- 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 “We repealed prohibition once and we can do it again,” one of the group’s co-founders, Terry Nelson, told a Washington news conference on December 2.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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With new technologies capable of discovering recreational drug use becoming more commonplace all the time, it’s likely that recreational drug users will become more vocal about their beliefs as an unintended side-effect.
Stupid laws such as the legislation that characterizes the WoD only exist as long as it’s possible for most people to ignore them and get on with their lives in the way they see fit. It’s rapidly becoming impossible to continue to ignore that these laws are not effective and need to be rethought.
FRANK, YOU HAVE A REAL PROBLEM WITH WHAT YOU EXCEPT AND WHAT IS REALITY. TWIST UP A FAT ONE AND LET GO. ARE YOU A DRINKER?
I just returned from Amsterdam and advise all to go see what the big deal is all about. In January medical marijuana and law enforcement and government officials have a seminar of talks on this subject and how they deal with it. Imagine an 18.6% tax on every gram of weed sold through legal shops for selling it to those who wish to participate. We’ve wasted a lifetime of money and resources to get rid of something that won’t go away. Einstien had it right but the only way to do it is to get the right people in congress to legalize something that has been proven time and time again not to make you do what alcohol has been doing to us for decades. How much money does the government take in yearly on the tax of ciggarettes and alocohol? It has relieved us of many costly projects we do need to address. Why would legalizing marijuana be an excepted way to help bring us out of the mess we are in now. Bailout why can’t we bail ourselves out without loans from countries using us up with the ignorant trade policies. Legalize It was the saying at this years Cannabis Cup. Good luck society and hopefully we can see this in our life time. Book a trip to The Netherlands and get educated. The US and France throw truck loads of cash at eradicating coffeeshops and it is a battle that they the coffeeshop operators fight daily in the tolerated country of The Netherlands. For those of you not into the smoking can certainly witness society operating with tolerance and Alocohol is still the problem over there. Michigan legalized medical marijuana law goes into effect today. Maybe we can help get the ball rolling with the help of our friends in The Netherlands and the support of your votes on this issue.
Insanity is the word! Einstein had well clear the disastrous results of ideological postures, whether religious or simply ascientific, so dearly and hypocritically assumed by politicians.
I look forward to the day when government is actually run by the people its governing. I for one am a marijuana user. Honestly, I liken canibus to a beer. If I can drink a Miller Lite in my home then it should not be far fetched for me to smoke bowl. Why? Because they both have the same effect.
Since Regan started this so called “war on drugs” we have seen nothing but failure after failure. Our prison’s are filled with more non-violent criminals than ever. Drugs are even more accessible now. More terrorist organizations are being funded by it than ever. How much good could be done if we simply regulated them? We wouldn’t have to poor so much time and money to stop it. For a drug dealer you lock up, two will replace him. That’s just how it works. Take the power to sell it on the street away from him then you not only take him out of the equation but no one can take his place.
Einstein was right, repeating the same thing over and ov er and expecting different results is insanity. Do we sit back then and not want to put our government in a straight jacket?
Dear Bernd,
It is always instructive to see how the obvious solution can be ignored. BTW, can I expect a piece on the futility of a “war on terror” with your next column?
Yours sincerely,
Akram
Legalize Marijuana, tax it and use the taxes to finance the bailout of GM, Ford and Chrysler. Just an idea.
How can it make sense for drugs to be illegal while alcohol and tobacco are legal?
