Pubdate: Sun, 12 Apr 2009
Source: Financial Times (UK)
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 2009
Contact:  http://www.ft.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/154
Author: Clive Crook
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

A CRIMINALLY STUPID WAR ON DRUGS IN THE US

How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a 
failure and reversed? The US "war on drugs" suggests there is no 
upper limit. The country's implacable blend of prohibition and 
punitive criminal justice is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in 
principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes, and in practice a 
disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to 
suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an 
act of reckless self-harm.

Even a casual observer can see that much of the damage done in the US 
by illegal drugs is a result of the fact that they are illegal, not 
the fact that they are drugs. Vastly more lives are blighted by the 
brutality of prohibition, and by the enormous criminal networks it 
has created, than by the substances themselves. This is true of 
cocaine and heroin as well as of soft drugs such as marijuana. But 
the assault on consumption of marijuana sets the standard for the 
policy's stupidity.

Nearly half of all Americans say they have tried marijuana. That 
makes them criminals in the eyes of the law. Luckily, not all of them 
have been found out - but when one is grateful that most law-breakers 
go undetected, there is something wrong with the law.

Harvard's Jeffrey Miron published a study denouncing drug prohibition 
in 2004*. He noted that more than 300,000 people were then in US 
prisons for violations of the law on drugs - more than the number 
incarcerated for all crimes in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and 
Spain combined. Today the number is higher - according to some 
estimates, nearly 500,000. The far larger number of people who have 
been convicted, at any point, of a drugs offence face permanently 
impaired employment prospects and all manner of other setbacks: in 
the US, once a criminal always a criminal.

Strict enforcement, Mr Miron explained, has reduced drug use only 
modestly - supposing for the moment that this is even a legitimate 
objective. The collateral damage is of a different order altogether. 
Violence related to drug crimes has surged in Mexico and in US cities 
close to the border, giving rise to renewed interest in the topic. 
Thousands are thought to have been killed by criminal gangs competing 
for the trade

Many users also die because of tainted drugs, or because they share 
needles - consequences again of prohibition. There is an obvious 
national security dimension as well: in countries such as Colombia 
and Afghanistan, the huge surplus derived from prohibition supports terrorists.

The consequences of prohibition corrupt governments everywhere, and 
the US is no exception. Since a drug transaction has no victims in 
the ordinary sense, witnesses to assist a prosecution are in short 
supply. US drug-law enforcement tends to infringe civil liberties, 
relying on warrantless searches, entrapment, extorted testimony in 
the form of plea bargains, and so forth. Predictably, in the US the 
hammer of the law on drugs falls with far greater force on black 
people: whites do most of the using, blacks do most of the time.

Few policies manage to fail so comprehensively, and what makes it all 
the odder is that the US has seen it all before. Everybody 
understands that alcohol prohibition in the 1920s suffered from many 
of the same pathologies - albeit on a smaller scale - and was 
eventually abandoned.

The present treatment of alcohol, which is to regulate and tax the 
product, is the right approach for today's illegal drugs. One could 
expect some increase in the use of the drugs in question, but also an 
enormous net reduction in the harms that they and the attempt to 
prohibit them cause. Adding the direct costs of prohibition (police 
and prisons) to the taxes forgone by the present system, the US could 
also expect a fiscal benefit of about $100bn (UKP75.7bn, UKP 68.2bn) a year.

Is an outbreak of common sense on this subject likely? Unfortunately, 
no. Only the most daring politicians seem willing to think about it 
seriously. One such is James Webb, a refreshingly unpredictable 
Democratic senator for Virginia, who has called for a commission to 
examine the criminal justice system and the law on drugs. Politicians 
such as Mr Webb are very much the exception.

Elsewhere, signs of movement are minimal. Barack Obama has admitted 
that as a young man he used not only marijuana - and, unlike Bill 
Clinton, he inhaled; the whole point was to inhale, he joked - but 
also cocaine. This might suggest the president has an open mind on 
the subject. And in a departure from the previous administration, his 
attorney-general has said he will not bring federal prosecutions 
against the medical use of marijuana in states that allow it. But 
then at a recent event Mr Obama ran away from a question about the 
broader decriminalisation of marijuana under cover of a wisecrack.

For now, outright legalisation of marijuana, let alone harder drugs, 
is difficult to imagine. Even gradual decriminalisation - a policy 
that maintains prohibition but removes it from the scope of the 
criminal law - seems unlikely, though perhaps not unthinkable. A new 
study by Glenn Greenwald, a writer and civil rights lawyer, looks at 
Portugal's policy of decriminalisation. He judges it a success: 
"While drug addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to 
skyrocket in many European Union states, those problems - in 
virtually every relevant category - have been either contained or 
measurably improved within Portugal since 2001."

Somebody in the White House should take a look. This national 
calamity is no laughing matter.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom