From the Front Lines of the 'War on Drugs'

While perhaps written partly tongue in cheek, Joe Klein makes some good points about legalizing marijuana in his article in TIME, "Why Legalizing Marijuana Makes Sense."

"[T]here are big issues here, issues of economy and simple justice," writes Klein. "[T]he U.S. is, by far, the most 'criminal' country in the world, with 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one–third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all arrests are marijuana–related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public."

Or how about this? The money that is currently being squandered could be used to track down the dangerous elements of society — the murderers, the rapists, the identity thieves. Putting those people behind bars might make life livable for the rest of us.

On the economic side of the ledger, Klein observes, "there is an enormous potential windfall in the taxation of marijuana. It is estimated that pot is the largest cash crop in California, with annual revenues approaching $14 billion. A 10% pot tax would yield $1.4 billion in California alone."

And California, with its budget woes and double–digit unemployment rate, could certainly use an annual infusion of more than $1 billion.

Not to mention that the black market would be eliminated — along with the violence that accompanies illegal trade.

At the other end of this discussion is the proposal that was made recently in West Virginia to give drug tests to applicants for public assistance.

Republican Craig Blair suggested "randomly testing people receiving state and federal assistance through unemployment, food stamps or welfare programs." The proposal died in the legislature on Tuesday.

I don't know if such legislation would be on solid legal ground when it comes to testing applicants for welfare or food stamps. But unemployment benefits are insurance that people pay for when they are employed. Seems like giving drug tests to people who are applying for unemployment benefits would be opening a big can of worms — one I'm not sure Blair or anyone else really wants to get into these days.

More than 660,000 jobs were lost in March, bringing unemployment to 8.5%, and drug testing can be costly. It doesn't seem like the wisest expenditure for cash–strapped governments, state or federal, although officials in several states are exploring Blair's proposal.

But, for the sake of argument, how would this random testing be accomplished? Would this be a matter of age or racial profiling? If young, black men were targeted more often than any other group, in much the same way they are disproportionately represented in the populations of state and federal prisons, wouldn't that leave the governing entities wide open for lawsuits? How much would the taxpayers have to pay to defend the government against those?

Or against charges of false positives? Not all labs are meticulous about their procedures.

And how likely would those lawsuits be to succeed? I guess that depends on the individual circumstances.

For that matter, giving drug tests to applicants for welfare and food stamps seems illogical as well. Even if someone tests positive, how does that prove that the public assistance funds would be used to buy marijuana?

If the concern is substance abuse, how would government prevent public assistance monies from being used for alcohol?

Drug tests don't even measure impairment. They only confirm the presence of molecules in the system, molecules that may be days or weeks old.

And that would only confirm that someone had taken the substance within the last several days or weeks, not how frequently it was taken or whether the person who tested positive was the one who purchased it.

The War on Drugs is being fought against our own people, most of whom are law–abiding citizens. Most people who have to apply for assistance don't want to do so. If someone has lost a job, do we want to make the situation worse by requiring that person to pass a drug test to receive assistance?

"[T]he costs of criminalization have proved to be enormous, perhaps unsustainable," Klein writes. "Would legalization be any worse?"

It's a question that deserves better than the blithe dismissal it received from the president last month.

The War on Drugs, the Economy and the Other Stuff

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Today, while visiting RealClearPolitics, my eyes were drawn to a piece by ABC journalist John Stossel, in which he makes the argument that the war on drugs is idiotic.

It is idiotic — and for many reasons.

Stossel touches on one of them — the insistence of law enforcement to interfere with transactions involving medical marijuana in states like California where it has been declared legal for that purpose.

A dozen other states also have declared medical marijuana legal.

The war on drugs is based, Stossel reports, on the fact that "U.S. law ludicrously calls marijuana a schedule I narcotic. That puts it in the same category as heroin."

Just to clarify, the word "narcotic" is applied pretty broadly to illegal substances — but many, like marijuana, are not considered narcotics in a medical sense, only in a legal sense.

Schedule I drugs have "a high tendency for abuse and have no accepted medical use." Pharmacies do not sell them, and they are not available with a prescription from a physician.

Schedule II drugs also have "a high tendency for abuse," but they may have an accepted medical use and can produce dependency or addiction with chronic use.

The likelihood of abuse or addiction declines significantly in schedules III-V. But it's worth pointing out that marijuana is the only schedule I drug of which I am aware that is not synthetically produced or enhanced.

And more and more people have concluded that marijuana does have medicinal value — for people who are suffering from cancer or AIDS or glaucoma or numerous other conditions.

But cigarettes contain a substance that is synthetically enhanced. The nicotine content in cigarettes has been manipulated by cigarette manufacturers to increase the likelihood that users will become addicted.

Cigarette addiction has been compared to heroin addiction.

But cigarettes are legal.

I don't think public health or the public's well-being ever figured into the equation, whether we're talking about legal substances like nicotine or alcohol or illegal substances like marijuana. Medical science has abundant proof that tobacco can cause a whole range of medical problems. So can alcohol — which was illegal during Prohibition.

During the days of Prohibition, a lot of people were killed because alcohol sales had been driven underground. The black market flourished. The cost of enforcing the law against alcohol was quite high, as was the loss of tax revenue (approximately $500 million annually).