A word to almost everyone here claiming that soft drugs like marijuana have to negative effects…….I have previously used this “harmless” drug. Besides the extremely high levels of tar found in a typical “joint” (higher than that found in cigarettes), I had stopped using this within months of starting, as I had extremely unpleasant experiences with it. The final episode of psychosis lasted a complete day, where I had the terrifying feeling that I was altered for the rest of my life. When this feeling eventually wore off, I realized I would rather perish than relive that experience. Another friend of mine was admitted to the psychiatric ward after having a bad ‘trip’ from which he never really recovered. He is better now, but is on anti-psychotics and has half a year hospital stay behind him. The doctors at the ward apparently told him that cases of psychosis caused by consumption of marijuana are not exceedingly rare. I do not want to imply this is the norm, but my own experience is enough for me, and I would rather take 5 years off my life than experience long term psychosis of the sort I experienced. Therefore, to state universally and generally that weed is not harmless is a complete lie. This is something very different from alcohol, and people should not take the other extreme and tout weed as completely harmless.
All the people who compare the number of deaths due to tobacco and/or alcohol consumption are being utterly ridiculous.
Firstly, you have to take into account that the number of people who consume those either of those two products is larger by orders of magnitude than the number of people who consume all kinds of drugs combined. You cannot simply compare the absolute number of deaths without taking into account the absolute number of users.
Secondly, in the case of alcohol, drinking a glass of red wine a day has been show to be beneficial in some cases, and very moderate consumption of alcohol has no deleterious effects. However, there is no such thing as a healthy or non-harmful dose of crack or heroine. There is no “in moderation” usage of these drugs.
Thirdly, a heroine has been shown to be addictive at first use, and the success rates for beating the habit are depressingly low. There are hundreds of millions of consumers of alcohol who are not addicted to the product. I have spent some time doing social work, and even when heroine usage does not kill, I have seen how it completely and utterly obliterates the life of the user. This is something that could also be said of an alcoholic, but not in general of a person who has had his first taste of beer. A heroin user, however, is almost always a user for life.
These issues cannot be ignored. I agree that the current strategy is not working, but I cannot with good conscience live with government revenues made off selling a product that so imprisons its users that they often wish they were dead.
Loss of respect for the law increases whenever a ‘moral’ legislation that a large percentage do not agree with is passed. Marijuana is considered a less damaging social lubricator than alcohol, by a whole lot of people. It isn’t because it’s illegal, which makes it a very profitable product for criminal cartels. Legalize it, tax it, sell it in liquor stores and bars. A pitcher of tea, instead of a pitcher of beer… Have you ever heard of fights breaking out because people had been consuming marijuana? The only really effective ‘treatment’ for ‘hard’ drug use is hope. Use the money saved and made to increase it.
As a retired police detective, I know about drug prohibition from the trenches. We have always been a mosquito on the butt of an elephant. We have seen every drug dealer arrested or killed replaced within days.
Meanwhile drunk drivers and child predators are not caught because we arrest 1.4 million citizens on non-violent drug charges.
One day we will be as wise as our grandparents and end this dysfunctional, immoral policy.
The subliminal message delivered in the mainstream press, TV & radio commercials is that drugs are good & can solve your problems, help you feel better & live healthier, longer lives - as long as they are the high-priced drugs distributed legally by the pharmaceutical companies. If it’s not some form of sexual dysfunction, it’s back pain, arthritis, menapause, weight loss, you name it, the pharmaceutical companies have a pill for it.
Health, health & more health for the people of one of the unhealthiest societies in the modern world. But don’t try to take any short cuts out of your problems by self medicating yourself with marijuana or some other substance not condoned by the FDA & the big drug companies……you’ll be arrested & imprisoned for making your own decisions about how you’ll cure what ails you.
The demand for the supply of “illegal” drugs coming into this country is due to the subliminal commercial messages being spewed over the air waves by the deep pocketed pharmaceutical companies who don’t want to share the profits with people distributing a product they can’t control….it’s time to end this insanity, do the right thing America & regulate that which you cannot fight.
It is a well proven fact that the only successful measure in combating drug abuse is non-moralist education and rehabilitation. The successes in combating Crystal Meth, as reported by the Economist in May of this year, is the most vivid example.
Teenagers and economically depressed communities are not receptive to moralist rhetoric and resent the self-rightous fundamentalists that lead the anti-drug crusade.
