By Request: Your Crime Control Policy On Drugs
A couple of questions asking me about the so-called “war on drugs.” It’s a multifaceted issue, of course, and part of the problem with our current approach is that different substances are treated in fairly arbitrary ways rather than with any kind of serious look at the harms in play. In general, I favor paternalism and policies that discourage people from doing stuff that’s harmful so I don’t regret that you can’t buy heroin at the local pharmacist anymore. A few things I think:
- Most jurisdictions should have higher cigarette taxes, though in some places it’s already so high that you’re starting to see substantial black market issues and those places need to be careful.
- Booze taxes should be higher most places and more clearly based on alcohol content.
- Conversely, restrictions on marijuana use should be eased. I think it’s good that we don’t have a “marijuana industry” with slick marketing campaigns and lobbyists on the Hill, but letting people “grow your own” in the basement and smoke it in your house would help undercut serious criminal enterprises and let people have some relatively harmless fun.
- Treatment that works should be more widely available, but unfortunately my understanding is that there isn’t much in the way of effective treatment beyond things like methadone replacement for opium addicts.
- We need to put much less emphasis on trying to fight drug abuse at the point of cultivation, which is taking a big toll on our foreign policy and not achieving much of anything.
- When we arrest people who have hard drug problems, we need to rely much more on things like coerced abstinence from drugs and much less on willy-nilly throwing people into jail.
- Law enforcement needs to get some reasonable goals in mind for its drug enforcement rather than “let’s seize a lot of drugs” or hazy and utopian efforts to eliminate the existence of illegal drugs. Maybe you’re targeting gangs that are killing people. Or maybe you’re targeting gangs that you hear are employing kids who belong in school. Or who are hassling people on the street. Conversely, you’re deliberately going easy on enterprises that are selling drugs out of a house somewhere but making trouble.
Those are some ideas, not by any means the last word. I think it’s really unfortunate that since the nineties crime drop, the public conversation about crime reduction has just vanished. It’d be one thing if the drop had been continuing, but in reality since the 2000-2001 recession we’ve generally been treading water. That doesn’t mean we need to “get tough” on crime, since we’re really past the limit where the “throw more people in jail” strategy is useful. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing more we can or should be doing.
62 Responses to “By Request: Your Crime Control Policy On Drugs”
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January 22nd, 2009 at 2:31 pm
As to the idea of coerced abstinacne…
It sounds like an improvement on what we have now, but anything that calls its philosophy “neo-paternalism” still leaves the US (and myself) queasy…
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:32 pm
In general, I favor paternalism and policies that discourage people from doing stuff that’s harmful
It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on how the line is to be drawn on that in a principled way.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
“Conversely, you’re deliberately going easy on enterprises that are selling drugs out of a house somewhere but making trouble.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – easily the most confusing typo is the elimination of the word “not.” In this case, also a pretty hilarious one.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Bunny Colvin for national drug Czar!
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Oh, you’re just a liberal weenie who doesn’t fear the Jihadi in your closet. Or the ones sizing your wyman folk for a Burkha fit. And did you know that BAghdad has more murder and mayhem than your average American big city. Everything not being relative or unequal, we are safe thanks to Al and GWB.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:50 pm
In general, I favor paternalism and policies that discourage people from doing stuff that’s harmful
Stuff that’s harmful? So eating junkfood? Turning up the TV too loud?
How about letting adults make their own mistakes and their own choices? No? The nanny state is better? Of course.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:54 pm
See also: http://www.samefacts.com/archives/drug_policy_/2008/12/what_should_the_new_administration_know_about_drugs.php
… and Kleiman’s commentary generally.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:54 pm
One of the key problems is the wholesale substitution of politics for objective, sound scientific analysis. It’s one thing for a pharmaceutical company to conduct a study, get a result they don’t like and then ignore/bury it. It’s quite another for the President (in this case Clinton) to have his drug czar conduct a study on whether or not marijuana is a) chemically addictive and b) a gateway drug, get a result that contradicts what they want, throw that out and continue to base policy on bad (or no) science.
