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subject persuasive in arguing that the weight of the evidence is
against the current attempt to prohibit drugs.  But NATIONAL REVIEW
has not, until now, opined formally on the subject.  We do so at this
point.  To put off a declarative judgment would be morally and
intellectually weak-kneed.
Things being as they are, and people as they are, there is no way to
prevent somebody, somewhere, from concluding that "NATIONAL REVIEW
favors drugs." We don't; we deplore their use; we urge the stiffest
feasible sentences against anyone convicted of selling a drug to a
minor.  But that said, it is our judgment that the war on drugs has
failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal
with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and
that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures
associated with police states.  We all agree on movement toward
legalization, even though we may differ on just how far.
We are joined in our judgment by Ethan A. Nadelmann, a scholar and
researcher; Kurt Schmoke, a mayor and former prosecutor; Joseph D.
McNamara, a former police chief; Robert W. Sweet, a federal judge and
former prosecutor; Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist; and Steven B. Duke, a
law professor.  Each has his own emphases, as one might expect.  All
agree that the celebrated war has failed, and that it is time to go
home, and to mobilize fresh thought on the drug problem in the context
of a free society.  This symposium is our contribution to such thought.
William. F. Buckley Jr.
Last summer WFB was asked by the New York Bar Association to make a
statement to the panel of lawyers considering the question.  He made
the following statement:
We are speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per
year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from
consumers, is responsible for nearly 50 per cent of the million
Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50 per cent of
the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000
policemen - yet a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect.
Perhaps you, ladies and gentlemen of the Bar, will understand it if I
chronicle my own itinerary on the subject of drugs and public policy.
When I ran for mayor of New York, the political race was jocular, but
the thought given to municipal problems was entirely serious, and in
my paper on drugs and in my post-election book I advocated their
continued embargo, but on unusual grounds.  I had read - and I think
the evidence continues to affirm it - that drug-taking is a gregarious
activity.  What this means, I said, is that an addict is in pursuit of
company and therefore attempts to entice others to share with him his
habit.  Under the circumstances, I said, it can reasonably be held that
drug-taking is a contagious disease and, accordingly, subject to the
conventional restrictions employed to shield the innocent from Typhoid
Mary.  Some sport was made of my position by libertarians, including
Professor Milton Friedman, who asked whether the police might
legitimately be summoned if it were established that keeping company
with me was a contagious activity.
I recall all of this in search of philosophical perspective.  Back in
1965 I sought to pay conventional deference to libertarian presumptions
against outlawing any activity potentially harmful only to the person
who engages in that activity.  I cited John Stuart Mill and, while at
it, opined that there was no warrant for requiring motorcyclists to
wear a helmet.  I was seeking, and I thought I had found, a reason to
override the presumption against intercession by the state.
About ten years later, I deferred to a different allegiance, this one
not the presumptive opposition to state intervention, but a different
order of priorities.  A conservative should evaluate the practicality
of a legal constriction, as for instance in those states whose statute
books continue to outlaw sodomy, which interdiction is unenforceable,
making the law nothing more than print-on-paper.  I came to the
conclusion that the so-called war against drugs was not working, that
it would not work absent a change in the structure of the civil rights
to which we are accustomed and to which we cling as a valuable part of
our patrimony.  And that therefore if that war against drugs is not
working, we should look into what effects the war has, a canvass of the
casualties consequent on its failure to work.  That consideration
encouraged me to weigh utilitarian principles: the Benthamite calculus
of pain and pleasure introduced by the illegalization of drugs.
A year or so ago I thought to calculate a ratio, however roughly
arrived at, toward the elaboration of which I would need to place a
dollar figure on deprivations that do not lend themselves to
quantification.  Yet the law, lacking any other recourse, every day
countenances such quantifications, as when asking a jury to put a
dollar figure on the damage done by the loss of a plaintiff's right
arm, amputated by defective machinery at the factory.  My enterprise
became allegorical in character - I couldn't do the arithmetic - but
the model, I think, proves useful in sharpening perspectives.
Professor Steven Duke of Yale Law School, in his valuable book,
_America's Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade against Drugs_,
and scholarly essay, "Drug Prohibition: An Unnatural Disaster," reminds
us that it isn't the use of illegal drugs that we have any business
complaining about, it is the abuse of such drugs.  It is acknowledged
that tens of millions of Americans (I have seen the figure 85 million)
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