While implementing systems to control a legal recreational drug industry would provide for a very interesting intellectual challenge the real barrier to legalisation remain religious conviction.
If the religious community can be convinced of the moral virtues of saving they neighbour, rather than condemning them for their sins, which is what their religions dictate anyway, we will start to see real progress.
Bernd Debusmann’s article is incisive and brilliant, laying bare the facts about drug prohibition and analyzing them with uncommon objectivity and clarity. If everything Debusmann writes is of this quality, he is a world-class journalistic force to be reckoned with.
As is well known in most of the cultivated world today, both at home and abroad, the American people as a whole (excuse me for telling the truth) are phenomenally stupid, as well as ignorant, and beyond doubt crazy according to Einstein’s operational definition of “insanity.” But as the old Far Eastern proverb says, the Fool who persists in his folly will become wise–if he survives his folly. In this case we see that it took the massive failure of Republican policies together with the crash of the national economy to shock enough Americans back to their senses to get Barack Obama elected President. Now that the dazed metaphorical Fool-of-a-Nation called “America” has begun to somewhat wake up from its silly dream that it is God’s Own Country and competent to set the rest of the world aright, in the sense of defining what is true, real, just, or moral for all of humankind (including, needless to say, tens of millions of its own people who don’t buy into either the mentality or the prohibitionist prescriptions of standard-brand Republicanism) it is just possible that what is known in America as the “Culture War” will cool off and begin to wind down over the next four to eight years, the flashy Sarah Palin notwithstanding.
The spectacularly failed and counterproductive “War on Drugs” is a major front in that Culture War, having over the last 40 years turned America into what the late Dr. Timothy Leary of Harvard fame (if I can remember his exact words)–himself slapped with a 30-year federal prison sentence for alleged possession of a single cannabis seed–around 1973 called “an ever-more-dismal and draconian cross between a swamp and a penal colony.”
Barack Obama, as part of his call for sweeping change, has hinted that many of the old ways of doing things, both nationally and globally, are about to bite the dust of history. In particular, his stated plan to go through the federal budget to ruthlessly eliminate policies and programs that don’t work implies that he intends to end America’s Drug War once and for all.
We can be sure that millions of his most dedicated supporters will be dismayed and even furious at him if he doesn’t try very hard to do that. Failure to end the Drug War in timely manner at this opportune moment carries far greater political risks than simply getting the job done. If Obama is unable to marshall support from the now heavily Democratic Congress to pass the necessary legislation, he will be seen as weak, and there will be bitter division within Democratic ranks–as well as escalation of the nation’s Culture War. If nothing else, continuing to spend vast sums of money each year prosecuting and/or keeping a substantial proportion of the population locked up for often minor drug offenses is in the current strained economic climate simply irresponsible, and therefore indefensible.
It is hard to see Barack Obama, with his clear intelligence and pristine character, not to mention grasp of history, as a supporter of the armed Nanny-state, the State which goes by the name of “Thou Shalt Not” and “Just Say No.” For history has never, in the last analysis, been on the side of repression. The Nanny-state is at root in total contradiction to the fundamental principles of the American Revolution and the Constitution itself, that “every man in his castle is king” and that the individual has an absolute right to privacy in all matters that pertain to his or her person and exercise of freedom thereof.
It was, after all, Bill Clinton’s great failing that (having himself confessedly puffed on pot in his earlier days) he caved in to what seemed political expediency and appointed a drug czar who continued much in the repressive tradition of the drug-warring Nixon, Reagan, and the elder Bush. Political expediency is no longer an acceptable excuse for continuation of failed policies that are counterproductive and which harm the Country and its citizens. It is time for the United States of America to wake up, smell the pot, and get itself in line with more progressive democracies around the world that have begun to liberalize their drug laws. This will entail redefining addiction (where it exists) as a medical problem, in addition to assuming a much-needed leadership position in the global drive to once and for all put international drug-smuggling and the illegal drug trade out of business.
