Issue Position: Ending the War on Drugs

Issue Position

It is time to end the "War on Drugs" (technically, the "War on Certain People Who Use Certain Drugs") in America because that war has been, is, and will continue to be, an abject failure.

It has failed, and will continue to fail to accomplish its stated objectives because:

1) its fundamental premise is flawed;

2) its social costs far outweigh its supposed benefits;

3) it creates violent crime while incarcerating an ever-increasing number of nonviolent users;

4) it is a waste of resources, as more and more tax dollars are lavished on enforcement without any real diminution of usage;

5) it spreads corruption throughout our society, touching police forces, prosecutors and judges; and

6) it destroys the lives of millions of individual Americans and their families.

U.S. drug policy has failed persistently over the decades because it has preferred rhetoric to reality and moral finger-pointing to mature pragmatism. As a society, we have to grow up and acknowledge that drugs are here to stay and that we have no choice but to learn how to live with them so that they cause the least possible harm.

Yet we continue to have a drug policy that creates the most possible harm. A policy created and maintained by generals, politicians, and self-proclaimed guardians of public morality who make pronouncements and assertions with no basis in fact or science; who ignore the independent commissions appointed to evaluate programs and policies when the results differ from their self-righteous opinions; and who stifle serious debate and ridicule anyone who dares to question the legitimacy of their arguments or point out the fallacies of their thinking. The good news is that the American people are way ahead of the politicians and are finally beginning to understand that this is the second time in our history that Prohibition has failed.

The first flaw in the arguments of the drug warriors is that drugs are wrong and that drugs are dangerous and, therefore, should remain illegal. Let's take the second point first, that drugs are dangerous.

Fact 1: Most people can or could use most drugs without doing much harm to themselves or anyone else. Approximately 85 million Americans have, at one time or another, consumed or exposed themselves to an illegal drug. Yet it is estimated that there are not more than one million regular cocaine users, fewer than one million heroin users, and five million Americans who regularly smoke marijuana. Of an estimated 70 million who have tried marijuana, only a tiny percentage of them have gone on to have problems with that or any other drug. The same is true of the tens of millions of Americans who have used cocaine or hallucinogens. So we can reasonably deduce that Americans who abuse a drug or have a serious drug problem are a very small percentage of these who have experimented with or continue to use drugs without any observable distraction in their lives or careers.

Fact 2: Drug-related deaths -- which average fewer than 15,000 per year -- are far fewer than those attributed to alcohol, and are dwarfed by the 400,000 yearly deaths due to cigarettes, yet no one is advocating jailing the Marlboro man, and no serious person would suggest we attempt to make alcohol illegal again. And while one has to admit that there is a tiny percentage of our population that has serious drug problems, the argument cannot be maintained that, as a society, we can justify spending billions of dollars a year on the basis of the dangerous aspects of presently illegal drugs.

As for marijuana, even the drug warriors acknowledge that it is without lethal effect. No one has ever died from smoking too much pot (in contrast to the many deaths caused yearly by the legal drugs manufactured and peddled by the country's pharmaceutical companies). And even though 20 states have legalized medical marijuana, and two -- Colorado and Washington -- have recently legalized recreational marijuana, we continue to arrest over 500,000 Americans every year for mere possession of pot.

As to the suggestion that drugs are "wrong"... well, many people think that many kinds of behaviors their neighbors indulge in may be "wrong." Yet, as a free society, we understand that criminal sanctions cannot, and should not, attempt to prohibit personal conduct which does no harm to others, regardless of how we may view that behavior. If America is supposed to be a society committed to individual liberty and personal responsibility, certainly that liberty must extend to what, when, and how much of which substance a citizen can ingest.

In 1859, British philosopher, John Stuart Mill wrote, "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant."That is to say, we may feel that body-piercing, or watching too much TV, or getting fat on Twinkies is wrong, yet we cannot make these or other acts like it, illegal. We live in a country where closing the garage door and filling your lungs with carbon monoxide for the purpose of inducing death is legal, but it is illegal to fill those same lungs with marijuana smoke for the purpose of inducing pleasure... or relieving pain.

