Migz420

Drawing the line on drugs
04.12.07|Cavalier Daily|Josh Levy

"The drug prohibition causes crime," proclaims Jerry Cameron to a room filled with rapt libertarians. A former police chief with FBI and DEA training, Cameron is doing "penance" for his seventeen-year law enforcement career in the "war on drugs." He spends an hour setting forth the case for the total decriminalization of all drugs to the Students for Individual Liberty's delight. Sadly, Cameron takes it too far. Although he spends most of his time discussing the legalization of marijuana, he supports legalizing all drugs and even wants the government to hand out free heroin. It is these types of arguments that let people get away with ignoring the case for legalizing marijuana.

Cameron's argument goes like this: Demand for drugs is highly inelastic (i.e., the quantity of drugs people want is not very sensitive to price.) The only thing drug enforcement accomplishes is a temporary shortage of supply, either by catching shipments or locking up drug dealers. This supply shortage, in turn, causes the price of drugs to increase. Since demand is inelastic, drug users still want just as much; so, they end up having to steal in order to afford their drug habit. Thus, the illegality of drugs causes crime and "we can't arrest our way out of it."

Cameron doesn't stop there. He follows up his arguments by pounding his audience over the head with statistics. Although some of his numbers are a bit fudged (he conveniently left out the massive crime drop of the 1990s, for example), he makes two very good points. First, the "war on drugs" is very expensive and an ineffective deterrent. The United States spent $63 billion and the United Nations spent $500 billion on drug enforcement in 2003. Yet from 1991 to 2002, marijuana use in all grades increased, including a staggering 88 percent jump among 8th graders. According to last year's Center for Alcohol and Substance Education Survey, 28.4 percent of University students have used marijuana in the last year. Cameron concludes that it's "easier to buy drugs than beer or cigarettes."

Second, drug enforcement is racist. On this point, Cameron makes hackneyed points bemoaning mandatory minimums for crack cocaine and the much higher felony conviction rates for black people (This doesn't make them any less right, though). He did have one chilling stat: In South Africa, at the height of apartheid, the black incarceration rate was 851 per 100,000. In the United States in 2004, it was 4,919 per 100,000. And Cameron blames it all on the drug prohibition.

"Whatever you leave illegal and don't regulate, you get a black market [in]." By keeping drugs illegal, "we've turned the drug trade over to the criminals." Cameron envisions a vicious cycle where poor, inner-city kids, who are disproportionately black, receive poor education and end up dealing drugs. The fear of arrest and the money in drugs attracts gangs, which bring guns and violence. Arresting these drug dealers results in prison overcrowding and, after the drug dealers are released, they go back to dealing since they still have no job skills. The solution, Cameron says, is to "remove the profit motive" from the black market by legalizing drugs.

Cameron lays out a two-pronged plan to end drug prohibition: government clinics and education. Cameron speaks very highly of the Swiss Model in which government-run clinics provide free heroin and monitor usage to ensure users do not overdose. He notes that street crime, homelessness, AIDS, hepatitis and the rate of new users all dropped. But again, Cameron is playing with the numbers.

The recent economic prosperity of the European Union and Switzerland's proximity to EU countries probably explains much of this. He also seems to have forgotten that users can easily become physically addicted to heroin after just trying it once. His second point, on the other hand, has much more merit. Cameron argues that "we've never tried honest education." He believes that educators try to scare kids out of pot so badly that they lose credibility. As a result, kids don't understand the serious harms associated with hard drugs. By finally drawing a distinction between marijuana and hard drugs, Cameron starts sounding sensible.

Criminalizing marijuana is simply indefensible. It has no serious ill-effects, is not physically addictive and to overdose you have to smoke about your own body weight in pot (which is impossible because you will pass out long before that). Conversely, current drug laws end up resulting in increased crime, racist enforcement, and overcrowded prisons. This is not the case for hard drugs. They are highly addictive and have been proven to cause serious, long-term medical problems, but Cameron wants the government to hand them out for free. As long as libertarians support the legalization of all drugs, they'll continue to be pigeonholed as a one-issue party. What's worse, people will continue to ignore the need to legalize marijuana.

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Abomonog

The Swiss drug program is a lot deeper than people realize. It also includes things like employment assistance and schooling. This is one of the few countries where employers (including the government) will pour over your police records looking for talent instead of reasons to exclude you.

The Swiss measure their unemployed in actual numbers instead of percentages.
In 1985 the country reported 8 unemployed, the lowest rate anywhere in history.

Despite what the article says, the true reason for any Swiss economic boon is their habit of not discarding anything, or anyone.

Maybe if we Americans learned how to find talent and use it we could win in Iraq!

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It's all fun and games until the flying monkeys attack!

bluntman_420

"Prohibition.... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislationand makes crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon wich our government was founded."
---Abraham Lincoln

Buzzby

Reality check: most heroin users are not addicted. They're occasional, recreational users. You have to use it frequently over a long period of time to become addicted. The only drug that you might get addicted to after one taste is nicotine.

Actually, you can be addicted to opiates and live a long and healthy life.

The problems come from adulterated drugs, unsanitary injection, and spending all your money on drugs instead of food. If drugs were legal, all of these problems would disappear. A reliable source of inexpensive, pure heroin and clean syringes would make them go away.

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