Pubdate: Sat, 21 Apr 2012
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Pubdate: 21 Apr 2012
Authors: Mark A.R. Kleiman, Jonathan P. Caulkins And Angela Hawken

RETHINKING THE WAR ON DRUGS

Prohibition and legalization aren't our only choices when it comes to
drugs. Proven programs can greatly reduce the harm caused by hard-core
users and reduce our prison population, too.

"For every complex problem," H.L. Mencken wrote, "there is an answer
that is clear, simple and wrong."

That is especially true of drug abuse and addiction. Indeed, the
problem is so complex that it has produced not just one clear, simple,
wrong solution but two: the "drug war" (prohibition plus massive,
undifferentiated enforcement) and proposals for wholesale drug
legalization.

Fortunately, these two bad ideas are not our only choices. We could
instead take advantage of proven new approaches that can make us safer
while greatly reducing the number of Americans behind bars for drug
offenses.

Our current drug policies do far more harm than they need to do and far 
less good than they might, largely because they ignore some basic facts. 
Treating all "drug abusers" as a single group flies in the face of what 
is known as Pareto's Law: that for any given activity, 20% of the 
participants typically account for 80% of the action.

Most users of addictive drugs are not addicts, but a few consume very
heavily, and they account for most of the traffic and revenue and most
of the drug-related violence and other collateral social damage. If
subjected to the right kinds of pressure, however, even most heavy
users can and do stop using drugs.

Frustration with the drug-policy status quo - the horrific levels of
trafficking-related violence in Mexico and Central America and the
fiscal, personal and social costs of imprisoning half a million drug
dealers in the U.S. - has led to calls for some form of legalization.
Just last week, at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, President
Barack Obama got an earful from his Latin American counterparts about
the need to reverse current U.S. drug policy.

The appeal of legalization is clear. At a stroke, it would wipe out
most problems of the black market by depriving gun-wielding thugs of
their competitive advantage. But for it to work, it would have to
include not just the possession of drugs but their production as
well - and not just of marijuana but of substances that really are
very dangerous: cocaine, crack, heroin and methamphetamine.

Legalizing possession and production would eliminate many of the
problems related to drug dealing, but it would certainly worsen the
problem of drug abuse. We could abolish the illicit market in cocaine,
as we abolished the illicit market in alcohol, but does anyone
consider our current alcohol policies a success? In the U.S., alcohol
kills more people than all of the illicit drugs combined (85,000
deaths versus 17,000 in 2000, according to a study in the Journal of
the American Medical Association). Alcohol also has far more addicted
users.

Any form of legal availability that could actually displace the
illicit markets in cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine would make
those drugs far cheaper and more available. If these "hard" drugs were
sold on more or less the same terms as alcohol, there is every reason
to think that free enterprise would work its magic of expanding the
customer base, and specifically the number of problem users, producing
an alcohol-like toll in disease, accident and crime.

Fortunately, there are things that we already know how to do that work
demonstrably better than our current antidrug regime and avoid the
predictably dire consequences of legalization. These practical
measures can't abolish drug abuse or the illicit markets, but they
could shrink those problems to a manageable size.

Start with the biggest problem: alcohol. Inflation has eroded the
federal alcohol tax down to about a fifth of its Korean War level in
constant-dollar terms. Analysis by Philip Cook of Duke University
suggests that tripling the tax - from about a dime to about 30 cents a
drink - would prevent at least 1,000 homicides and 2,000 motor-vehicle
fatalities a year, all without enriching any criminals, putting anyone
behind bars or having a SWAT team crash through anyone's door.

Raising alcohol taxes would have a big effect on adolescents and heavy
drinkers, but many problem users of alcohol would have enough money to
keep guzzling. Some of them like to drink and drive, or drink and beat
up other people. Telling them not to misbehave does not do much good,
because being drunk makes them less responsive to the threat of
criminal penalties. So we need to find ways of preventing drinking
among the relatively small group of people who behave very badly when
they drink.

Larry Long, a district court judge in South Dakota, developed one
promising approach, called 24/7 Sobriety. Started in 2005, it requires
people who commit alcohol-related crimes - originally just repeat
offenders for drunken driving but now other offenders - to show up
twice a day, every day, for a breathalyzer test as a condition of
staying out of jail. If they fail to appear, or if the test shows they
have been drinking, they go straight to jail for a day.

More than 99% of the time, they show up as ordered, sober. They can go
to alcohol treatment, or not, as they choose; what they can't choose
is to keep drinking. According to the state attorney general's office,
some 20,000 South Dakotans have participated in 24/7 Sobriety (a large
number for state with just 825,000 residents), and the program has
made a big dent in rearrests for DUI.

By distinguishing sharply between people who use alcohol badly and the
larger population of non-problem users, 24/7 Sobriety moves past the
simple dichotomy of either banning a drug entirely or making it legal
in unlimited quantities for all adults.

