As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." It's not a stretch to conclude that our Draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery.
He even admits the police are corrupt "there isn't a major police force that has escaped the problem: cops, sworn to uphold the law, seizing and converting drugs to their own use, planting dope on suspects, robbing and extorting pushers, taking up dealing themselves, intimidating or murdering witnesses"
OK I don't like any of his proposed government programs. But what do you expect I am a Libertarian. But his dumb programs are a 1000 times better then the current war on drugs!
Legalize drugs — all of them
Sometimes people in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they'll...
By Norm Stamper
Special to the Los Angeles Times
Sometimes people in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they'll approach me the way they might a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.
Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle's police department.
But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.
Decriminalization, as my colleagues in the drug-reform movement hasten to inform me, takes the crime out of using drugs but continues to classify possession and use as a public offense, punishable by fines.
I've never understood why adults shouldn't enjoy the same right to use verboten drugs as they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a scotch and water.
Prohibition of alcohol fell flat on its face. The prohibition of other drugs rests on an equally wobbly foundation. Not until we choose to frame responsible drug use — not an oxymoron in my dictionary — as a civil liberty will we be able to recognize the abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it is: a medical, not a criminal, matter.
As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush — delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.
It's not a stretch to conclude that our Draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?
I've witnessed the devastating effects of open-air drug markets in residential neighborhoods: children recruited as runners, mules and lookouts; drug dealers and innocent citizens shot dead in firefights between rival traffickers bent on protecting or expanding their markets; dedicated narcotics officers tortured and killed in the line of duty; prisons filled with nonviolent drug offenders; and drug-related foreign policies that foster political instability, wreak health and environmental disasters, and make life even tougher for indigenous subsistence farmers in places such as Latin America and Afghanistan. All because we like our drugs — and can't have them without breaking the law.
As an illicit commodity, drugs cost and generate extravagant sums of (laundered, untaxed) money, a powerful magnet for character-challenged police officers.
Although small in numbers of offenders, there isn't a major police force — the Los Angeles Police Department included — that has escaped the problem: cops, sworn to uphold the law, seizing and converting drugs to their own use, planting dope on suspects, robbing and extorting pushers, taking up dealing themselves, intimidating or murdering witnesses.
In declaring a war on drugs, we've declared war on our fellow citizens. War requires "hostiles" — enemies we can demonize, fear and loathe. This unfortunate categorization of millions of our citizens justifies treating them as dope fiends, less than human. That grants political license to ban the exchange or purchase of clean needles or to withhold methadone from heroin addicts motivated to kick the addiction.
President Bush has even said no to medical marijuana. Why would he want to "coddle" the enemy? Even if the enemy is a suffering AIDS or cancer patient for whom marijuana promises palliative, if not therapeutic, powers.
As a nation, we're long overdue for a soul-searching, coldly analytical look at both the "drug scene" and the drug war. Such candor would reveal the futility of our current policies, exposing the embarrassingly meager return on our massive enforcement investment (about $69 billion a year, according to Jack Cole, founder and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition).
How would "regulated legalization" work? It would:
• Permit private companies to compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package and peddle drugs.
• Create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to libertarians or paleo-conservatives).
• Set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency and purity.
• Ban advertising.
• Impose (with congressional approval) taxes, fees and fines to be used for drug-abuse prevention and treatment and to cover the costs of administering the new regulatory agency.
• Police the industry much as alcoholic-beverage-control agencies keep a watch on bars and liquor stores at the state level. Such reforms would in no way excuse drug users who commit crimes: driving while impaired, providing drugs to minors, stealing an iPod, assaulting one's spouse, abusing one's child. The message is simple. Get loaded, commit a crime, do the time.
These reforms would yield major reductions in a host of predatory street crimes, a disproportionate number of which are committed by users who resort to stealing in order to support their addiction.
Regulated legalization would soon dry up most stockpiles of currently illicit drugs — substances of uneven, often questionable quality (including "bunk," i.e., fakes such as oregano, gypsum, baking powder or even poisons passed off as the genuine article). It would extract from today's drug dealing the obscene profits that attract the needy and the greedy and fuel armed violence. And it would put most of those certifiably frightening crystal meth labs out of business once and for all.
Combined with treatment, education and other public-health programs for drug abusers, regulated legalization would make your city or town an infinitely healthier place to live and raise a family.
It would make being a cop a much safer occupation, and it would lead to greater police accountability and improved morale and job satisfaction.
