- 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 “We repealed prohibition once and we can do it again,” one of the group’s co-founders, Terry Nelson, told a Washington news conference on December 2.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.
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Oh come on people! Do you honestly think the government and the corporate giants in this country are any different than the drug lords they are at war with? You can buy a senate seat for the right price these days. Open your eyes! Any way this issue goes you and I are going to be the losers. Ask yourself, either way, are my taxes going to go down? Is the price of food going to go down? Will I be any safer in my own home? No! every nook and cranny of this country is rife with crooks from top to bottom. The fact that gas is affordable all of a sudden shows there was and is no shortage. The whole world is run by criminals, that’s the only truth left on this earth.
To the gentleman who said that the tobacco companies would only make the marijuana cancerous, I have nothing against people using it but, I think his comment proves that heavy use impedes ones learning capabilities. Growers in other countries us a number of pesticides on the crops. Does he think they wash the weed before they package it up for sale? I don’t think so. You won’t be able to grow it at home, how would you be taxed? So, your options are to get caught and go to jail or smoke the marlboro weed.
Legalize drugs? You silly Americans.
It will never happen. I have a dozen lobbyists in Washington right now making sure they *never* take my profits away!!
Don’t legalize marijuana; just DECRIMINALIZE it. You are NOT a criminal and you should NOT be put in jail for using marijuana. Decriminalization will clear out the jails and return people to their families where they can live productive lives.
I think that legalization would be a good idea also, but not at the grocery and drug store. I think that there should be a new category of store created that is run by the state that would be tied in with the medical establishment. A prescription would be needed to get your legalized drug just like the other drugs and one would have to visit a para physician that is trained in drug addiction and other facets of this so that they could help people if they wanted to quit their “prescription”. A good medical person could be a good advocate which could advise people on their drug use, so that they would not overdose or get aids. I think that the person would have to show that they need to have these drugs to get through the day before they get them, or they would be out selling them on a secondary market that would develop for people that couldn’t get a prescription. These type of drugs would need to be treated like illegal drugs are now. In other words, legal use for yourself would be ok, but helping or enabling someone else would not be. There needs to be controls since the goal would not be to try to make it more prevalent, but less so.
The arguments are the same as they were 50 years ago and the conclusions are the same. Take a walk around the streets of amsterdam and ask is this where you would like your children to grow. One point which should be raised in the debate would be the overall loss of national productivity lost in increased numbers of users. Weed drains motivation hugely!! There are very distinct differences in the effects of alcohol and cannabis to be considered when making any comparison to alcohol prohibition.
Many people suggest that it is not in the states business to decide what a person should and shouldn’t put in their body and that the decision should be left to the user but I disagree with this very strongly for the following reason: It will be the state and it’s citzens who end up having to pay for the increased healthcare costs with poorer services due to the increased burden on resources (well in the UK anyway, over there, you just have to pay higher insurance i guess), and while you are getting bamboozled instead of working, then it will be the state and it’s citzens that have to pay for your benefits. It will be the state and its citzens who pick up the tab for your detox /rehabillitation /drug counselling / Psychotherapy etc etc etc - Therefore, whichever state you reside in, it IS the business of the state what you put in your body, because ultimately, when you mess yourself up, everyone else is picking up the tab. Arnie swarznegger caused outrage when he said that people need to be told what to do, but the drug ravaged mind is easily swayed and I lose count of the number of smokers who are content to smoke their life, brains and health away rather than face the demon of giving up. Drug addicts need help, information on side effects, maybe counselling, maybe support , usually something to replace what purpose the drug was having for the user but most certainly not increased availablity of drugs!
Weed is the ultimate tool for procrastinating, but procrastinating isn’t healthy.
There is also the fact that this will encourage non-tobacco smokers to begin smoking tobacco too as they become addicted to the tobacco in joints.
To suggest that its wrong to do the same thing over and over when it isnt working is one way of looking at it - but another way is this: this is a battle we are fighting - just like the one against poverty, crime, cancer etc. Just because we havent won the battle yet doesnt mean we should give up the fight. You might find if we did that, then years down the line the fight would be a lot harder and maybe impossible to recover from due to social unrest (take away a smokers weed and he can become very vexxed!!) and the problem will be much bigger than before.
There is a reason that it’s illegal virtually all over the globe. It’s still technically illegal in amsterdam, just ‘tolerated’, but if you ever go there and see the streets full of wandering lost souls muttering out loud (it reminds me in someways of my visions of hell), you see the possibilities for social destruction.
For me it’s a no vote, but if you wanna go ahead, you’ll see, 20 years down the line, the US will be full of dimwits….:)
All my friends who smoke weed, mostly smoke weed all day. Most of them work, but they lose jobs frequently, and smoke during the day, driving jobs, labourers, any basic stuff you can do while puffing really - battered brains, basic jobs, brown teeth, black eyes…. The ones that don’t smoke have stunning careers & stunning girl to match…Makes me wish so much that I took the straight and narrow path
The War on Drugs is another example of the incompetency of the federal and state governments. To correct this problem I call on the Governors to pardon all pot smokers. I call on the government to repeal laws outlawing drug use.
Damn, just think about all the money we can save releasing prisoners. Imagine the tax revenue from the legalized sale of drugs. Wow…seems kinda simple to me.