Since Prohibition was repealed three–quarters of a century ago, very few deaths have been caused by clashes between law enforcement officers and alcohol manufacturers — except in a few pockets of the country where alcohol is still illegal. In 2006, U.S. tax revenue for alcoholic beverages was $5.3 billion. That's nearly 2½ times what it was 30 years earlier.

Today, we are seeing similar problems associated with the war on drugs.

Both Mexicans and Americans are dying by the thousands in an effort to keep illegal drugs from crossing the border. Many otherwise law–abiding citizens are being arrested and tried for possession of marijuana. Others are being denied job opportunities because drug screens have revealed the presence of traces of past drug use that in no way measure current impairment.

Stossel is blunt: "The war on drugs is idiotic. It deters few, drives drug use underground — making it more dangerous — and creates horrible crime."

Those reasons, apparently, aren't enough to persuade the president to revisit the issue. "I do not think that is a good strategy to grow our economy," Barack Obama said when asked about legalizing marijuana during his online town hall today.

It's worth pointing out that many of the internet participants voted for Obama and were motivated by their support for him to take part. They ranked the issues, and this was one of the major issues they wanted to address.

"I don't know what this says about the online audience," Obama joked. He might want to take it easy on that kind of thing. After all, that online audience played an important role in putting him where he is. If he's going to commit their money to bailouts for banks and corporations, he owes it to them to discuss the issues they care about.

They're paying their admission price.

Let's see. So far this year, more than $4.8 billion in federal funds and more than $7.3 billion in state funds has been spent on the "war on drugs." More than 400,000 people have been arrested for drug law offenses.

The war on drugs costs American taxpayers $40 billion a year, and the cost continues to rise. By the government's own standards, America is losing this war. Illegal drugs are cheaper and easier to obtain, and the beneficiaries of this war are organized crime, arms manufacturers, special interests and corrupt elements of law enforcement.

Joshua Green leaped into the conversation with an item at The Atlantic's website. "Legal pot sales in California generated $100 million in state tax revenue last year, a welcome infusion for a state facing a crippling budget deficit," Green writes. "Know anybody else whose budget projects red ink as far as the eye can see?"

Taxing and regulating a substance that millions continue to consume in spite of existing law wouldn't benefit the economy? Legalizing the industry — and, in the process, creating millions of jobs — wouldn't help the economy? Not spending billions of dollars to fight a losing war wouldn't be good for the economy? And not continuing to needlessly risk the lives of police officers and the citizens they are sworn to protect wouldn't be a good thing?

And the president dismisses the suggestion, making light of those who bring it up, while his secretary of state is in Mexico to discuss new strategies for a war on drugs that the United States was losing when Hillary Clinton was still the first lady of Arkansas.

The End of Prohibition

It was 75 years ago today that America ended its mostly failed experiment with Prohibition.

Prohibition ended on Dec. 5, 1933, when three states — Ohio, Pennsylvania and Utah — ratified the 21st Amendment — which repealed the 18th Amendment.

And syndicated columnist Froma Harrop says it's time to end the modern-day equivalent, "the so-called War on Drugs."

Those who oppose drug legalization should read the article. Not only does legalization make sense from a revenue standpoint, but, as Harrop points out, regulating the strength and purity of currently illegal drugs makes them less deadly.

Removing the "illegal" stigma from these drugs will make it more likely that those who need help will seek it. "We have treatments for alcoholism," Harrop writes, "but we don't ban alcohol." A valid point.

The "War on Drugs," Harrop observes, hasn't had the effect of inflating drug prices, thereby discouraging people from buying and consuming them. In fact, she says, "[t]he retail price of cocaine is now about half what it was in 1990."

Legalizing drugs also would take the profits out of the terrorists' pockets.

Harrop quotes a Harvard economist who contends that legalizing drugs could save $44 billion in enforcement costs while providing governments with up to $33 billion in revenues "were they to tax drugs as heavily as alcohol and tobacco."

It seems to me there would be all sorts of ripple effects from legalizing drugs — not the least of which would be the elimination of all the innocent victims of drive-by shootings from gang members and others involved in the illegal drug trade.

Economist Milton Friedman estimates that the criminalization of drugs has been responsible for more than 10,000 such fatalities — deaths of children, the elderly and other innocent bystanders — per year. These killings would cease if drugs were legalized, he says.

When was the last time you heard about someone being killed in a drive-by shooting that involved the sale of liquor?

"The war on drugs has led to gang violence, trampling of civil liberties, and military interventions abroad," writes Jacob Grier in The American Spectator. "Federalist principles are routinely ignored in medical marijuana raids, doctors face prosecution for prescribing painkillers, and ordinary adults must show their ID just to purchase effective cold medicine. The United States now has more than 300,000 people imprisoned for drug violations."

Harrop concedes that it won't be easy to end the "War on Drugs."

"Too many police, drug agents, bureaucrats, lawyers, judges, prison guards and sprayers of poppy fields have a stake in it," she says — and that, I presume, includes those companies that make their living testing other people's bodily fluids for trace evidence of recreational drug use. "But Prohibition was repealed once."

Indeed it was. And it took an economic crisis to make it happen.