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Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate
drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and
maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the
drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and
psychological treatment.
I have spared you, even as I spare myself, an arithmetical consummation
of my inquiry, but the data here cited instruct us that the cost of the
drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than
would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of
non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment
with drugs.  We have seen a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco
over the last thirty years, and this is not because tobacco became
illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers,
to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health, even as, we can
assume, a growing number of Americans desist from practicing unsafe sex
and using polluted needles in this age of AIDS.  If 80 million
Americans can experiment with drugs and resist addiction using
information publicly available, we can reasonably hope that
approximately the same number would resist the temptation to purchase
such drugs even if they were available at a federal drugstore at the
mere cost of production.
And added to the above is the point of civil justice.  Those who suffer
from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it.  This does not
mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight.  It
does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those
citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and
property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs
sought after by the minority.
I have not spoken of the cost to our society of the astonishing legal
weapons available now to policemen and prosecutors; of the penalty of
forfeiture of one's home and property for violation of laws which,
though designed to advance the war against drugs, could legally be
used - I am told by learned counsel - as penalties for the neglect of
one's pets.  I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a
society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison
because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana.  I
would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would
mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal
equivalent of a My Lai massacre.  And perhaps proceed to recommend the
legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.
Ethan A. Nadelmann
We turned to Mr. Nadelmann to pursue the inquiry.  Formerly in the
Political Science Department at Princeton, he is now the director of
the Lindesmith Center, a drug-policy research institute in New York
City.  He is the author of _Cops across Borders: The
Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement.
The essayists assembled here do not agree exactly on which aspect of
the war on drugs is most disgraceful, or on which alternative to our
current policies is most desirable, but we do agree, as Mr. Buckley
expected, on the following: The "war on drugs" has failed to accomplish
its stated objectives, and it cannot succeed so long as we remain a
free society, bound by our Constitution.  Our prohibitionist approach
to drug control is responsible for most of the ills commonly associated
with America's "drug problem." And some measure of legal availability
and regulation is essential if we are to reduce significantly the
negative consequences of both drug use and our drug-control policies.
Proponents of the war on drugs focus on one apparent success: The
substantial decline during the 1980s in the number of Americans who
consume marijuana and cocaine.  Yet that decline began well before the
Federal Government intensified its "war on drugs" in 1986, and it
succeeded principally in reducing illicit drug use among middle-class
Americans, who were least likely to develop drug-related problems.
Far more significant were the dramatic increases in drug- and
prohibition-related disease, death, and crime.  Crack cocaine - as
much a creature of prohibition as 180-proof moonshine during alcohol
prohibition - became the drug of choice in most inner cities.  AIDS
spread rapidly among injecting drug addicts, their lovers, and their
children, while government policies restricted the availability of
clean syringes that might have stemmed the epidemic.  And
prohibition-related violence reached unprecedented levels as a new
generation of Al Capones competed for turf, killing not just one
another but innocent bystanders, witnesses, and law-enforcement officials.
There are several basic truths about drugs and drug policy which a
growing number of Americans have come to acknowledge.
Most people can use most drugs without doing much harm to themselves or
anyone else, as Mr. Buckley reminds us, citing Professor Duke.  Only a
tiny percentage of the 70 million Americans who have tried marijuana
have gone on to have problems with that or any other drug.  The same is
true of the tens of millions of Americans who have used cocaine or
hallucinogens.  Most of those who did have a problem at one time or
another don't any more.  That a few million Americans have serious
problems with illicit drugs today is an issue meriting responsible
national attention, but it is no reason to demonize those drugs and the
people who use them.
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