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have at one time or another consumed, or exposed themselves to, an
illegal drug.  But the estimate authorized by the federal agency
charged with such explorations is that there are not more than 1
million regular cocaine users, defined as those who have used the drug
at least once in the preceding week.  There are (again, an informed
estimate) 5 million Americans who regularly use marijuana; and again,
an estimated 70 million who once upon a time, or even twice upon a
time, inhaled marijuana.  From the above we reasonably deduce that
Americans who abuse a drug, here defined as Americans who become
addicted to it or even habituated to it, are a very small percentage
of those who have experimented with a drug, or who continue to use a
drug without any observable distraction in their lives or careers.
About such users one might say that they are the equivalent of those
Americans who drink liquor but do not become alcoholics, or those
Americans who smoke cigarettes but do not suffer a shortened lifespan
as a result.
Curiosity naturally flows to ask, next, How many users of illegal drugs
in fact die from the use of them?  The answer is complicated in part
because marijuana finds itself lumped together with cocaine and heroin,
and nobody has ever been found dead from marijuana.  The question of
deaths from cocaine is complicated by the factor of impurity.  It would
not be useful to draw any conclusions about alcohol consumption, for
instance, by observing that, in 1931, one thousand Americans died from
alcohol consumption if it happened that half of those deaths, or more
than half, were the result of drinking alcohol with toxic ingredients
extrinsic to the drug as conventionally used.  When alcohol was
illegal, the consumer could never know whether he had been given
relatively harmless alcohol to drink - such alcoholic beverages as we
find today in the liquor store - or whether the bootlegger had come up
with paralyzing rotgut.  By the same token, purchasers of illegal
cocaine and heroin cannot know whether they are consuming a drug that
would qualify for regulated consumption after clinical analysis.
But we do know this, and I approach the nexus of my inquiry, which is
that more people die every year as a result of the war against drugs
than die from what we call, generically, overdosing.  These fatalities
include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for
commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed
by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become
addicted.
This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of
cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of
those drugs.  Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per
week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000.
The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to
come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars,
whatever.  We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would
provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug
situation, requires of him $1,000.
My mind turned, then, to auxiliary expenses - auxiliary pains, if you
wish.  The crime rate, whatever one made of its modest curtsy last year
toward diminution, continues its secular rise.  Serious crime is 480
per cent higher than in 1965.  The correlation is not absolute, but it
is suggestive: crime is reduced by the number of available enforcers of
law and order, namely policemen.  The heralded new crime legislation,
passed last year and acclaimed by President Clinton, provides for
100,000 extra policemen, even if only for a limited amount of time.
But 400,000 policemen would be freed to pursue criminals engaged in
activity other than the sale and distribution of drugs if such sale and
distribution, at a price at which there was no profit, were to be done
by, say, a federal drugstore.
So then we attempt to put a value on the goods stolen by addicts.  The
figure arrived at by Professor Duke is $10 billion.  But we need to add
to this pain of stolen property, surely, the extra-material pain
suffered by victims of robbers.  If someone breaks into your house at
night, perhaps holding you at gunpoint while taking your money and your
jewelry and whatever, it is reasonable to assign a higher "cost" to the
episode than the commercial value of the stolen money and jewelry.  If
we were modest, we might reasonably, however arbitrarily, put at $1,000
the "value" of the victim's pain.  But then the hurt, the psychological
trauma, might be evaluated by a jury at ten times, or one hundred times,
that sum.
But we must consider other factors, not readily quantifiable, but no
less tangible.  Fifty years ago, to walk at night across Central Park
was no more adventurous than to walk down Fifth Avenue.  But walking
across the park is no longer done, save by the kind of people who climb
the Matterhorn.  Is it fair to put a value on a lost amenity?  If the
Metropolitan Museum were to close, mightn't we, without fear of
distortion, judge that we had been deprived of something valuable?
What value might we assign to confidence that, at night, one can sleep
without fear of intrusion by criminals seeking money or goods
exchangeable for drugs?
Pursuing utilitarian analysis, we ask: What are the relative costs, on
the one hand, of medical and psychological treatment for addicts and,
on the other, incarceration for drugs?  It transpires that treatment is
seven times more cost-effective.  By this is meant that one dollar
spent on the treatment of an addict reduces the probability of
continued addiction seven times more than one dollar spent on
incarceration.  Looked at another way: Treatment for addicts is not now
available for almost half of those who would benefit from treatment.
 >>> Continued to next message...
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