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Our View: Runners go wrong way in drug war
Initiative's stiffer penalties reverses trend toward sanity
3-25-08|Appeal Democrat|Editorial

State Sen. George Runner (R-Antelope Valley) and Assemblywoman Sharon Runner (R-Lancaster) are looking to compound the failure of America's drug war by making it even nastier and more costly to Californians.

The Runners are looking to score with voters by sponsoring the "Safe Neighborhoods Act," an initiative gathering signatures to try to make the November ballot. The act is a collection of laws that, among other things, increases penalties for certain drug and gang-related crimes.

Of note is the initiative's intention to increase penalties for meth possession and sales to the same level as penalties for cocaine. We find it amazing that, as the federal government is looking at its penalties for cocaine and crack cocaine and realizing they may just be too harsh, they're actually considering increasing penalties for drug use.

The drug war has been a costly, violent, destructive failure. There has been very little to come out of the drug war to suggest that its perpetuation will ever result in less drug use, less violence or less crime. It has been responsible for the creation of the gang problem, as surely as alcohol prohibition gave power to the Mafia.

The irony of the Runners' initiative is that it also attempts to fight gangs by increasing penalties for the recruitment of juveniles. But the reason the gangs need to recruit new members is because they need to refill their ranks when they're sent to prison or get killed. The recruitment of teens into gangs would not be necessary without the drug war.

We are not naive about the effects of drug use. Some libertarians act as though the abandonment of the drug war would bring about an end to crime. We know that's not entirely the case. Violence will decrease, certainly, and the power of gangs would drop notably. But crimes caused by drug users will continue — identity theft, robbery, burglary — because addicts can't hold down jobs to earn the money to pay for the drugs. The price of drugs, though, would likely drop as well, making crime a little less necessary (well, until the government starts taxing it, of course).

But laws against drugs simply don't discourage drug use. In order for laws to be effective, a potential criminal actually has to care about what happens to him or her. The criminal has to actually ponder the consequences of his or her behavior. Drug addicts (any addicts, really) simply don't care about the consequences the same way a rational, sober person would, or else they wouldn't be using drugs in the first place.

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Buzzby

The only reason drugs are expensive enough that addicts have to steal to buy them is prohibition. You could support a $300/day heroin habit on $4 if it weren't for the black market bump.

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