And while it is perfectly appropriate to sanction behavior which may harm others, such as driving under the influence of drugs, or selling drugs to children, we cannot continue to exist as a free society if we continue to prohibit and punish behavior that is only harmful to the person indulging in it... which may not even be the case with drug use to begin with. So the arguments that justify the War on Drugs on the basis of danger and morality simply don't hold up under scrutiny.

Another argument used to justify our War on Drugs is that if drugs were legal, everyone would do them, producing, in short order, a nation of tripped-out zombies. Further, keeping drugs illegal discourages drug use. The facts simply do not bear out this argument in either respect. Indeed, the history of substance use and abuse has shown us that the legal status of drugs has no substantial effect on drug consumption. Prohibition had little or no effect on the consumption of alcohol. Marijuana use, which has been illegal since the 1930's, remained fairly rare, as were arrests, until the social changes of the 1960's brought a massive increase in pot-smoking -- against which the criminal law had no effect. Witness all our present national leaders who admit to smoking marijuana in their youth.

Experience with harder drugs shows similar patterns. In 1906, cocaine was legal and inexpensive. By 1980 it was illegal and costly, yet the rate of consumption was twice that of 1906. Drug use has held at pretty consistent levels for many years, even though politicians love to point to minor rises and falls, mostly for partisan purposes around election time. In fact, all the numbers seem to suggest that if the illegality of drugs is meant to discourage use, then prohibition is clearly not achieving that objective. While expenditures in the war on drugs continue to increase, the number of Americans using drugs has remained relatively constant at 40 million, with steady users estimated at six million, and one to two million with serious disorders.

Similarly, legalization of drugs also seems to have little effect on usage. Holland legalized marijuana de facto in 1976 and teenage marijuana use subsequently dropped by 40%. The rate of teen marijuana use in Holland and Spain, where cannabis was decriminalized in 1983, is only two-thirds that of Britain, which enforces its anti-marijuana laws strenuously. So another set of arguments of the drug warriors cannot withstand rational scrutiny. Keeping drugs illegal does not, in fact, discourage their use, while decriminalizing them would not necessarily lead to epidemic levels of consumption.

So here's our present situation: we have a drug policy that is clearly not achieving the aims for which it is ostensibly in place; one whose fundamental logic is flawed; and one whose entire supposed rationale for existence is untenable. But then what are the actual results of this policy, if, in fact, the intended results are nonexistent? What are the real effects of our 80-year experiment with drug prohibition? Well, more people in jail is certainly one outcome.

Today, there are more than 215,000 inmates in federal prison. And over 50 percent of them have been locked up for drug offenses (almost a third of that 50 percent for "crimes" related to marijuana). That percentage has risen fairly consistently over the decades, all the way from 16 percent in 1970, when the War on Drugs began in earnest. As the number of people convicted of drug offenses has gone up, the federal prison population has increased, as well -- almost 790 percent since 1980, when there were only about 25,000 federal inmates, according to a 2012 Congressional Research Service report.

And all of those arrests and convictions take time and manpower. Prohibition occupies an estimated 50 percent of the trial time of our nation's judiciary and takes the time of 400,000 policemen, nationwide, with some 18,000 cops devoted exclusively to anti-drug units.

So, the actual results of the War of Drugs has been the criminalizing of our population, the clogging of our courts, and the misuse of hundreds of thousands of law enforcement personnel who could be engaged in the much more useful activity of combating violent crime. In addition, with mandatory sentencing in some drug cases, we have locked up some first-time offenders for ten years, while turning out of prison and back on the streets violent offenders, murderers, and rapists, who actually pose a real threat to society.