Obviously this causes problems in other area (hello, global warming) and it’s not like we can just pass a law requiring the government to act based on the results of individual studies. But I also think it’s not unreasonable for there to be a government (Congressional?) entity whose sole reason to exist is to be an (empowered) arbiter of ALL scientific data relevant to government policy, specifically when it comes to new research. Maybe this already exists, but I get the feeling that it’s mostly scattered across different entities (EPA, USDA, NSF, etc.) Hopefully Obama can bring his “reality-based” approach to the use of science in government as well.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:59 pm
How do we know when we’ve arrested “people who have hard drug problems”, versus people who simply use “hard” drugs but continue to lead responsible lives?
People seem to understand this distinction quite easily when it comes to other activities: gambling, eating, watching TV. There’s a spectrum from abstinence to use to abuse to addiction to serious life problems/death
If someone does cocaine once a month, do they need to be forced into rehab by the government?
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:09 pm
my understanding is that there isn’t much in the way of effective treatment beyond things like methadone replacement for opium addicts.
You can prescribe heroin. Oh, I forgot: for that, you need a functional healthcare system.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Forget drug policy. I’d like to hear more about why, in general, you favor paternalism as public policy.
My bet? You don’t have a good argument for this and it negates the entire logic of this mish-mash post. I think it’s hard to find an example of an issue that required legal ‘paternalism’ where sincere progress was made by involving law enforcement.
I mean, speeding laws make sense, because they protect individuals from being involved in dangerous car accidents. Whose protected by anti-drug laws? The vast majority crime involved in the drug market is the crime created and spawned by its very illegality.
By product crime, like addicts stealing to get funds to buy drugs, is not nearly as common as people like to think. Any progressive who thinks submitting these people to the mercy of the criminal justice system makes more sense than cheap available treatment for what is a genuine chemical medical condition have a steep rhetorical hill to climb. I think that’s why this post was a serious disappointment from an otherwise well-thought-out writer.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:12 pm
The “war on drugs” has proven to be an appalling, abject, total failure.
Heroin at the corner pharmacist would be vastly better than what we have now.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:17 pm
I think we shouldn’t be asking whether policies are “tough” on crime or “easy” on crime but whether they work to reduce harmful behavior. Do what works, not what makes you feel good.
And criminalization is itself a policy subject to this analysis. If it’s not getting results it should be getting the ax.
Prison and law-enforcement lobbies would block any such attempt, of course. But it’s what we *should* be doing.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:21 pm
You lost me at “paternalism”.
I would say blogs are about as detrimental to my health and productivity as alcohol, but, despite my liberal leanings, I wouldn’t recommend sin taxes on either.
Drug abuse is a medical issue, not a criminal one, and should be treated as such.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:21 pm
oh dear. paternalism is a big part of the problem here, paternalism, in my opinion, has a great deal to do with the general state of cultural retardation in which we find ourselves mired, particularly with respect to drugs.
you get mindless slogans as Mr. Yglesias mouths above – he’s “glad you can’t buy heroin at the pharmacy”. ok. what if it saved lives, led to less crime, and more productive lives for addicts? who cares! better to be paternalistic, that way you can pat yourself on the back for being a hard-ass, and tell yourself that the view is morally justified when a hapless addict is dragged away and beaten, or buys unsafe substances when trying to get a fix. yeah, that makes sense!
i mean really, this is grade-school-level thinking. this notion that people need to be protected from themselves by “big daddy” types who ‘know what’s best’ is what we really need to be protected from, because people who think that way are, well, immature and short-sighted. and the assumption that all recreational use of substances such as either alcohol or marijuana is “bad” or wrong, is also just as childish. there are certainly times when these things are “good”, good for you, good for the spirit, and so overwhelmingly encouraged and celebrated in our culture that no amount of paternalistic chest-thumping would be enough to convince people otherwise. and that’s as it should be.
on this subject more than almost any other, we have to grow up and lose this “but ew, that’s icky and makes me uncomfortable” attitude. it is a fundamental weakness in our way of thinking and acting.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:26 pm
I expect better from Matt; this is hyper-timid incrementalist BS. The “war on drugs” is a tragedy and a farce. It destroys our inner cities and is disproportionately affects the poor and minorities. It’s a national disgrace and MY should know better.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Thanks for taking on this topic, MY, however briefly. Perhaps you could further expand on why drug policy, writ large, is not part of the national conversation any more by left or right.
