Pubdate: Mon, 01 Apr 2013
Source: Kansas State Collegian (KS Edu)
Copyright: 2013 Patrick White
Contact:  http://kstatecollegian.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2850
Author: Patrick White
Note: Patrick White is a junior in journalism and mass communications.

DRUG LEGALIZATION NOT THE ANSWER TO CURRENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

An oft-touted solution to many national problems is to legalize drugs
and regulate them, thus providing a new source of revenue. People
wouldn't be put in jail for drugs, so they could get on with their
lives and get jobs. It's supposedly a win-win situation. However, the
legalization of drugs would have several bad consequences that do not
get mentioned because of how appealing the potential revenue sounds.

Regulation would still cost money. Take methamphetamine, for example -
the cost of police enforcement would not disappear just because
citizens aren't being arrested for possession. Decriminalization could
never make it legal or safe for a meth lab to be running in a
residential area. The chemicals used to cook meth are at great risk of
exploding in the process. Even if meth was legal, the dangers of
someone wanting homemade instead of store-bought meth would continue.
The police would still have to find and shut down meth labs.

Furthermore, drug legalization has been tried before, and it failed to
produce the intended effect. According to "Drug Legalization: Myths and
Misconceptions," a 1994 manual published by the United States Department
of Justice, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands both attempted to
legalize drugs. The theory was that if drugs were legal, organized crime
would lose a source of income and addicts would not commit theft to get
more drugs. It would also, in theory, decrease the number of addicts,
since the money once used to combat the drug trade could instead be used
for rehabilitation and prevention. The measures failed miserably.

Hypothetically, people would not suddenly become heroin addicts
because their jobs would require them to remain clean. In actuality,
for the decade that Britain ran the program (1970-1980), the number of
addicts increased by 100 percent. Why? The increase was mostly made up
of the demographic that didn't have to worry about job security and
financial stability - teenagers. The United Kingdom shut down the
program because they had used taxpayer money to get everyone's kids on
heroin.

The Netherlands are currently reversing their stance on
decriminalization because of problems in Amsterdam. Drug use in
Amsterdam was not only legal, but also permitted in public. While that
was fine on its own, everyone eventually saw a problem when the number
of such cafes skyrocketed from around 30 locations in the city to well
over 300 in one decade. In addition, drug users accounted for 80
percent of all property crime in the city.

In history class, it was joked that if Imperial China had made the
sale of opium legal, it could have controlled its opium epidemic. The
real joke is that no one looked into how the country solved the
problem - a real oversight for a history class. China used a
three-pronged method to end the opium epidemic. They created a task
force centered on arresting drug dealers as opposed to users and
created a state-sponsored rehab program which was followed by job
training. The program worked.

Perhaps the most influential part of the historical evidence
overlooked is that no money was made off of taxing and regulating
sales. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands in particular saw that
drug trafficking went on as usual because of people's fiscal decisions.

The often-cited Cato Institute study on the amount of money that would
be made on the taxation of drugs makes those projections based on
rates similar to alcohol and tobacco. This study assumes people would
pay taxes on them. If people are fine breaking the law and getting
drugs illegally on the street for a certain price now, why would they
pay additional money later in the form of taxes on it just because it
was legal?

I know the United States is not winning the War on Drugs, but
legalization has issues that would be present whether the drug of
choice was legal or not. The supposed new revenue source doesn't
exist. Legalization makes the problem worse than the current solution
of overspending on enforcement.

Patrick White is a junior in journalism and mass communications.
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D