And, of course, the final irony is that, like alcohol prohibition was in the early part of the last century, it is drug prohibition itself that is, by far, the largest cause of crime in America. It is prohibition that puts the very lucrative drug trade -- some $60 billion a year spent by Americans -- into the hands of organized crime. When the law makes trade in a particular commodity illegal, it naturally becomes the exclusive domain of criminals. We saw it with Al Capone and the mob during the Roaring Twenties, and we see it again today. There's an old joke, not too funny, that says: "Kill a drug dealer, and you create a job opening." The incredibly huge profits to be made in the drug business, because of its illegality, will guarantee, forever, an endless supply of criminals willing to take the risks for the potential payoff.

The end of alcohol prohibition in 1933 was also, not coincidentally, the end of most bootlegger violence. And though our current political culture equates decriminalizing drugs with being soft on criminals, it is prohibition itself that guarantees wealth and power for gangs, pushers, and drug lords with all its attendant crime and mayhem!

We have seen how this endless, escalating spiral of violence and counter-violence has achieved absolutely nothing except more and more wasted tax dollars (the annual combined federal and state budgets for drug interdiction and enforcement in the U. S. is about $40 billion) and more and more draconian enforcement measures directed against the American people. The continuing failure of the War on Drugs has led many American jurisdictions to subvert the protections of the Constitution and is leading this nation down the frightening road to a police state.

In America, property can be seized without the owner being charged with a crime... so long as evidence of drug use is found on the property. Police departments can have the value of these seized assets added directly to their own budgets. Congress has created a system of fines up to $10,000 that can he imposed administratively, when prosecutors feel they cannot get enough evidence for a criminal prosecution.

What has become known as the "drug exception to the Fourth Amendment" has allowed the issuance of warrants based on anonymous tips and tips from informants known to be corrupt and unreliable; the warrantless searches of fields, barns, and private property near a residence; and the upholding of evidence obtained under defective search warrants, if the officers state that they acted in "good faith."

The result? All over this country lives are being ruined, families devastated, and ordinary citizens put at risk -- not by drug use, but by drug prohibition. If there ever were a case in which the remedy is worse than the disease, this is it.

It is finally becoming clear to many thinking individuals -- liberals and conservatives, white and black, rich and poor -- that the effects of the underworld drug economy, the debasement of the rule of law, and the undermining of fundamental fairness and individual rights because of the War on Drugs, all combine to require that the criminal prohibition against drug use and distribution be ended, once and for all.

The good news is that our representatives in Washington are finally getting the message. In recent months, the Obama administration has portrayed the country's tough drug policies as unjust and pledged to seek early release or lighter initial sentences for low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. Lawmakers in the House and Senate have introduced identical bills that would cut the length of mandatory prison sentences for certain drug crimes ̶ now set at 5, 10, and 20 years ̶ in half.

But it's not enough. We have to admit that the War on Drugs is a failure and, though well-intentioned by some, the desire to lessen the criminal sanctions for drug use, merely perpetuates a failed policy, while cloaking the fist in kid gloves.

The War on Drugs has failed! How long must we wear the worn out clothes of a public policy that has caused so much harm in so many ways to our society? How long must we tolerate the sanctimonious moralism of self-serving politicians and self-appointed guardians of public piety before we come to our senses and solve the real problems before us?

The drug problem must be taken out of the criminal justice system and placed in the hands of those responsible for our public health. Persuasion and education must replace persecution and incarceration. Drug abusers must no longer be demonized, criminalized, and imprisoned, but helped and treated. And those drug users with no physical, emotional, or psychological problems stemming from drug use -- the vast majority of users in America -- must be left alone.

How many nonviolent drug users would be spared the devastation of prison and financial ruin from overzealous prosecutions and hysterical witch-hunts? How many inner cities would he freed from the crime and misery of drug-related violence and how many ordinary Americans would he protected against the erosion of their Constitutional rights?

In the name of decency, fairness, and enlightened self-interest, can we not muster the political courage to end this War and demand, for our future as a free and compassionate society, a new dawn of reason and understanding?

If you agree, hire me.

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