An alternative means to the same end would require everyone buying a
drink to show identification. A state could then make someone
convicted of drunken driving or drunken assault ineligible to buy a
drink just by marking his driver's license. That is a pretty minimal
intrusion on the liberty of people convicted of crimes and on the
privacy of those who don't now get "carded."

The same principle of denying drugs to problem users could work for
the currently forbidden drugs. Current laws already make it illegal to
possess or use cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine, but the risk of
arrest is too low to be much of a deterrent. However, once someone has
been convicted of a crime, the rules change. Abstinence can be
required as a condition of pretrial release, probation or parole, and
that condition can be enforced with chemical testing.

Drug testing is already widespread for probation and parole, but these
systems lack any sort of swift, moderate penalty for detected drug
use. Given the alternatives currently available - issuing a warning to
the relapsed drug user or sending him back to serve out his full
sentence - most judges and parole officers choose the warning.
Probationers quickly learn that a warning is mostly a bluff, and they
keep on using drugs and committing crimes.

Steven Alm, a circuit judge in Honolulu, and Leighton Iles, the
probation chief for Tarrant County, Texas (Fort Worth and Arlington),
have demonstrated that swift and certain sanctions make all the
difference. In a carefully studied yearlong trial involving hundreds
of probationers, Judge Alm's program, called HOPE, reduced drug use by
more than 80% and days behind bars by more than 50%, according to
figures from the National Institute of Justice. Offenders quickly
learned that drug use was no longer something they could get away
with, and even most long-term users were able to quit. The program
freed them from the cycle of use, crime and incarceration.

Having to call in every day to find out whether it is your day to be
tested turns out to be powerful help in staying clean. As one
probationer told a researcher, "Knowing I had to make that phone call
the next morning ruined the high." Leighton Iles's Swift program in
Texas has recorded equally impressive results, and there are promising
pilot efforts with parolees in Seattle and Sacramento.

Substantial progress in suppressing the drug use of arrestees would be
a great boon. It would deprive the illicit drug markets of their most
valuable customers, which would, in turn, reduce violence in
inner-city neighborhoods and take the pressure off Latin American
countries now racked by drug dealing.

Since the war on drugs started in earnest three decades ago, the law
has found it impossible to stop the flow of illegal drugs. Prices have
dropped despite billions of dollars spent on catching drug dealers and
locking them up. We are long overdue for refocusing anti-drug efforts
on the central task of protecting public safety and order.

David Kennedy of John Jay College in New York City has pioneered two
related programs designed to go after the most violent dealers and
organizations and to shut down the most violent market areas. His Drug
Market Intervention program, first used in High Point, N.C., in 2004
and replicated many times in places such as Hempstead, N.Y., and
Memphis, Tenn., focuses on areas where crack houses and flagrant
street-corner dealing generate crime and disorder.

The first step, once the police negotiate community support, is to
identify all the dealers and make cases against them. Then comes the
surprising part: Instead of being arrested, the nonviolent dealers are
called in for a meeting. (The handful of violent ones go to jail.)
They are presented with the evidence against them - perhaps video of
them making a sale - and confronted by angry neighbors, clergy and
relatives. Each one is then offered a choice: Stop dealing and get
help to turn your life around, or tell it to the judge.

The point is not to eliminate the drug supply but to force dealing
into a less flagrant and socially damaging form: sales in bars or home
delivery instead of street-corner transactions. The results have been
spectacular, with long-established markets disappearing overnight.

Prof. Kennedy's other innovation was the Boston Ceasefire program. In
1996, violent youth gangs engaged in drug dealing and other crimes
were brought in by the authorities and given a simple message: "If
anyone in your gang shoots somebody, we will come down on every member
of the gang for all of his illegal activity." Suddenly gang members
had a strong reason to enforce nonviolence on one another, and
pressure from peers turned out to be more effective than pressure from
police officers. Youth homicides dropped from two a month before the
program started to none in the following two years.

This approach could be applied to violent individuals as well. Instead
of trying to arrest all dealers indiscriminately, law enforcement
could identify the most violent dealers, warn them that if they don't
stop right away they are headed to prison, and focus on putting away
as many as possible of those who don't quit. That wouldn't shrink the
supply of drugs, but it might reduce street violence.

The U.S. has reached a dead end in trying to fight drug use by
treating every offender as a serious criminal. Blanket drug
legalization has some superficial charm - it fits nicely into a
sound-bite or tweet - but it can't stand up to serious analysis. The
real prospects for reform involve policies rather than slogans. It
remains to be seen whether our political process - and the media
circus that often shapes it - can tolerate the necessary complexity.

Dr. Kleiman is professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of
Public Affairs. Dr. Caulkins is Stever Professor of Operations Research 
and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Hawken is associate
professor of public policy at Pepperdine University. They are co-authors 
of "Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know."
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