[...] I just don’t see it happening any time soon. Reuters Technorati Tags: War on Drugs, Marijuana, Decriminalization « To: the Amerocan people [...]
I think the government should start a war on cell phones. They’re much more dangerous than pot and impaired techno-druggies are swerving all over the road while they read, type and chat while driving! For the love of humanity, stop the madness!
Spare me from all the dire warnings about how people won’t be able to control their usage if drugs are legalized.
The same concept behind not crossing a roads dividing line is at play (i.e. …cross this and disaster happens).
I don’t want fellow citizens telling me what I can put into MY body anymore than I want them telling me what god (if any) to believe in.
Look into the drug referendum from Switzerland. swiss citizen voted overwhelmingly for it with significant outcome to the present.
Not a single one of you people saying, “It shouldn’t be legalized” have addressed the problem. Namely : America imprisons 25% of the worlds prisoners while we only have 5% of the worlds population.
The number of officers lives that would be saved far outweigh the minor increase in drug use that would happen with legalization (if any increase happened at all, which none of you can prove).
If you can’t see that alcohol, and tobacco are better off legal, then you’re simply denying the truth of reality. Come out of your wishful thinking world, and deal with it. The world, and America would be better off with legalized and regulated drugs.
If anything there should be an economic reason not to do drugs should be implemented. Something along the lines of a public database of drug purchasers, or drug testing, and then you simply don’t get good jobs if you’re a drug user. Supply and demand (even if sadly) rule this world, and REALITY.
Again, get a dose of the stuff, because it sure sounds like “reality” is the drug you people need to get some of.
Mr. Debusmann,
This is the 75th anniversary of legalized booze? How ironic. 12 years ago this past Thanksgiving my brother died from his drug and alcohol addiction. I am against legalized street drugs and I think alcohol advertising should be as restricted as cigarette smoking adds are. I believe what is needed continual education about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse and addiction, especially for young children. I never knew alcohol was an addictive substance and I am sure my brother didn’t either. I thought addiction was just a lack of will power. Wrong. My brother started with pot in Jr. High School and ended at the age of 40 a heroin user and an alcoholic.
Pot not addictive? Having known a couple of “pot heads” I can tell you they need their pot as much as any drunk or “druggie” needs their drug. One has even graduated to other drugs. Just like my brother did.
“Even still, that’s no reason to make alcohol, or any other drug, illegal — criminalization doesn’t solve drug abuse problems — it just creates other problems. ”
I do not agree far more problems with be created if drugs are legalized. Far more people will try and use and become addicted to drugs if they are legal. Some of these drugs are addictive after the FIRST USE and are so by design. Remember the tobacco companies? They made cigarets MORE addictive. The same will happen with legal street drugs.
Addicts commit crimes to get money for drugs because they are usually unemployable because of their addiction. This will not change if drugs are legal. More crime, more pain and suffering. Only the profits will be legal.
Daren wrote: “admitted to it). Most of those 30% have legitimate jobs and are living amongst non-smokers who probably don’t have much idea of this.”
I doubt your percentages. I remember in high school a stoner announcing in class that he bet most everyone in the class smoked just like him. He was wrong. I knew for a fact at least half did not, myself included. Total addict thinking. As for the people that do get high and actually have a job? ( It has been my experience that pot is a huge motivation killer, why work when you can get high.) They also show up to work stoned. Having worked with a few pot heads I never appreciate their disregard for safety, work ethic, or the fact that they stink of the stuff. People can not work drunk so why should they be allowed to work while high.
Posted by bkskiispow -Oh by the way, marijuana is already socially accepted despite the Federal Gov.’s best efforts
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Ah, no it is not. Many people do not find pot smokers acceptable. That junk stinks. Yuck.
mark schalter wrote: “Switzerland and The Netherlands. Neither country has seen an increase in harder drug use as a result, and the coffers of both nations have ”
This is now no longer true. Read an article last month about dutch cities and towns are now restricting soft drug sales because of the problems being imported by drug tourists. They are also trying to curb the harder drug sales that have been found to be happening due to drug tourism.
I loved a comment from Jesse Jackson regarding legalizing drugs. He said we would be trading street criminals for corporate criminals. Look at the history of the U.S. Heroin and cocaine were legal and then banned because of the harm they were doing people. Heroin was ADVERTISED by vendors as a remedy for crying babies! The History Channel ran a great show called the History of Drugs, and it featured segments on various mind altering drugs: alcohol, narcotics, pot, pills. You think you can handle your drugs safely? Go ahead… play with fire.
Fighting drugs seems to be like fighting California fires. Once you declare war on either, instead of removing the need or the cause, you create a massive industry that feeds on itself–both the drugs and fires become valuable commodities.
http://feww.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/soc als-godfather-brush-fire/
Have you heard that the Dutch are now restricting so called “soft drug” sales because they are tired of the troubles “drug tourists” are bringing to their country. Did someone say high drivers are safer than drunk drivers?!?!?! First driving under the influence of any drugs or alcohol is illegal if you are impaired. Secondly your statement is little comfort to sober drivers like me. People should never drive while impaired by drugs or alcohol.
If you think pot smoking is safer than cigaret smoking you are wrong again. My spouse is a nurse and has seen more than a few pot smokers in hospital with SEVER lung diseases. All caused from pot smoking. Of course these pot using patients are in denial about the cause of their illness even when the doctor tells them why they can’t breath.