Also, I was curious as to what it is you fear would happen if heroin were available at pharmacies? Back when that was actually the case, the principal danger was that a lot of people sat at home, listless and glassy-eyed. This strikes me as preferable to having people steal or rob to pay for heroin with its black-market inflated price and using dirty needles. Certainly we wouldn’t care to have a very large percentage of the population hooked on even pharmaceutical-grade smack in the privacy of their homes, but something tells me that it’s a pretty self-limiting problem.
Anyhoo, thanks for taking my (and others’) request.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I’m sure Target brand heroin would be a lot better than the garbage I’d get off the street, were I in the mood. Plus, I could get ten percent off my purchase if I signed up for a credit card.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Didn’t President Obama say Omar was his favorite Wire character? He should do the Omar strategy.
It’s bizarre having a president who was a fan of the Wire.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I think it’s good that we don’t have a “marijuana industry” with slick marketing campaigns and lobbyists on the Hill, but letting people “grow your own” in the basement and smoke it in your house would help undercut serious criminal enterprises and let people have some relatively harmless fun.
This is some pretty pathetic reasoning. It shouldn’t be illegal to possess or to use, but it should be illegal to sell because if you could sell it then the industry would have lobbyists? Would you ban the sale of beer and cigarettes to get rid of the pernicious alcohol and tobacco lobbies too? And of course agriculture lobbyists are pretty bad as well, and you can grow your own corn just as easily as growing your own marijuana. I’m thankful that in the real world you can’t go around banning trade for shoddy reasons like that.
Practically the only reason it makes sense to grow marijuana in your basement with expensive artificial light is because if you grow it outdoors where there is abundant free light, then either the cops will arrest you, or someone will steal it and you’ll have no recourse against them. The law can easily remedy both of these conditions, and if they did then you’d have practically no reason to grow in the basement.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:21 pm
“I think it’s good that we don’t have a “marijuana industry””
That’s not always true. There are some small towns near me where marijuana growing is the main industry. Sheriffs get elected by sending signals that they will not go against that industry. It makes for some bizarre situations, though. I was at a blues show and was smoking a joint with the guitarist during the set break. A guy walks right by me and asks the guitarist to sign the CD he just bought. When he left, I asked the guitarist who the guy was. “Oh, he’s the Sheriff,” was the reply.
As for coerced abstinence, well, I’ve been through it. It’s a hassle, but it sure beats jail. It’s not totally effective, but it makes you think about how drug use affects your life. It doesn’t make you quit, but it does lead you to use more responsibly. And that’s a good thing. Better than jail, for sure.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:40 pm
All currently illegal drugs should be treated exactly like cigs and booze. legalize ‘em, but limit their over use and control production through taxes and regulation.
Seems really simple to me.
I don’t have a problem with the State enacting policies to limit but don’t outlaw the over-use of stuff that is bad for people. Including junk food. It comes down to what’s the best use of public resources to best benefit the public good. If things like the drug trade (and related violence and corruption), obesity, and abundant hand guns are costing the nation lives and dollars, the law should nudge people away from their over-use.
There’s no reason heroin couldn’t be treated like Sudafed – sold at a non-trivial price at the drug store, but in limited amounts. Same with guns. You can limit straw purchases, and control the supply through regulation and licensing, without outlawing the sensible use by responsible, non-children.
It’s neither hyper-incrementalist bullshit nor a slippery slope. It’s an ideal end-state.
Easy.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Tragically — criminally — we’ve delayed crafting sensible drug policy for so long that a sophisticated criminal network is now in place to process, transport and supply illegal substances. You could legalize every drug tomorrow, and this network would no more disappear than the mob disappeared when Prohibition was repealed. The drug mob will find other ways to make money, and it won’t confine itself to the old inner-city drug zones.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
“It’s a multifaceted issue, of course, and part of the problem with our current approach is that different substances are treated in fairly arbitrary ways rather than with any kind of serious look at the harms in play. In general, I favor paternalism and policies that discourage people from doing stuff that’s harmful so I don’t regret that you can’t buy heroin at the local pharmacist anymore.”
