>>> Part 14 of 15...
If these remarks had been preceded by two words, "Prohibition of," the
statement would have been correct, and the political reverberations
would have been deafening.  Instead, Dr. Brown implied that drug
consumption is by itself responsible for "turf wars" and the other
enumerated evils, an implication which he and every other drug warrior
know is false.  The only possibility more daunting than that our
leaders are dissembling is that they might actually believe the
nonsense they purvey.
I have little to add to the catalog of drug-war casualties in the other
essays assembled here.  I do, however, see another angle of entry for
Mr. Buckley's efforts at "quantification." I have argued elsewhere that
the drug war is responsible for at least half of our serious crime.  A
panel of experts consulted by U.S. News & World Report put the annual
dollar cost of America's crime at $674 billion.  Half of that, $337
billion, was the total federal budget as recently as 1975.  The crime
costs of drug prohibition alone may equal 150 per cent of the entire
federal welfare budget for 1995.
I also think Mr. Buckley understates the nonquantifiable loss of what
he quaintly refers to as "amenities." Not only is it nearly suicidal to
walk alone in Central Park at night, it is impossible in sections of
some cities safely to leave one's home, or to remain there.  Some
Americans sleep in their bathtubs hoping they are bullet-proof.
Prohibition-generated violence is destroying large sections of American
cities.  We can have our drug war or we can have healthy cities; we
cannot have both.
In this collection of essays, we critics have focused on the costs of
the drug war.  The warriors could justly complain if we failed to
mention the benefits.  So let's take a took at the "benefit" side of
the equation.  Were it not for the drug war, the prohibitionists say,
we might be a nation of zombies.  The DEA pulled the figure of 60
million from the sky: that's how many cocaine users they say we would
have if it weren't for prohibition.  Joseph Califano's colleague at the
Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, Dr. Herbert Kleber, a former
assistant to William Bennett, puts the number of cocaine users after
repeal at a more modest 20 to 25 million.  In contrast, government
surveys suggest that only about 3 million Americans currently use
cocaine even occasionally and fewer than 500,000 use it weekly.
The prohibitionists' scenarios have no basis either in our history or
in other cultures.  In many countries, heroin and cocaine are cheap and
at least de facto legal.  Mexico is awash in cheap drugs, yet our own
State Department says that Mexico does "not have a serious drug
problem." Neither cocaine nor heroin is habitually consumed by more
than a small fraction of the residents of any country in the world.
There is no reason to suppose that Americans would be the single
exception.
Lee Brown used to rely on alcohol prohibition as proof that
legalization would addict the nation, asserting that alcohol
consumption "shot straight up" when Prohibition was repeated.  He no
longer claims that, it having been pointed out to him that alcohol
consumption increased only about 25 per cent in the years following
repeal.  Yet even assuming, contrary to that experience, that ingestion
of currently illegal drugs would double or triple following repeal,
preventing such increased consumption still cannot be counted a true
benefit of drug prohibition.  After repeal, the drugs would be
regulated; their purity and potency would be disclosed on the package,
as Mr. Buckley points out, together with appropriate warnings.  Deaths
from overdoses and toxic reactions would be reduced, not increased.
Moreover, as Richard Cowan has explained (NR, "How the Narcs Created
Crack," Dec. 5, 1986), the drugs consumed after repeal would be less
potent than those ingested under prohibition.  Before alcohol
prohibition, we were a nation of beer drinkers.  Prohibition pushed us
toward hard liquor, a habit from which we are still recovering.  Before
the Harrison Act, many Americans took their cocaine in highly diluted
forms, such as Coca-Cola.
We would also end the cruel practices described by Ethan Nadelmann
wherein we deny pain medication to those who need it, preclude the
medical use of marijuana, and compel drug users to share needles and
thus to spread deadly diseases.  The proportion of users who would
consume the drugs without substantial health or other problems would be
greatly increased.  In comparison to any plausible post-repeal
scenario, therefore, there simply are no health benefits achieved by
prohibition.
Given the forum, I should perhaps confess that I am not now, nor have
I ever been, a conservative.  As an outsider, therefore, perhaps I can
be pardoned for my inability to see consistency in the positions
conservatives commonly take on drugs and related issues.  I can
understand how one who believes that government should force us to
lead proper lives can, albeit mistakenly, support drug prohibition.
But I cannot comprehend how any conservative can support the drug war.
That is my major mystery.  I am also perplexed by some subordinate,
mini-mysteries, of which here are a few:
- Why do so many conservatives preach "individual responsibility" yet
ardently punish people for the chemicals they consume and thus deny the
right that gives meaning to the responsibility) Many of these same
conservatives would think it outrageous for the government to decree
the number of calories we ingest or the kind of exercise we get, even
though such decrees would be aimed at preserving our lives, keeping us
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