But wouldn't regulated legalization lead to more users and, more to the point, drug abusers? Probably, though no one knows for sure — our leaders are too timid even to broach the subject in polite circles, much less to experiment with new policy models. My own prediction? We'd see modest increases in use, negligible increases in abuse.
The demand for illicit drugs is as strong as the nation's thirst for bootleg booze during Prohibition. It's a demand that simply will not dry up. Whether to find God, heighten sex, relieve pain, drown one's sorrows or simply feel good, people throughout the millenniums have turned to mood- and mind-altering substances.
They're not about to stop, no matter what their government says or does. It's time to accept drug use as a right of adult Americans, treat drug abuse as a public-health problem and end the madness of an unwinnable war. Norm Stamper is the former Seattle police chief and author of "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing" (Nation Books, 2005). He is an advisory board member of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), www.leap.cc
What if we legalized all drugs?
How does a $50 billion boost to the US economy sound? Not bad? Well, what about all the new addicts we could see pop up on the streets? Theoretically, it's all possible.
By Shirley Skeel
Every year, about 2 million people in the U.S. are arrested for drug offenses, including using or selling marijuana, heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine. About a third of the country's prisoners are held on drug charges or for crimes attributed to drug abuse.
But what if we legalized all street drugs?
More kids would decide to try drugs "just once," and more would get hooked. Some lives would be ruined. But other lives would be saved. Gang murders would fall sharply. Thousands of people now in jail would be free to find work and feed their families. We'd save billions on the war on drugs, and a new drug industry would create jobs and loads of taxable revenue.
Of course, it may sound like madness. And the gut feeling among many people is that it would be disastrous.
Don Semesky, the former chief of financial operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington, D.C., asks: "Have you ever seen a meth addict, with all those sores and rotten teeth? And what they do to their kids? Do you want the government to be responsible for that?"
Yet some economists, including American Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, have supported the idea of legalizing drugs. Friedman believed America's war on drugs was at the root of police corruption and caused thousands of unnecessary deaths, with few gains for ordinary citizens.
So just how would legalized drugs affect the economy and your standard of life?
Running some numbers
Let's look at two scenarios: if marijuana alone were legalized and if all street drugs were legalized. Either way, we assume there'd be strict regulation similar to that for alcohol and cigarettes, including age limits, licensing, quality control, high taxes and limits on advertising.
At first glance, on a "strictly numbers" basis, the effect on the country's pocketbook looks promising. We'd see:
* Savings on drug-related law enforcement -- FBI, police, courts and prisons -- of $2 billion to $10 billion a year if marijuana were legalized, based on various estimates, or up to $40 billion a year if all drugs were legalized, based on enforcement costs from the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy. That's before the cost of overseeing the new drug regulations.
* Increased productivity as fewer people were murdered, drug offenders were freed to find work and those stripped of their criminal record found it easier to get jobs (including running drug boutiques). However, how many of those now in prison would turn away from crime is unknown.
* Tax gains. Drug prices would have to fall sharply in order to squeeze out the black market. Still, Jeffrey Miron, a senior lecturer in economics for Harvard University, calculates the $10 billion-plus U.S. marijuana market could reap $6 billion in annual taxes. The $65 billion market for all illicit drugs, he estimates, might bring in $10 billion to $15 billion in taxes.
* A new legal drug industry would create jobs, farm crops, retail outlets and a tiny notch up in gross domestic product as the black market money turned clean. A 1994 study by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws in Washington, D.C., suggested 100,000 jobs and 60,000 retailers could emerge from a legal marijuana industry.
So, seemingly we'd get a shower of money for the government coffers -- perhaps an initial $50 billion under the "all drugs" scenario -- and gains for business and the community. But at what cost?
The answer is that it all depends, mostly on how many more people would use drugs, which drugs and how much more they used.
Give me a latte and a joint
Currently, considering it can get you arrested (or kill you), drug use is surprisingly common. A 2006 federal government study said 20% of Americans 18 to 25 had taken an illicit drug in the month prior to the survey.
So what if a Starbucks-style chain of drugstores that fulfilled Abbie Hoffman's wildest dreams opened across the country? What if you could sit on a sofa, pick up a magazine and light up, or even shoot up, in a congenial atmosphere?
Europe offers some clues. In 1976, the Netherlands decided to tolerate (though not legalize) the selling of small amounts of cannabis in licensed coffee shops. At first there was little change in usage. But between 1984 and 1992, as shops opened rapidly, smoking of the drug doubled among Dutch 18- to 20-year-olds.