Not to be too snarky, but it might be better to choose a different example for the illustrating the distinction between the “arbitrary” nature of current policy and “paternalism” that you would favor. There is very little evidence that heroin does long term physiologic damage besides addiction, when you exclude the problems associated with non-sterile intravenous administration (e.g. blood borne pathogens and/or infection). Maybe some very weak evidence of nephrotoxicity. Certainly less bad than booze. Cocaine, however, can be quite cardiotoxic in the short and/or long terms. I think that the “regret that you can’t buy heroin at the local pharmacist” is as arbitrary as anything else in the drug war.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:01 pm
The drug mob has too high a cost of operation to compete with legal merchants selling the same product (let alone a better quality, more reliable product). Without their main source of income, they will have a hard time attracting new recruits or bribing government and law enforcement officials.
In short, there’s a reason organized crime did very badly in between the old prohibition and the new.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Let’s not forget this consequence of the drug war: It’s virtually impossible to get narcotics for pain relief without showing up at the doctor’s office every month– or sometimes week– for a physical prescription, no matter how serious your condition, how overbooked the doctor is, or how much of a physical or logistical challenge it is to get to the doctor’s office. And that’s not even talking about how many hoops you have to jump through to get pseudephedrine, a once ‘over the counter’ drug.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I think the assertion that the drug war is failure is about spot-on. The law can say one thing but lets face it, with or without laws humans will engage behaviors: “good” “bad” and everything in between.
So, given that, if people want to talk about morals in this, lets talk about the thousands of deaths that powerful drug kingpins are causing. Let’s discuss how moral it is for minorities who may be dealing to be thrown in prison so readily, when other serious white-collar crimes are treated so lightly.
That said readily admit that I’m a policy lightweight, so I think I’ll just contribute a few links, concerning drugs in Mexico. Granted, I understand they have a certain slant to them, but still very important, I think.
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/opinion/ci_11465756
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/world/5262558/mexico-narco-junior-teenagers-kill-drug-rivals/
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:09 pm
All this talk of lobbyists, but I wonder why no one ever seems to mention pharmaceutical companies in these sorts of discussions.
I think if recreational drugs were legal, they, not the current mobsters, would be the ones picking up the ball, and we’d probably be talking about more than just a higher quality of the usual suspects at the pharmacy. After all, the pharmaceutical industry would love to enter that huge new market and start patenting some brand new recreational drugs.
If the regulatory framework were right, it’s possible they could even be encouraged to make them less toxic and less addictive.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:10 pm
At least in New England, high cigarette taxes mean us smokers near New Hamshah drive 5-6 miles and pay less than half what is charged in Mass, and essentially act as smugglers for our friends who aren’t so close.
Will, meet way. I know, it’s bad for us. That’s completely irrelevant.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Wow, Matt clearly dropped the paternalism chum in the water there and the fishes predictably go into a frenzy.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Increase booze taxes? No! No! No!
May I make an alternative suggestion? Replace sin taxes with a special tax on bibles, rosaries, etc. As well as abandonment of tax deductions for churches and religious institutions.
Is anyone prepare to argue against the proposition that more people have been killed in the name of god, than have by alcohol?
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:39 pm
My bet? You don’t have a good argument for this and it negates the entire logic of this mish-mash post. I think it’s hard to find an example of an issue that required legal ‘paternalism’ where sincere progress was made by involving law enforcement.
Mandating seatbelts in cars. [Ralph Nader is still a dick].
I mean, speeding laws make sense, because they protect individuals from being involved in dangerous car accidents. Whose protected by anti-drug laws? The vast majority crime involved in the drug market is the crime created and spawned by its very illegality
This isn’t an argument against paternalism per se. Just against stupid laws.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:42 pm
“Is anyone prepare to argue against the proposition that more people have been killed in the name of god, than have by alcohol?”
Well, no. It’s really hard to come up with statistics about alcohol related deaths prior to the 20th century. But it’s safe to assume there were fewer alcohol related deaths prior to the 20th Century. You can crash a car easily, but it’s really hard to crash a horse. You may be drunk, but the horse isn’t. Alcohol does cause medical problems, but old medical records are pretty much useless. In modern America, there is no question that war kills far fewer people than alcohol, but we can’t really extrapolate that into the past. If I had to guess, I’d say alcohol has killed more people than religious fanaticism, but the data just isn’t there to prove it. We know from religious texts dating back to 500 BC that alcoholism has long been considered a real problem. War was rarely considered a problem at all. In fact, it’s glorified in most religious texts. Strangely, the one text that never says a bad word about alcohol is the New Testament.
