[wordup] legalizing drugs

Sat Aug 4 18:13:34 EDT 2001

Brett writes:

A series of articles on why to legalize drugs from the libertarian 'The
Economist.' Very smart and very savvy stuff. Begins with an oped article
(included below), and then goes on with a series of nine short articles on
why banning drugs wont/doesn't work from different business
points-of-view. These articles start with "Stumbling in the Dark" in the
'related items' in the top right of the webpage above.

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight.co.nz>
From: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=709603&CFID=400502&CFTOKEN=57555433

The Case for Legalisation
Jul 28th 2001

Time for a puff of sanity

IT IS every parent's nightmare. A youngster slithers inexorably from a few
puffs on a joint, to a snort of cocaine, to the needle and addiction. It
was the flesh-creeping heart of Traffic, a film about the descent into
heroin hell of a pretty young middle-class girl, and it is the terror that
keeps drug laws in place. It explains why even those politicians who
puffed at a joint or two in their youth hesitate to put the case for
legalising drugs.

The terror is not irrational. For the first thing that must be said about
legalising drugs, a cause The Economist has long advocated and returns to
this week (see survey), is that it would lead to a rise in their use, and
therefore to a rise in the number of people dependent on them. Some argue
that drug laws have no impact, because drugs are widely available. Untrue:
drugs are expensivea kilo of heroin sells in America for as much as a new
Rolls-Roycepartly because their price reflects the dangers involved in
distributing and buying them. It is much harder and riskier to pick up a
dose of cocaine than it is to buy a bottle of whisky. Remove such
constraints, make drugs accessible and very much cheaper, and more people
will experiment with them.

A rise in drug-taking will inevitably mean that more people will become
dependentinevitably, because drugs offer a pleasurable experience that
people seek to repeat. In the case of most drugs, that dependency may be
no more than a psychological craving and affect fewer than one in five
users; in the case of heroin, it is physical and affects maybe one in
three. Even a psychological craving can be debilitating. Addicted gamblers
and drinkers bring misery to themselves and their families. In addition,
drugs have lasting physical effects and some, taken incompetently, can
kill. This is true both for some hard drugs and for some that people think
of as soft: too much heroin can trigger a strong adverse reaction, but so
can ecstasy. The same goes for gin or aspirin, of course: but many voters
reasonably wonder whether it would be right to add to the list of harmful
substances that are legally available.

Of Mill and morality

The case for doing so rests on two arguments: one of principle, one
practical. The principles were set out, a century and a half ago, by John
Stuart Mill, a British liberal philosopher, who urged that the state had
no right to intervene to prevent individuals from doing something that
harmed them, if no harm was thereby done to the rest of society. Over
himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign, Mill
famously proclaimed. This is a view that The Economist has always
espoused, and one to which most democratic governments adhere, up to a
point. They allow the individual to undertake all manner of dangerous
activities unchallenged, from mountaineering to smoking to riding bicycles
through city streets. Such pursuits alarm insurance companies and mothers,
but are rightly tolerated by the state.

True, Mill argued that some social groups, especially children, required
extra protection. And some argue that drug-takers are also a special
class: once addicted, they can no longer make rational choices about
whether to continue to harm themselves. Yet not only are dependent users a
minority of all users; in addition, society has rejected this argument in
the case of alcoholand of nicotine (whose addictive power is greater than
that of heroin). The important thing here is for governments to spend
adequately on health education.

The practical case for a liberal approach rests on the harms that spring
from drug bans, and the benefits that would accompany legalisation. At
present, the harms fall disproportionately on poor countries and on poor
people in rich countries. In producer and entrepot countries, the drugs
trade finances powerful gangs who threaten the state and corrupt political
institutions. Colombia is the most egregious example, but Mexico too
wrestles with the threat to the police and political honesty. The attempt
to kill illicit crops poisons land and people. Drug money helps to prop up
vile regimes in Myanmar and Afghanistan. And drug production encourages
local drug-taking, which (in the case of heroin) gives a helping hand to
the spread of HIV/AIDS.

In the rich world, it is the poor who are most likely to become involved
in the drugs trade (the risks may be high, but drug-dealers tend to be
equal-opportunity employers), and therefore end up in jail. Nowhere is
this more shamefully true than in the United States, where roughly one in
four prisoners is locked up for a (mainly non-violent) drugs offence.
America's imprisonment rate for drugs offences now exceeds that for all
crimes in most West European countries. Moreover, although whites take
drugs almost as freely as blacks and Hispanics, a vastly disproportionate
number of those arrested, sentenced and imprisoned are non-white. Drugs
policy in the United States is thus breeding a generation of men and women
from disadvantaged backgrounds whose main training for life has been in
the violence of prison.

Legalise to regulate

Removing these harms would bring with it another benefit. Precisely
because the drugs market is illegal, it cannot be regulated. Laws cannot
discriminate between availability to children and adults. Governments
cannot insist on minimum quality standards for cocaine; or warn asthma
sufferers to avoid ecstasy; or demand that distributors take
responsibility for the way their products are sold. With alcohol and
tobacco, such restrictions are possible; with drugs, not. This increases
the dangers to users, and especially to young or incompetent users.
Illegality also puts a premium on selling strength: if each purchase is
risky, then it makes sense to buy drugs in concentrated form. In the same
way, Prohibition in the United States in the 1920s led to a fall in beer
consumption but a rise in the drinking of hard liquor.

How, if governments accepted the case for legalisation, to get from here
to there? When, in the 18th century, a powerful new intoxicant became
available, the impact was disastrous: it took years of education for gin
to cease to be a social threat. That is a strong reason to proceed
gradually: it will take time for conventions governing sensible
drug-taking to develop. Meanwhile, a century of illegality has deprived
governments of much information that good policy requires. Impartial
academic research is difficult. As a result, nobody knows how demand may
respond to lower prices, and understanding of the physical effects of most
drugs is hazy.

And how, if drugs were legal, might they be distributed? The thought of
heroin on supermarket shelves understandably adds to the terror of the
prospect. Just as legal drugs are available through different
channelscaffeine from any cafe, alcohol only with proof of age, Prozac
only on prescriptionso the drugs that are now illegal might one day be
distributed in different ways, based on knowledge about their potential
for harm. Moreover, different countries should experiment with different
solutions: at present, many are bound by a United Nations convention that
hampers even the most modest moves towards liberalisation, and that
clearly needs amendment.

To legalise will not be easy. Drug-taking entails risks, and societies are
increasingly risk-averse. But the role of government should be to prevent
the most chaotic drug-users from harming othersby robbing or by driving
while drugged, for instanceand to regulate drug markets to ensure minimum
quality and safe distribution. The first task is hard if law enforcers are
preoccupied with stopping all drug use; the second, impossible as long as
drugs are illegal. A legal market is the best guarantee that drug-taking
will be no more dangerous than drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco. And,
just as countries rightly tolerate those two vices, so they should
tolerate those who sell and take drugs.