Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 15, 1990 TAG: 9004150290
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JODI DUCKETT The Allentown Morning Call
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Most of the drugs are made according to government standards by pharmaceutical companies, whose interest in profit have led them to research and manufacture the happy pill, a drug that offers pleasure without the harmful side effects of most mind-altering drugs.
The government is making billions by taxing the sale of these products and is plowing the revenue into treatment programs for addicts and educational programs that try to teach people that doing drugs, like smoking cigarettes, is not a particularly cool or healthy thing to do.
There is no criminal underworld dealing drugs. There also are no children selling crack on street corners and gangs spraying bullets over drug-dealing turf. Police are spending most of their time pursuing thieves and murderers and harsh sentencing is in vogue because there's plenty of room in the jails.
Sound appealing? Sound possible? This vision and similar ones are both appealing and possible to a growing number of people who have argued strenuously for a national debate on legalizing drugs as a solution to an out-of-control drug problem that has overwhelmed our public resources, our health and our spirit.
The government's shoot-em-down, lock-'em-up, brand-them-for-life policy has done little to stem addiction and much to fuel crime and contempt for law and order, they say. They say the time has come to end the drug war and start treating drugs as a health problem, not a criminal one.
"Drug prohibition produces two outcomes that directly undercut its goals," Judge Robert W. Sweet, a federal trial judge in New York, wrote in an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times last month. "It creates an incentive for drug dealers to increase narcotics use, and by forbidding use, it enhances the appeal of certain chemicals.
"If what we are doing is not working, is it time to abolish the prohibition, to stop treating mind alteration as a crime?"
Sweet is one of a small but growing group of highly respected people - law enforcement officials, economists, politicians, writers - who have done something quite risky. They have said the "L" word.
The "L" word is legalization. But you won't hear it said by many high-profile folks. The mere thought of legalizing the very thing that has ripped apart cities and lives is so explosive that some won't even say it.
"To comment in any way except to wave the banner and say zero tolerance is taking a risk," said Glen Cooper, director of Bethlehem, Pa.'s, Health Bureau.
Said Donald Miles, president of the Lehigh Valley chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania: "The thing that really annoys me about the legalization debate is it isn't really a debate; how nobody in Congress and no major national politicians will even say they are thinking about legalization because the few people who have brought it up have been so universally jumped upon."
Indeed, when George Shultz, the ultraconservative secretary of state under former President Reagan, said the "L" word last October, the fallout was quick and harsh.
"Now that I am out of government, I can say this," he told a group of alumni of the Stanford University Business School. "We need at least to consider and examine forms of controlled legalization. I find it difficult to say that. Sometimes at a reception or cocktail party, I advance these views and people head for somebody else."
Shultz was accused of not having fully supported Reagan's anti-drug policies. The nation's drug czar, William Bennett, called Shultz's remarks "really stupid."
Commented White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, "Whoa, he's been out on the West Coast too long, hasn't he? The guy slips into retirement and right away he starts saying things that are strange."
The legalization idea has been advanced from many unexpected places. Indeed, conservatives like Shultz and economist Milton Friedman stand side by side with liberals such as ACLU President Ira Glasser and Chicago-Tribune columnist Mike Royko.
Those who promote legalization as an alternative to the current drug policy make arguments like these:
Prohibition of drugs, like alcohol in the 1920s, has created a massive criminal underworld eager to meet the demand. Prices have soared, leading to enormous profits for dealers and traffickers who engage in violence to protect their financial investments. High prices cause people to commit crimes to support their habits. Legalize drugs and drug crime will be drastically reduced.
Using drugs is a health problem, not a criminal one. Arresting people instead of treating them does little to lessen the scourge of addiction. Treating drugs as a health problem would allow the billions of dollars used for interdiction and enforcement to be redirected to prevention and treatment. Government regulation also would mean users wouldn't die from taking tainted drugs.
There's little justification for keeping drugs illegal as long as alcohol and tobacco, which kill many thousands of Americans each year, are not.
Some advocates embrace all these arguments; others just one or two. There also is no one school of thought on the method by which drugs could be made legal.
At one extreme, some people advocate no government interference, a free market with the possible exception of a ban on sales to minors. At the other extreme, some envision strict government controls that might make drugs available by prescription only. This scenario might include greater efforts to limit tobacco and alcohol consumption as well. Some think we should legalize marijuana only.
The most widely suggested scenario is where the production and sale of all mind-altering drugs is regulated by the government in much the same way as alcohol, with sales taxes and standards for purity.
Have no doubt, this scenario includes legalization of drugs across the board - crack as well as PCP, heroin as well as downers and uppers.
"To draw distinction on the degree of addiction may not be empirically possible, nor does it appeal to logic and symmetry," said Sweet, the only federal judge to have publicly spoken out in favor of legalization. "In my view, you don't outlaw 120 proof while permitting 80."
None of these scenarios appears to have received serious consideration by top government leaders. Reacting strongly against them are President Bush and Bennett, followed dutifully by most politicians, law enforcers and prosecutors and a majority of the public.
Their position is simple and clear: Legalizing drugs would increase use, create more addicts and distort the ethics of our children. Because the threat of criminal sanctions would be gone, fewer people would seek or be forced into treatment. The problem is not too big or too expensive to fix.
Advocates say there is no evidence legalization would drastically increase use, though many acknowledge that the availability, cheapness and removal of legal deterrents might invite experimenters. Though alcohol consumption increased by 50 percent following prohibition, abuse decreased.
Meanwhile, increasingly radical activities in the name of the drug war are causing more people to wonder if we might just be headed in the wrong direction.
Some people are concerned about their rights to privacy, which they see jeopardized by random drug testing and property searches and seizures. The government has stepped up the user accountability aspects of the drug war as it becomes increasingly questionable if the flow of drugs can be stopped.
Two Republican congressmen, Sen. Phil Gramm and Rep. Newt Gingrich, have drawn up a bill that calls for a mandatory drug test for recipients of driver's licenses and denying federal benefits, including access to public housing and job training programs, to persons convicted of drug offenses.
Bennett has suggested we cut off the heads of drug dealers.
And consider a statement by Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr., R-Fla., in response to a legalization presentation to Congress last September by Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke.
Shaw said the country should wipe out "every coca leaf from the face of the Earth" and if drug-growing countries like Bolivia don't like it, "then take them out, period."
But some see the tide turning toward legalization.
"If advocates of legalization could present a convincing case to the public that if drugs were decriminalized and treated as a health problem, that drug-related crime could be reduced by 80 percent, then I think you'd have a lot of people giving it a real hard look," Miles of the ACLU said.
"Most people are more concerned about getting robbed or shot at than they are concerned about whether that guy damages his health by drugs. If that guy agrees to stay in his house while he's slowly killing himself, they'd be perfectly happy," he said.
by CNB