to purchase beer. In 1988 Congress set a goal of a âdrug-free America by 1995.â Yet, according to research of the Drug Policy Foundation in Washington, D.C. (which in 2000 merged with the George Sorosâfunded Lindesmith/Drug Policy Research Institute to form the widely respected Drug Policy Institute), the number of Americans who have used illegal drugs stands at 77 million and counting. Thatâs a lot of enemies.
Not that the war on drugs hasnât taken prisoners. The Department of Justice reports that of the huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the eighties and nineties (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 476 per 100,000 in 2002), the vast majority are for drug convictions. The FBI reports that 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges in 1980. By 1999 that annual figure had ballooned to 1,532,200. Today there are more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, and aggravated assault combined.
Nowhere is this misguided campaign waged more mindlessly than in New York. The âRockefeller Drug Lawsâ call for life in prison for first-time offenders convicted of possessing four ounces, or selling two ounces, of a controlled substance. The result? The stateâs prison system is filled to the gills, with drug offenders, most of them convicted of minor offenses, most of them nonviolent, taking up 18,300 of its beds.
By any standard, the United States has lost its war on drugs. Criminalizing drug useâfor which there is, was, and always will be an insatiable appetiteâhas been a colossal mistake, wasting vast sums of money, and adding to the misery of millions of Americans.
The solution? Regulated legalization. âDecriminalization,â the controlled legalization of drugs, means you take the crime out of the use of drugs but preserve governmentâs rightâand responsibilityâto regulate the field.
How would it work? If I were the new (and literal) Drug Czar I would have private companies compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package, and peddle drugs. Iâd create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to libertarians and neo-cons) to: (1) set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency, and purity; (2) ban advertising; (3) impose taxes, fees, and fines to be used for drug abuse prevention and treatment, and to cover the costs of administering the new regulatory agency; and (4) police the industry much as alcoholic beverage control agencies operate in the states.
But I wouldnât stop there. I would put all those truly frightening, explosion-prone, toxic meth labs out of businessâtoday; make sure that no one was deprived of methadone or other medical treatment for addiction or abuse; establish free needle exchange programs and permit pharmacy sales of sterile, nonprescription needles in every city; and require random, mandatory drug testing (of the type that would have nailed me) for those workers whose judgment and mental alertness are essential to public safetyâcops, firefighters, soldiers, airline pilots, bus drivers, ferry boat operators, train engineers, et al. (Not part of the et al. are brain surgeons,mental health counselors, and countless others whose sensitive work, if botched, would generally not jeopardize public safety.)
And, in my spare time, Iâd mandate effective drug prevention education in all elementary, middle, and secondary schools. But what about DARE, you say? All those black and red bumper stickers, T-shirts, coffee mugs, dump trucksâsurely itâs the best âdrug abuse resistance and educationâ going? Not according to the Triangle Research Institute out of North Carolina. Their comprehensive mid-1990s study, commissioned by the Department of Justice (which then refused to publish the damning results, showing that DARE grads were just as likely as non-grads to use drugs), convinced me to get rid of the popular
Not that the war on drugs hasnât taken prisoners. The Department of Justice reports that of the huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the eighties and nineties (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 476 per 100,000 in 2002), the vast majority are for drug convictions. The FBI reports that 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges in 1980. By 1999 that annual figure had ballooned to 1,532,200. Today there are more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, and aggravated assault combined.
Nowhere is this misguided campaign waged more mindlessly than in New York. The âRockefeller Drug Lawsâ call for life in prison for first-time offenders convicted of possessing four ounces, or selling two ounces, of a controlled substance. The result? The stateâs prison system is filled to the gills, with drug offenders, most of them convicted of minor offenses, most of them nonviolent, taking up 18,300 of its beds.
By any standard, the United States has lost its war on drugs. Criminalizing drug useâfor which there is, was, and always will be an insatiable appetiteâhas been a colossal mistake, wasting vast sums of money, and adding to the misery of millions of Americans.
The solution? Regulated legalization. âDecriminalization,â the controlled legalization of drugs, means you take the crime out of the use of drugs but preserve governmentâs rightâand responsibilityâto regulate the field.
How would it work? If I were the new (and literal) Drug Czar I would have private companies compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package, and peddle drugs. Iâd create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to libertarians and neo-cons) to: (1) set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency, and purity; (2) ban advertising; (3) impose taxes, fees, and fines to be used for drug abuse prevention and treatment, and to cover the costs of administering the new regulatory agency; and (4) police the industry much as alcoholic beverage control agencies operate in the states.
But I wouldnât stop there. I would put all those truly frightening, explosion-prone, toxic meth labs out of businessâtoday; make sure that no one was deprived of methadone or other medical treatment for addiction or abuse; establish free needle exchange programs and permit pharmacy sales of sterile, nonprescription needles in every city; and require random, mandatory drug testing (of the type that would have nailed me) for those workers whose judgment and mental alertness are essential to public safetyâcops, firefighters, soldiers, airline pilots, bus drivers, ferry boat operators, train engineers, et al. (Not part of the et al. are brain surgeons,mental health counselors, and countless others whose sensitive work, if botched, would generally not jeopardize public safety.)
And, in my spare time, Iâd mandate effective drug prevention education in all elementary, middle, and secondary schools. But what about DARE, you say? All those black and red bumper stickers, T-shirts, coffee mugs, dump trucksâsurely itâs the best âdrug abuse resistance and educationâ going? Not according to the Triangle Research Institute out of North Carolina. Their comprehensive mid-1990s study, commissioned by the Department of Justice (which then refused to publish the damning results, showing that DARE grads were just as likely as non-grads to use drugs), convinced me to get rid of the popular
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