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:04 pm
If we legalized pot, our big “drug problem” would shrink down to about 1% of our population- way less than alcoholism, cigarettes, or other problems.
At that point we could just take law enforcement out of the loop. You don’t get charged with a crime for having a heart attack or a stroke while you’re driving. Drug “addiction” is a medical condition, and it’s usually not addiction at all, but a response to stress or pain. Drug “addicts” get bundled together, but in reality there are people who take drugs because they can’t cope even when they don’t take drugs, there are people who can’t cope because they have been sanctioned as “drug users” and can no longer get a good job or function in society, and there are people who simply take too many drugs and can’t cope because of that. The last-mentioned turn out to be a pretty small group when you separate them out.
Of course, there is a Catch-22 here. We’ve imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people on drug charges, and a fair number of those in jail are people who will punch you or steal your car, not because they need money for drugs, but because that’s what they do. To them it won’t matter if drugs are legal, cheap, and safe- let them out of jail and they will steal or rob anyway. To some extent our crime rates are based on locking up poorly dressed people and if you let them out, they will still be poorly dressed people.
But in this case we’re repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot. It would be way cheaper to give the poorly dressed people an apartment, vocational rehab, healthcare and education than it is to keep them in jail. Our average elderly citizen gets all of the above for about half what it costs to keep a person in jail.
One of the big issues that put Roosevelt in the White House was the repeal of Prohibition. Then, as now, 80% of the people favored Repeal. We can’t wait for our ‘leaders’ to do something about this. It just has to be pushed by the ‘little people’- the same ones we turn to whenever heavy lifting has to be done.
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:01 pm
I don’t regret that you can’t buy heroin at the local pharmacist anymore.
I do. I think it would be better if informed adults — ideally with a prescription or license of some sort — could obtain heroin and other opioids from a regulated, legal source than from a drug dealer selling artificially expensive (and so crime inducing) dope of unknown purity.
It’s true the US had a pretty major opioid addiction problem circa 1900. But it’s also true we have one now. Only now we have $400 billion crime and police state bill to go along with it. Not smart.
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I see Garanimal made the point I was making (though more cleverly and insightfully than I) at 3:39pm:
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:44 pm
War on Drugs: The Collateral Damage
January 22nd, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Part of the reason there’s a Liberal Democrats Party in the UK is that neither of the two major parties represents people – and particularly liberals – who flat out reject the nanny state.
At a certain point 20%+ of the American electorate may come to the same conclusion as 20%+ of the British electorate.
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:01 pm
“I favor paternalism and policies that discourage people from doing stuff that’s harmful”
Having unleashed this kind of bomb, it might be worth discussing the real dangers that lurk here.
Wh decides what’s harmful? I think most people agree that promiscuous teen sex is harmful in at least some sense. So… tax condoms? But that just encourages them to have unsafe sex. Arrest people caught in the act, even if they are consenting? That seems icky. So… And all the rest of the arguments apply. It’s unenforcable, etc, etc.
But all these things apply to drugs, too. Tax the hell out of booze, and people switch to pot. Crack down on crack, people switch to meth. Hammer supply, price goes up, and you you get ever more drug-related crime.
I know that MY kicked the smoking habint in part because of paternalistic measures like the smoking ban. (Please. It has nothing to do with protecting bartenders.) And he seems to be pleased about that. But I imagine there are certain paternalistic laws he does not favor. (There is clearly a strong strain of paternalism in anti-abortion circles, for instance.) So the question becomes, how does he divide these things up? How does he choose which to support and which to oppose? Is there a cost benefit analysis? Some aesthetic judgment? A political calculation? It’s a cheap jab to say that since he supports paternalism here, he must support it in all cases. But it’s worth asking how he chooses which paternalism to embrace. I think that, in most cases, we would all like to think we base our own answers on some kind of calculus. But do we? Would MY become pro-life if there were some metric that showed such laws somehow decrease teen pregnancy? I doubt it. So… how do you decide?
I err on the side of allowing a pot industry, and selling heroin in stores.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:38 am
know that MY kicked the smoking habint in part because of paternalistic measures like the smoking ban. (Please. It has nothing to do with protecting bartenders.)
What, bar and restaurant workers don’t deserve safe working environments?
