Time for another look at drug decriminalization in the U.S.

[BrainGlutton]

For one thing, the War on Drugs was dishonestly based on a blatantly racist agenda from the start – I mean, from the Nixon Admin, before “War on Drugs” was even a phrase. From Dan Baum’s April cover story in Harper’s:

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Of course, it still could be a good idea undertaken for the wrong reasons – but, it ain’t. As Sean Illing writes in Salon:

The drug war is an issue in this campaign, but it ought to be front and center. America’s war on drugs hasn’t worked – for anyone. It’s been a boon to the pharmaceutical companies, who don’t want the competition, and to the prison-industrial complex, who profit from locking up nonviolent offenders, but it’s been a disaster for everyone else.

<snip>

We’ve been waging this misbegotten war for nearly half a century, with objectively horrid results. Thankfully, there are states leading the way on this issue – Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and D.C. have all legalized pot, and many more states are likely to follow suit. But it’s not enough. And although it starts with marijuana, it has to extend to all drugs.

This isn’t theoretical; we know what happens when countries legalize drugs. As Baum points out, the Netherlands, Australia, the Czech Republic and others have legalized pot and in “none of these jurisdictions did marijuana become a health or public-order problem.” In Portugal, moreover, all drugs were decriminalized in 2001 – including cocaine and heroin. The results, Baum notes, “have been astounding.” The data is consistent and clear: legalization doesn’t lead to massive spikes in drug use, but it does save money, destroy black markets, and reduce addiction rates by promoting more rehabilitation.

Does anyone see a downside?

N.B.: The government of the Netherlands does not take a simply libertarian ain’t-nobody’s-business-if-you-do approach to all drugs. It does consider drug abuse a problem – but a public-health problem, not a crime problem. Therefore, you may not simply buy or sell heroin like you can buy or sell heroin, but addicts can get heroin from the government under careful supervision. Well, why not? In the U.S., heroin addicts can get methadone from the government under careful supervision – the only difference is that methadone satisfies the biochemical addiction-craving without getting the user high, or stoned, or whatever you call the psychoactive effects of a heroin dose. I don’t see how that’s any better, it seems to merely a case of American pleasure-denying puritanism.

Portugal, OTOH, apparently is taking a simply libertarian approach. And the results appear to be just as good as in the Netherlands.

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

For one thing, the War on Drugs was dishonestly based on a blatantly racist agenda N.B.: The government of the Netherlands does not take a simply libertarian ain’t-nobody’s-business-if-you-do approach to all drugs. It does consider drug abuse a problem – but a public-health problem, not a crime problem. Therefore, you may not simply buy or sell heroin like you can buy or sell heroin . . .

Sorry, I meant to write, “like you can buy or sell aspirin.”

[running_coach]

@BrainGlutton

Does anyone see a downside?

N.B.: The government of the Netherlands does not take a simply libertarian ain’t-nobody’s-business-if-you-do approach to all drugs. It does consider drug abuse a problem – but a public-health problem, not a crime problem. Therefore, you may not simply buy or sell heroin like you can buy or sell heroin, but addicts can get heroin from the government under careful supervision. Well, why not? In the U.S., heroin addicts can get methadone from the government under careful supervision – **the only difference is that methadone satisfies the biochemical addiction-craving without getting the user high, or stoned, **or whatever you call the psychoactive effects of a heroin dose. I don’t see how that’s any better, it seems to merely a case of American pleasure-denying puritanism.

Portugal, OTOH, apparently is taking a simply libertarian approach. And the results appear to be just as good as in the Netherlands.

Since I assume the addicts are looking for a high, I see a potential problem.

[BrainGlutton]

@running_coach

Since I assume the addicts are looking for a high, I see a potential problem.

I see it as more of a what-the-hell thing. AIUI, heroin users – and users of opiates generally – can be very high-function people if they have access to a steady and cheap supply of the drug (and if they’re sensible enough not to fix before going to work); it is mainly the social conditions under which they must feed their habit that make them losers.

[Crazy_Canuck]

@running_coach

Since I assume the addicts are looking for a high, I see a potential problem.

And look, we have an example by the third post of “American pleasure-denying puritanism.” Assuming there are no safety concerns, why do you care if someone gets high?

The war on drugs is a war on the poor. It was birthed in racism, and is used as a tool by the powerful to keep their lessers beneath them. I’m with BrainGlutton on this one.

[BrainGlutton]

I would actually worry more about cocaine than heroin – I’ve known people who were really driven 'round the bend by it.

[running_coach]

@Mithrander

And look, we have an example by the third post of “American pleasure-denying puritanism.” Assuming there are no safety concerns, why do you care if someone gets high?

Nothing of the sort. If methadone therapy is intended to satisfy the craving for opiates but the addict is still engaged in crime in order to get the high they want, the criminal/general destructive behavior is not solved.

I’m not necessarily against decriminalization of drugs but I don’t think just throwing the doors open is the best way to do it.

[Crazy_Canuck]

@running_coach

Nothing of the sort. If methadone therapy is intended to satisfy the craving for opiates but the addict is still engaged in crime in order to get the high they want, the criminal/general destructive behavior is not solved.