Well Done, LEAP! America, though, doesn’t believe it will ever happen…though the majority of Americans agree that present policy dosent work.
Hearken back to 1930 when Texas Senator Morris Sheppard, said: “There is as much of a chance of repealing the eighteenth amendment as there is for a humming bird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail. This country is for temperance and prohibition and it is going to continue to elect members of Congress who believe in that.”
3 years later the country ratified the 21st amendment, repealing alcohol prohibition.
The War on Drugs will end–it is just a matter of when.
Madness, indeed. Robert Heinlein, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, has the main protagonist say, We pass laws to tell us not to do what we don’t want to do anyway. What a radical concept! We pass laws that we all agree with! Except that there’s a lot of laws that are passed that not all that many people agree with. Clearly, given the shear volume of drug offenders in jail, not to mention the millions more who would be in jail if they were able to station a cop in everybody’s home, the US does not have drug laws that we all agree with.
Illegal drugs are the most profitable business ever invented by man. Because of this, there are multiple forces at work to keep them illegal. Too many powerful people on both sides of the equation would lose too much money if these drugs were legalized. In the U.S., we have entire bureaucracies that would be eliminated. What would the DEA think about giving up the toys, salaries and excitement of their cops and robbers games? It makes no sense to discuss legalization when even decriminalization is an impossible goal - just from an economic standpoint.
“Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.” - the Omnibibulous Mr. Mencken, some time in the mid 1920s.
Sometimes I imagine drug prohibition to be a collective act of self-flagellation, perhaps the product of some guilt-ridden, inextricable yearning for divine absolution. But it’s always the same poor folk situated at the backside that catch the brunt of the lash!
Or maybe this is just the twisted disposition of the crusading prohibitionist crank writ large on an ambivalent society? After all, this queer species, whether we consider past specimens like Howard Hyde Russell, Billy Sunday and W.J. Bryan or their progeny Bill Bennett, David Murray and John Walters, always effuses the brown stank of masochism in every batch of righteous hot-air. It simply can’t be a coincidence….
LEAP speakers often refer to modern prohibition as, among other things, a moral abomination, and the irony is that their appeal to our just indignation is more on point than all the Anti-Saloon League and Partnership for a Drug Free America harangues against straw men ever were or could be.
Thanks for this article and keep the hot lamp fixed right on these chumps. I believe that, when the drug war is finally over, we’ll all be a little surprised, and delighted, by how rapidly the whole despicable edifice collapsed.
Thanks, Berndt, for starting this brilliant conversation. The statistics of the rhetoric seem to match the poll results in favor of decriminalization. I would propose that the cart and horse are backwards in Alicat’s analysis. The destruction of education and the removal of banking regulation are the results of the erosion of the willingness of individuals to think for themselves. In short, we are too willing to submit to authority rather than decide for ourselves. This is the foundation of bad decisions on the part of drug use. The drug use problem is due to the erosion of self-determination. The finance system was not stolen, the education system was not corrupted. You and I gave them away to people we decided to believe in with our vote.
The real foundation of the strangle-hold of the anti-drug community is uneducated blind following. This leads to blind leadership of a flock that then circles back on its own logic and perpetuates the bad decisions. The point of the research shows this blindness. I won’t take any drug to drown my problem, and nobody is telling you that you should take drugs. Hyperbolic over-reaction is a tool of mis-guided leadership. Please allow this latter-day prohibition to end.
It is illegal for a person charged with posession of marijuana at any point in their life to enter the US to vacation or visit. This affects an amazing number of would be tourists. Canadians are denied entry quite often for some transgression years ago. How absurd.
Currently in the US student loans are unavailable to anyone with a drug conviction but the conviction will be overlooked if they wish to join the armed forces. Education of the individual and the opportunity for social and economic advancement has been proven a more effective method of curtailing drug use than darn near anything else.