"In that case, it looked like changing the legal status was of minor importance, but opening commercial outlets mattered," says Mark Kleiman, the director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Moreover, what if drugs were glamorously promoted via YouTube or Facebook, or even big business? Peter Reuter, a professor of public policy and criminology at the University of Maryland, says it would be hard to block advertising because there's little proof that marijuana is harmful.
"I think we'd see a fair amount of promotion," he says. "Then you could have large increases in use."
Kleiman adds, "Imagine what Philip Morris and MillerCoors could do if we gave them cannabis to work with."
Would addiction increase?
One oddity that stands out in the research is that the Dutch are still only midrange users of marijuana by European standards. By some measures, they use marijuana far less than Americans, according to a recent World Health Organization survey.
It's thought that this is due to differing social norms, which raises another point. If drugs were legal in America, this could send a powerful signal to kids that drugs are OK. Add this to the lower price, addictive effects of some drugs and easy access, and drug use could rise quite a bit. To offset this, we could run campaigns warning against the stuff. That might work. It might not.
The response from marijuana reform advocates is: "So what if use increases? It's harmless anyway." However, that remains unproved. Researchers worry about the high tar content, the risk of personal injury while someone is "high" and about any effects on students' work.
As for legalizing all drugs, Harvard's Miron argues that the increase in drug abuse would likely be small. "Millions of people don't smoke cigarettes. The same is true of alcohol . . . because they know that too much of it is not good for you," he says. People who are prone to abuse drugs are probably already abusing them, he adds.
That's hardly so, Reuter argues. Heroin and cocaine "are attractive drugs," he says. "Lots of kids would experiment, and maybe 3 or 4% would become dependent. So the increase in addiction might be very substantial."
The added costs
Whichever case proved true, there could be extra costs to U.S. taxpayers for abusers' medical treatment, family support, petty crime and lost worker productivity.
Just how much is hard to say. And how these negative economic effects might net out against the positive effects is virtually impossible to say. Data on drug-use behavior are thin and often contradictory.
Semesky says, "Nobody is going to be better off." The Office of National Drug Control Policy puts the cost of drug abuse at $145 billion, including medical expenses and lost productivity. That's more than the cost of cancer. If drugs were legal, some of these costs would rise, some would fall. Semesky believes the net effect would be highly negative.
Miron says a small rise in drug abuse would be far outweighed by the gains from reduced violent crime, freed-up police resources, a more productive citizenry and reduced illness from bad drugs and dirty needles.
Rosalie Pacula, the director of the Rand Drug Policy Research Center in Santa Monica, Calif., says there are huge unknowns. But if you look at the effects of alcohol and tobacco abuse, she says, legalizing drugs would be "very, very risky."
Could this happen?
How likely is it that street drugs would be legalized?
The possession of small amounts of marijuana has been decriminalized in 12 states, meaning offenders might get fined but won't be jailed or given a criminal record. Nonetheless, full legalization of marijuana is hardly likely. In a 2002 CNN/Time Magazine poll, 59% of respondents opposed legalizing marijuana, and 34% favored it. Although attitudes are getting more liberal, marijuana is not legal anywhere in the world.
As for other street drugs, don't even ask. The question of legalization is no more than an interesting academic exercise.
Published Sept. 3, 2008
Why we should legalize drugs
by Benson B. Roe, MD
Benson Roe is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of California at San Francisco.
More than 20 years ago when I was removing destroyed heart valves from infected intravenous drug abusers I assumed that these seriously ill patients represented just the tip of the iceberg of narcotic abuse. In an effort to ascertain what proportion of serious or fatal drug-related disease this group represented, I sought information from the San Francisco Coroner. To my surprise he reported that infections from contaminated intravenous injections were the only cause of drug-related deaths he saw except for occasional deaths from overdoses. He confirmed the inference that clean, reasonable dosages of heroin, cocaine and marijuana are pathologically harmless. He asserted he had never seen a heroin user over the age of 50. My obvious conclusion was that they had died from their. habit but he was confident that they had simply tired of the drug and just quit. When asked if the same were basically true of marijuana and cocaine, he responded affirmatively. [Well he is wrong on that! There are lots of old farts over 50 years old who smoke pot!] That caused me to wonder why these substances had been made illegal.
It is frequently stated that illicit drugs are "bad, dangerous, destructive" or "addictive," and that society has an obligation to keep them from the public. But nowhere can be found reliable, objective scientific evidence that they are any more harmful than other substances and activities that are legal. In view of the enormous expense, the carnage and the obvious futility of the "drug war," resulting in massive criminalization of society, it is high time to examine the supposed justification for keeping certain substances illegal. Those who initiated those prohibitions and those who now so vigorously seek to enforce them have not made their objectives clear. Are they to protect us from evil, from addiction, or from poison?
