more deaths than all the illegal drugs combined.
(2)The effects of withdrawal from alcohol addiction are much worse than from any narcotic or other physically addictive drug.
I enjoyed reading your article and agree with most of your points. In the comments, including the “best comment”, I keep reading ‘the 2 most deadly drugs are legal’. Now come on, do you really believe cocaine is less deadly than alcohol or heroin less deadly than tobacco? The two most deadly drugs are legal because they are legal and readily available. Not as many people do cocaine because there are serious consequences with the law. If people could buy cocaine at the gas station, you can be sure there would be a new “most deadly drug” at the top of the list. I’m all for legalizing marijuana, and I could even support legalizing everything. Let people do what they want. If the life of a crack fiend is the life they choose, let them have fun and die an early but quick death of heart failure. If they want to smoke a joint while they watch Scooby Doo, so be it. Don’t sheepishly disregard the facts of how dangerous these drugs are by labeling tobacco as more deadly than morphine or cocaine or heroin though. Give me a break.
DOM imagines: Does anyone know what the most smuggled-in product is in the United States? Cigarettes!
I REPLY: Utter nonsense.
Tobacco products do see some interstate diversion via illegal methods due to varying tax levels by state, but evn with this smuggling, over 99.9% of all tobacco sales are made by legal and licensed dealers.
The most smuggled product in North America is marijuana with upwards of 30million Americans as buyers.
The next two most commonly smuggled items would be cocaine (3 to 4million American buyers) and firearms.
MIKE ponders: If criminal enterprises are willing to risk life and limb to sell drugs illegally, what makes anyone think they won’t risk life and limb to avoid paying taxes on drugs and continue to sell them illegally?
I REPLY: Illegal street dealers cannot financially compete with legal, regulated dealers. This can be proven by looking at the two most popular drugs in North America - alcohol and tobacco and of course, most over the counter drugs.
There is no street trade for tobacco or alcohol.
There is at the moment a relatively small street trade for controlled pharmacueticals, but that is due in large part to the current monopolies enjoyed by a small number of American Rx companies and by the fact that we have two tiers of consumers for Rx pharms.
Americans with insurance coverage get Rx pharms at about 1/4 the price paid by Americans without insurance coverage.
Eliminate that discrepancy and street dealers would not be able to compete.
We can acknowledge that the war on drugs was long ago lost. It’s in every city and small town across the US. That’s not exactly how it was envisioned to come out.
Not only would tax revenues increase but the legal system would become a whole lot less hectic in the day to day functioning. Face it drug cases are by far the largest percentage of what is passing though and bogging down the serving of justice.
As has been mentioned, as long as drugs such as marijuana are held illegal, this system will continue to be a problem.
There are people whom will do drugs. No mandating of how it will be by law will stop it. That’s why illegal drugs are our second (black market) economy, allowing money to flow out of the country like water. We evidently can’t print it fast enough to cover that which is leaving the country. True it is not the only reason for money to leave the country as long as our currency is considered the worlds standard but it has a large part to do with it.
We have a mini-war on the streets in cities across the nation today as innocent bystanders happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time next to a target that the shooters who can’t aim and hit their targets become the KIAs. Remove the financial reward of these drug dealers and near over night, shootings will become less and less of something everyone fears because they can not stop it.
You see, it’s not just those doing drugs that are suffering from the problem. If you live in a large city, you never know when the morning might come and you wake up to find out your spouse or worse a your child might have died in the night as a bullet came through the wall of your home.
Because drugs are illegal there is no place to buy them over the counter. Those that will do them are forced to deal with criminals in the process. One of the side results of that is scorn for the police and the laws they are forced to enforce. This in turn becomes a pervasive attitude from the public towards the law.
This is exactly how the term pig came to be when mentioned in the derogatory terms for the police. Unpopular laws eventually result in this. So not only are we making criminals by the multitudes as these laws are applied but society begins to look at law units with disdain.
We are spending what is near some small third world countries annual budgets. I believe by this time we have proven throwing money at it isn’t working, nor is adding manpower to it making a dent in the drug flow. What we have revealed is that there are tons of ways for terrorists to slip things into the country and it is shown how to do that by other drug kings near daily.
On the “bright” side, the government has learned at least a little from the prohibition experiment. They’ve learned that if you keep the substance legal, but steadily remove the places where it’s legal to use it, you can at least get people to cooperate with that end of it. They’re still trying to figure out how to get people to quit smoking once it’s only legal to do in their bedroom under a blanket with the lights off on odd Tuesdays. As soon as they get that figured out, they can finally solve all our really big problems… like our gross misuse of free will, civil liberties, and other nuisances. The government has also been actively brainwashing the general populace into believing that marijuana was directly responsible for everything from an increased mexican crime rate to terrorism. They’d look like fools if they turned around at this point and contradicted themselves. That’d be like President Bush announcing to the nation that there were no WMD’s in Iraq, or that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11… Oh… right.