I’m in favor of drug legalization myself, but I’m also in favor of sensible public safety and health measures. You can have both.
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:37 am
I think it would be better if informed adults — ideally with a prescription or license of some sort — could obtain heroin and other opioids from a regulated, legal source than from a drug dealer selling artificially expensive (and so crime inducing) dope of unknown purity.
Yeah, right, those “informed adults” would buy from a “regulated, legal source” and everything would be just dandy – not.
I’ll tell you what would happen: half of the people you see getting drunk like there’s no tomorrow on your typical Friday and Saturday night would throw heroin into the mix just for kicks resulting in an immediate and steep rise in the number of heroine addicts. Especially young adults will try everything and anything to get high, they are generally not informed or reasonable, and the easy availability of heroin would turn them into addicts in no time.
Now maybe that’s just fine with you, as long as the addicts leave you alone, but I happen to think that heroine addiction is a terrible thing and that the state has a duty to prevent people from getting hooked, as opposed to making it easier.
January 23rd, 2009 at 7:53 am
I’ll tell you what would happen: half of the people you see getting drunk like there’s no tomorrow on your typical Friday and Saturday night would throw heroin into the mix just for kicks resulting in an immediate and steep rise in the number of heroine addicts. Especially young adults will try everything and anything to get high, they are generally not informed or reasonable, and the easy availability of heroin would turn them into addicts in no time.
Polls have shown that greater than 99% of Americans would not try heroin if it were legal. Please stop such ridiculous, insulting generalization.
When I was a young adult heroin, crack, and (especially) meth were readily available, yet I did not try them. Why? Because I’m not a goddamn fool. It’s probably the case that were all drugs legalized, use would rise. But show more respect for da kids.
January 23rd, 2009 at 8:04 am
Fortunately, Novakant simply has it all wrong.
Almost all Americans at some time use opiate pain killers and almost none of them become “addicted”. In fact, if you let them choose how much to use, they use less than their doctors and nurses would administer (studies have been done). The opiates are simply not very addicting, most people don’t particularly like the effects, and they don’t cause that much harm or deterioration of function among regular users who have access to known dosages of pure drugs.
Back in about 1995 the American Public Health Association did a study of all the literature and concluded that most Americans try about five psychoactive drugs in their youth and end up using about two on a regular basis. Today those two are alcohol and tobacco. The APHA suggested that, because marijuana and cocaine are less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, they should be legalized because people using pot and cocaine as recreational drugs would suffer less harm than people using alcohol and tobacco.
In general, the concept of ‘addiction’ is a crutch, used by users to claim they ‘just can’t help themselves’ and by governments to claim they just can’t help them. Education, job programs, and universal healthcare go a long way to end addictions.
January 23rd, 2009 at 8:38 am
I’ll tell you what would happen: half of the people you see getting drunk like there’s no tomorrow on your typical Friday and Saturday night would throw heroin into the mix just for kicks resulting in an immediate and steep rise in the number of heroine addicts. Especially young adults will try everything and anything to get high, they are generally not informed or reasonable, and the easy availability of heroin would turn them into addicts in no time.
Sorry, but this is absolute bollocks for so many reasons. Where do we start?
First off, for Americans under 21, certain illegal substances, including marijuana and crystal meth, are already easier to obtain than alcohol. Dealers don’t ask for ID. But if those dealers had to compete against a heavily regulated industry with lower prices and strict age and volume restrictions, they couldn’t make enough money off of youngsters to make up the difference. Hence, there aren’t many shady dealers selling moonshine to teenagers these days.
Furthermore, the public opinion on heroin itself is overwhelmingly negative, and decriminalization is unlikely to change that much. Most people who are casual users of other illicit substances choose not to try heroin, even when they know exactly how and where to get it, and not because it’s illegal.
For a better case study in regulated heroin, though, it’s best to look at Switzerland, where addicts can in fact buy it in special pharmacies (not Walgreens). It’s sold in very small maintenance doses at a low price, thereby reducing the frequency of overdoses as well as the criminal problems such as robbery for drug money and violent episodes during withdrawal. However, the injection centers aren’t full of weekend party people out to get high and have a good time. If you’ve ever tried heroin (and not suggesting that you do), you’d probably understand why.