1. If the drugs are legal and cheap enough that the addict does not need to steal to feed his habit, the criminal behaviour is solved.

2. That’s not the question I asked. I asked why you cared if someone got high. Your assumption that an addict is a criminal stealing to feed his habit says quite a bit.

[Ukulele_Ike]

@BrainGlutton

I would actually worry more about cocaine than heroin – I’ve known people who were really driven 'round the bend by it.

Hmmmm…I haven’t touched the stuff in over 20 years, but if ten-gram bottles of pure cocaine were sold at every newsstand for a few bucks…I would probably be dead in a few months.

However, far be it from ME to stand in the path of the Public Good.

[BrainGlutton]

@running_coach

I’m not necessarily against decriminalization of drugs but I don’t think just throwing the doors open is the best way to do it.

Fine, then let’s do it the Dutch way, not the Portuguese way. But at any rate we should be trying to learn something from foreign examples here (and a great many elswheres, but that’s another discussion).

[jasg]

@running_coach

Nothing of the sort. If methadone therapy is intended to satisfy the craving for opiates but the addict is still engaged in crime in order to get the high they want, the criminal/general destructive behavior is not solved.

I’m not necessarily against decriminalization of drugs but I don’t think just throwing the doors open is the best way to do it.

My wife & daughter both work for a non-profit that provides methadone treatment.

It is supplied to keep the addicts from suffering from withdrawal, not to satisfy cravings. By the time the addicts hit the program, the high is not the object of shooting up - avoiding the agony of lack of opiates is.

The experience of HAT - Heroin Assisted Therapy in Switzerland is instructive.

Nobody thinks this is a good thing - it’s not cool to go to a clinic like ours to get heroin twice a day.

"We’ve medicalised heroin in Switzerland - it has the image of an ugly illness, and that is why, I think, numbers of new addicts are falling.

Very few young people are turning to heroin in Switzerland these days."

[BrainGlutton]

@Ukulele_Ike

Hmmmm…I haven’t touched the stuff in over 20 years, but if ten-gram bottles of pure cocaine were sold at every newsstand for a few bucks…I would probably be dead in a few months.

However, far be it from ME to stand in the path of the Public Good.

Well, of course, all drugs are not the same.

And any reform effort should begin with recognizing that fact.

OTOH, cocaine is not only a public-health problem – the illegal U.S. market for it keeps the Latin American drug cartels in business, with disastrous social and political consequences there and here, and far worse there, and I can think of no way to drive them out of business short of full decriminalization.

I doubt marijuana is much of a problem in that regard – coca plants can only be grown in the South American highlands, but hemp can grow almost anywhere, including here. Look for the Union Label!

[BrainGlutton]

@jasg

The experience of HAT - Heroin Assisted Therapy in Switzerland is instructive.

I guess going to a clinic for your smack kind of spoils the Cool Factor.

[Maastricht]

That quote in the OP is deeply chilling. It speaks of a level of cynism deemed to ubelievable for House of Cards . And yet I believe it.

[John_Mace]

@BrainGlutton

For one thing, the War on Drugs was dishonestly based on a blatantly racist agenda from the start – I mean, from the Nixon Admin, before “War on Drugs” was even a phrase. From Dan Baum’s April cover story in Harper’s:

I’m for drug legalization pretty much across the board, but I call bullshit on that*. Both marijuana and heroine were illegal long before Nixon was president, and (from wikipedia):

Mandatory sentencing and increased punishment were enacted when the United States Congress passed the Boggs Act of 1951.[4] The acts made a first time cannabis possession offense a minimum of two to ten years with a fine up to $20,000; however, in 1970, the United States Congress repealed mandatory penalties for cannabis offenses

Emphasis added.

*Not that many laws might have been racist all along, but that Nixon had much to do about it one way or the other.

[dtilque]

@BrainGlutton

I doubt marijuana is much of a problem in that regard – coca plants can only be grown in the South American highlands, but hemp can grow almost anywhere, including here. Look for the Union Label!

There was a news story recently that the flow of MJ from Mexico was quickly slowing and may even reverse. It seems that marijuana grown in the US is much higher quality than that grown south of the border. Credit this to medical marijuana mainly, although the legalization in several states helps.

[Hector_St_Clare]

Uruguay has a state-run marijuana industry, apparently. (In general, Latin American countries are increasingly moving in the direction of liberalizing on drugs, and calling for more widespread legalization).

[BrainGlutton]

@John_Mace

I’m for drug legalization pretty much across the board, but I call bullshit on that*. Both marijuana and heroine were illegal long before Nixon was president, and (from wikipedia):

Yes, I know, since the 1920s. But Nixon made a national issue of it, he gave it unprecedented attention and priority, he created the DEA, he started the first national War on Drugs since Prohibition.

[Ukulele_Ike]

@BrainGlutton

I guess going to a clinic for your smack kind of spoils the Cool Factor.

Yeah, you wouldn’t catch William Burroughs DEAD there.

[BrainGlutton]

@dtilque

There was a news story recently that the flow of MJ from Mexico was quickly slowing and may even reverse. It seems that marijuana grown in the US is much higher quality than that grown south of the border. Credit this to medical marijuana mainly, although the legalization in several states helps.

Finally, some good news for America’s balance of trade!