The concept of evil is derived from subjective values and is difficult to define. just why certain (illegal) substances are singularly more evil than legal substances like alcohol has not been explained. This complex subject of "right" and "wrong" has never been successfully addressed by legislation and is best left to the pulpit.
Addiction is also a relative and ubiquitous phenomenon. It certainly cannot be applied only to a short arbitrary list of addictive substances while ignoring. a plethora of human cravings - from chocolate to coffee, from gum to gambling, from tea, to tobacco, from snuggling to sex. Compulsive urges to fulfill a perceived need are ubiquitous. Some people are more susceptible to addiction than others and some "needs" are more addictive than others. Probably the most addictive substance in our civilization is tobacco - yet no one has suggested making it illegal.
As for prohibition, it has been clearly demonstrated that when an addictive desire becomes inaccessible it provokes irresponsible behavior to fulfill that desire. Education and support at least have a chance of controlling addiction. Deprivation only sharpens the craving and never works. Even in prison addicts are able to get their `fix.'
And "poison" is also a misleading shibboleth. The widespread propaganda that illegal drugs are "deadly poisons" is a hoax. There is little or no medical evidence of long term ill effects from sustained, moderate consumption of uncontaminated marijuana, cocaine or heroin. If these substances - most of them have been consumed in large quantities for centuries - were responsible for any chronic, progressive or disabling diseases, they certainly would have shown up in clinical practice and/or on the autopsy table. But they simply have not!
Media focus on the "junkie" has generated a mistaken impression that all uses of illegal drugs are devastated by their habit. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that the small population of visible addicts must constitute only a fraction of the $150 billion per year illegal drug market. This industry is so huge that it necessarily encompasses a very large portion of the ordinary population who are typically employed, productive, responsible and not significantly impaired from leading conventional lives. These drug users are not "addicts" just as the vast majority of alcohol users are not "alcoholics."
Is it not a ridiculous paradox to have laws to protect us from relatively harmless substances and not from the devastating effects of other substances that happen to be legal? It is well known that tobacco causes nearly a million deaths annually (in the US alone) from cancer, cardiovascular disease and emphysema; more than 350,000 die from alcohol-related cirrhosis and its complications and caffeine is the cause of cardiac and nervous system disturbances. These facts suggest that the public is being fraudulently misled into fearing the wrong substances and into complacency about hazardous substances by allowing their sale and even subsidization.
Our environment contains a plethora of hazards, of which recreational substances are much less important than many others. Recognizing the reality of consumer demand and the perspective of relative harm should make a strong case for alternatives to prohibition. Should we not have teamed from the failure of the Volstead Act of the 1920s and the current ubiquitous availability of illegal drugs that prohibition is the height of futility?
Is it not time to recognize that the " problem" is not the drugs but the enormous amounts of untaxed money diverted from the economy to criminals? The economic incentive for drug dealers to merchandise their product aggressively is a multi-billion dollar return which has a far more powerful effect to increase substance abuse than any enforcement program can possibly do to, constrain that usage. The hopeless challenge of drug crime is compounded by the parallel expansion of theft, crime, which is the principal economic resource to finance the drug industry. How can this be anything but a lose-lose situation for society?
We should look at the fact that a relatively low budget public education campaign has resulted in a significant decline in US consumption of both alcohol and tobacco during a period when a costly and intensive campaign to curtail illegal drugs only resulted in their increased usage. Is there a lesson to be heeded?
Of course there is. Scrap the nonsense of trying to obliterate drugs and acknowledge their presence in our society as we have with alcohol and tobacco. Legalization would result in:
1. purity assurance under Food and Drug Administration regulation;
2. labeled concentration of the product (to avoid overdose);
3. obliteration of vigorous marketing ("pushers");
4. obliteration of drug crime and reduction of theft crime
5. savings in expensive enforcement and
6. significant tax revenues.
Effort and funds can then be directed to educating the public about the hazards of all drugs.
Can such a change of attitude happen? Probably not, because the huge illegal drug industry has mountains of money for a media blitz and for buying politicians to sing the songs of "evil" and "danger" which is certain to kill any legislative attempt at legalization. Perhaps it will take some time before reality can prevail, but meanwhile we should at least do more to expose deception and to disseminate the truth.