Mark Kleiman discusses the idiocy that passes as thought at the NY Times regarding the use of hallucinogens in research, and it occurred to me how truly wrong all of our nation’s conventional wisdom is regarding drugs. It appears that almost everything we think, do, or fear regarding drugs is just ass-backwards, and we owe this to the hysterical drug policies our elected leaders have foisted on us over the last eighty years.
If you ask me, one of the greatest failings of the Bush adninistration has been the continuation of an untenable War on Drugs, to include the disgusting (and illegal) agitprop that you and I are funding. if you look at it, nearly everything our government has done about drugs has been wrong:
– Banning or making nearly impossible medicinal use of drugs.
– Banning or making nearly impossible research with the use of drugs.
– Lying about the outcomes of drug use and drug experimentation, which has the reverse effect of what is intended. Rather than scaring off users, it mythologizes drugs, perhaps increasing first time use through curiosity.
– Creating the incentive to spread the sale of drugs by cacking down harshly on supply, rather than focussing on demand. QUick- what happens when supplies are limited, and demand remains the same? If you say people just quit doing drugs, you are as dumb as Nelson Rockefeller.
– Imposing absurdly harsh criminal sentences on addicts and low-level suppliers, clogging jails and creating a professional criminal class. No one comes out of jail a better person, but lots of drug offenders come out of prison with a new set of criminal skills.
– Failing to spend even close to adequate funds on rehabilitation.
– Stigmatizing addicts as criminals rather than as people with a medically recognized disease.
And that is what I can think of off the top of my head- Mark can probably come up with much, much more. I recomend you peruse his writings on drug policy (which needs to be updated, Mark).
The “drug warriors” are wrong, have been wrong for years, yet they continue to dominate the policy debate and the policy design and implementation. This needs to change, or the cycle will just continue. And I say this as someone who has a heroin addict (who almost died twice) as a member of my family.
john b
Excellent post, although I think you’ve got the wrong URL for the Mark Kleiman article.
Sidenote: Simon Blackburn, the philosophy professor quoted in the NYT article, is British. In British English, the elderly colleague who “died…sitting in his suspenders, in candlelight, holding a wine glass” conjures up some really disturbing images…
bg
I’m with ya pal. So how do we fix this?
Kimmitt
Vote Libertarian instead of Republican, if you vote Republican, and either vote Green instead of Democrat or find the Dems that support liberalization of our drug laws and back them.
ape
right on!
harms you missed:
1) extra harmful side effects from drugs as criminals supply it
2) Subsidizing gangsterhood and violence; illegal gun ownership
3) Creating an easy source of income for terrorists.
4) Destabilizing innocent third world countries where the prohibition income (combined with first world farm subsidies) is so vast compared with other land use that criminality is king.
5) promoting police corruption around the world.
6) alienating police from people
7) giving an excuse for the police to act on racist prejudice (cf comparison of treatment of cocaine users and crack users, divided unequally between cultures, but essentially the same thing); or reason to believe that they do.
8) telling me what i can and cant do when im not hurting anyone.
all of this compared with the single harm of people making adult choices which maynot be wise.
How many times over are we paying this cost? 10 times maybe? and the single harm we started out? still there.
there has been an outrageous development on this front in the UK today.. see the debate on the Grugs Bill.. which i will post about when i stop fuming.
Scott Harris
The immutable obstacle to a sane drug policy is the government formed a buraeucracy to “fight the war” on drugs. No bureaucracy is going to work itself out of a job. And no politician is going to pull the plug on that cash Hoover.
What I always remember about our drug policy is that Peter McWilliams (libertarian and inspirational writer) drowned in his own vomit trying to keep his medications down.
ape
you won’t believe what’s been going on in the UK..
magic mushrooms grow all over the place, people have been taking them for millennia, noone gets hurt (i mean noone), and its not illegal.
So New Labour are banning it. I thought that the fox-hunting ban was the living end, those fucking morons dribbling BLT crumbs over the legislation as they drafted it, but since then we’ve had the detente with theocracy (and people hurt because of it; death threats issued)
and now this
Read Charles Clarke explain his ‘thinking’
http://oneampfuse.blogspot.com/2005/01/new-labour-in-blundering-moron-scandal.html
Mark Kleiman
Yes, the drug warriors are wrong. But that doesn’t make the legalizers right.
Drug abuse is a real problem, not just a Puritan fantasy or an artifact of prohibition. If you think the cocaine situation couldn’t be worse than it is, take a look at the alcohol situation.
We could have many fewer people in prison and less violence around drug dealing without changing the underlying laws at all. Thinking of “prohibition v. legalization” as the basic drug policy choice is the one thing that the warriors and the legalizers agree on, and naturally they’re both wrong.
More thoughts here.
CadillaqJaq
Someone please explain this new Black Panther party spinoff represented by a young African-American female today on John Gibson’s cable TV program stating that their “party” will protest the Bush inauguration tomorrow on the streets of DC because Bush is not doing enough about the inner city drug epidemic.
I don’t use addictive drugs. I do wonder if one could legally buy a weeks supply of the stuff for $20, would that make everyone’s life whole, perfect and complete?
Kimmitt
And I say this as someone who has a heroin addict (who almost died twice) as a member of my family.
Lost in the shuffle here, but my sincere condolences.
Toren
One way to improve prisons is to make them entirely solitary confinement. As the cost of guards is one of the largest expenses, and right now we average 1 guard to 3 inmates, locking them into cells and not letting them out to mix and cause trouble would mean a half-dozen guards could control an entire penitentiary. This would more than pay for the cost of self-contained cells with showers, etc. Feed them three means a day of a nourishing, tasteless paste with water to drink. No TV. No books, no entertainment of any kind.
I suspect you could cut sentences in half or more and they’d be screaming to never come back.
Kimmitt
One way to improve prisons is to make them entirely solitary confinement.
Wouldn’t this more or less uniformly induce psychosis?
Bruce
Here! Here!
daksya
Drug abuse is a real problem, not just a Puritan fantasy or an artifact of prohibition. If you think the cocaine situation couldn’t be worse than it is, take a look at the alcohol situation.
Drug abuse is a real problem, not drug use. There’s a distinction to be made, and can be made for almost all drugs. There are a few, for which the distinction is blurry, but not for most of the popular drugs. Keeping current laws as they are, punishes all types of users. It also breeds cynicism. Because drug use is taboo in mainstream society, the only visible users are those who can’t keep their shit together. That’s like saying the drunk homeless bum represents the typical alcohol drinker.50% of alcohol is bought by the heaviest 10% of users. A Dutch study finds the same about heroin. And unlike alcohol or cigarettes, pure heroin by itself is not toxic to the mammalian organ systems. So, an addict on accessible, cheap, legalised heroin, can lead a normal life, as opposed to the alcoholic wasting his liver, or smoker wasting much more.
The book by Jacob Sullum: Saying Yes should be a good read. A review can be found here.
Toren
Wouldn’t this more or less uniformly induce psychosis?
No.
That is a fallacy drummed up by the bleeding heart brigade. Plenty of POWs and others have spent years in solitary (miserable conditions, too) and come out with mind intact.
That said, perhaps we might need to fine tune the idea, but the basis is there.
Let us not forget the criminals are not supposed to LIKE prison. That’s kind of the idea behind putting them there.
wild bird
They tell kids to stay away from these dangerous drugs then they use them like this? what a bunch to two faced hypotcrits what with them anyway?