Now maybe that’s just fine with you, as long as the addicts leave you alone, but I happen to think that heroine addiction is a terrible thing and that the state has a duty to prevent people from getting hooked, as opposed to making it easier.
I think everyone agrees that addiction (be it to heroin, crystal meth, tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, or lefty blogs) is a terrible thing. The question is whether the state has chosen an effective way of preventing it. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that prohibition has been a failure when it comes to preventing addiction from starting, treating it once it’s begun, and reducing the criminal behavior to which it can lead.
Funny, though, that the freedom to buy drugs, some of which can kill you if used improperly, is so much more controversial here than the freedom to buy a gun, any of which can kill a lot of people when used exactly as intended…
January 23rd, 2009 at 8:55 am
So Russell is claiming that everybody is just like him and that consequently the widespread and legal availability of heroin wouldn’t lead to an increase in a addicts. And serial catowner claims that addiction doesn’t really exist in the first place and if only those addicts would pull themselves together with a little help from the state and get a life, there wouldn’t be any addicts.
Both claims just go to show that neither of you have a clue about the nature of addiction and the way an addict’s mind works. Fortunately your proposals have no chance in hell of getting implemented.
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:10 am
One word: Hamsterdam.
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:25 am
Novakant, “legal” and “widespread” are not the same thing. Heroin is already widespread but not legal. In places where it is treated as a health concern rather than a criminal one, there has not been a drastic rise in usage or addiction (which, by the way, are also not the same thing – believe it or not, many people have used heroin without becoming addicted).
But it seems like one way or other, you favor a policy in which drug use is driven into the underground, where its consequences are inevitably more severe, and where a far greater number of violent crimes are a direct result. I don’t think we need to start putting cocaine back in Coca-Cola or selling heroin in vending machines or advertising LSD on TV. But it’s arguments like yours that stand in the way of developing a workable, sensible policy that would actually have a chance at reducing the number of lives destroyed by irrational jail sentences and endangered by drug abuse. How is an outright ban on a dirty product people will continue to use anyway a better idea than supervised, monitored distribution of a comparatively clean product with sterile needles?
And who are all these people who are eager to try heroin but can’t bring themselves to do it because of the law? Do you know any? Are you one of them?
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:11 am
AB, we need to clarify what is meant by “legal” here, as people are always dancing around the term in discussions like this.
To me “legal” means: anybody of legal age can buy the drug of his choice, just like you can buy alcohol or cigarettes. If that is meant by legalizing drugs, I am against it, because it would increase the risk of people becoming addicts in the first place.
On the other hand, I am all for decriminalizing possession combined with mandatory treatment, because users shouldn’t be in jail, but rather in treatment. If the dispensation of drugs to diagnosed addicts under medical supervision proves to be a more successful treatment than the other options and if the medium- to long-term goal of such a therapy is a drug free life, then I’m for that too.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Are you also in favor of unrepealing prohibition? And developing some Switzerland style system to deal with people who drink alcohol and smoke tobacco?
I still don’t understand why you think legalized (as you define, cause that’s what I favor) drugs would increase the number of addicts? Drugs are widely available right now. Think about it how hard would it be for you find some heroin? I’m thinking a few phone calls. (Call pot smoker find out where they buy weed and work your way from there. Might take a little bit of doing. If I was still in high school or college, complete and utter ease)
Heroin just had a spike (ha ha) in popularity among high schoolers in Portage, MI, near where I live in Kalamazoo. ODing teens and such. I notice this happened despite it being illegal and us spending untold billions to try to enforce those laws.
And even if you’re right and heroin with an alcohol-level regulation leads to more heroin addicts, are you really convinced the whole war on drugs insanity is worth preventing that? This country’s love of cocaine and heroin leads to the death of a lot of people in the countries south of here. How many fewer heroin addicts is that worth?
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:26 pm
On the other hand, I am all for decriminalizing possession combined with mandatory treatment, because users shouldn’t be in jail, but rather in treatment.
It’s funny, I know several people in the US who have been convicted of DUI’s (a very serious crime that even my mother commits occasionally), one of whom drove drunk in a crash that killed his passenger. Remarkably, not a single one of them has ever been forced into mandatory treatment for alcoholism, never restricted from buying booze, never even given a cold glare at the local bar. And I suppose it makes sense; the substance that got them in trouble is so widely available that only their own free will could stop them using it.
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