From: [m--th--e] at [usa.net] (Matt Hine)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs,alt.psychoactives
Subject: Cogent arguments for the De-Criminalization of drugs (LONG)
Date: 28 Nov 1995 15:28:55 GMT
ARGUMENTS FOR THE REGULATION (DECRIMINALIZATION) OF DRUGS:
THE PROHIBITION OF DRUGS CAUSES VIOLENT CRIME.
All major authorities agree that the vast majority of drug-related violent
crime is caused by the prohibition against drugs, rather than the drugs
themselves. This was the same situation which was true during alcohol
Prohibition. Alcohol Prohibition gave rise to a violent criminal
organizations that profited from an underground economy.
Violent crime dropped 65 percent in the year Prohibition was
repealed.
Drug dealers, not drug users, commit most violent crimes associated
with drugs. The "war on drugs" drives up drug prices, which attracts
more people to the drug trade. When potential profit increases, drug
dealers resort to greater extremes, including violence. They fight
each other and law enforcement officials to defend their very
profitable turf. Occasionally they kill innocent bystanders in the
crossfire. Those few crimes committed by drug users also are a result
of artificially high drug prices. Desperate drug addicts commit more
and more robberies to keep up with the increasing cost of their habits.
We know from past experience how to solve this problem. During
Prohibition, when alcohol was banned, violence increased from turf wars
between bootleggers. When Prohibition ended, so did the violence
related to bootlegging. The per capita murder rate decreased for nine
consecutive years after the end of Prohibition.
Do we hear about alcohol distributors having a shootout on the street
today? Of course not! Why? Because there is no reason to commit
violent crimes when operating a legal business. While those addicted
to alcohol certainly suffer, at least they don't have to steal to
support their habit. People addicted to alcohol don't rob houses
because they can obtain enough money through other means, be it a job
or panhandling.
Earlier this century, drugs were legal in the United States. If the
importation, sale, and use of drugs were legal again, open competition
would eliminate the extreme profitability of drug dealing. The
violence of drug dealing would cease because dealers would no longer
have the economic incentive to commit violent crimes. We can expect
the end of drug prohibition to lead to the same decrease in violent
crime we experienced after the end of alcohol Prohibition.
LEGALIZATION WOULD SAVE MORE THAN IT COSTS.
The best analysis done to date by any Federal official shows that
"legalization" of the now illegal drugs would result in a net $37 Billion
annual savings. This Federal financial analysis of legalization comes from
Theodore R.
Vallance, Former chief of the Planning Branch of the National Institutes of
Mental Health. The analysis was published in the 7-10-95 issue
of National Review.
The cost to put a single drug dealer in jail is about $450,000, composed of
the following:
The cost for arrest and conviction is about $150,000.
The cost for an additional prison bed is about $50,000 to $150,000,
depending upon the jurisdiction.
It costs about $30,000 per year to house a prisoner. With an average
sentence of 5 years, that adds up to another $150,000.
The same $450,000 can provide treatment or education for about 200 people.
In addition, putting a person in prison produces about fifteen dollars in
related welfare costs, for every dollar spent on incarceration. Every
dollar spent on treatment and education saves about five dollars in related
welfare costs.
Presently, approximately 60% of all persons in federal prisons are there as
a result of a drug-
related offense. Mandatory sentences imposed upon non-violent drug users
result in a prison
over-crowding, often resulting in the early release of violent criminals,
and the continually
increasing costs of building ever more prisons.
THE CURRENT DRUG POLICY ERODES THE BLACK COMMUNITY.
At the present time, one-fourth of all of the young black men in America
are either in prison or on parole. Most of them were arrested on
non-violent drug charges. Most of those who go to prison will be released
into society again.
Because they are black men with a prison record, many will be permanently
unemployable.
OUR POLICY IS INEFFECTIVE WHEN COMPARED WITH OTHER COUNTRIES.
Europe is beginning to form uniform drug laws as a result of European
unification. Europe is decriminalizing drugs along the lines of the
programs used in England and the Netherlands. Most of the countries have
already approved the Frankfort Accord, which adopts decriminalization as
the primary approach to drugs.
Let's compare two major cities which both have a drug problem.
The cities are New York, and Liverpool, England.
* In New York, most drug addicts are unemployed criminals. In Liverpool,
most drug addicts are gainfully employed taxpayers.
* In New York, crime committed by drug addicts is a major problem. In
Liverpool, it is a very minor problem.
* In New York, sixty percent of all intravenous drug users are infected
with AIDS, and they are a major cause of the spread of AIDS. In
Liverpool, only one percent of the intravenous drug users are infected
with AIDS and they are a very minor source of infection for the rest
of the population.
ILLEGAL DRUGS KILL RELATIVELY FEW PEOPLE.
The number of drug deaths in the US in a typical year is as follows:
* Tobacco kills about 390,000.
* Alcohol kills about 80,000.
* Sidestream smoke from tobacco kills about 50,000.
* Cocaine kills about 2,200.
* Heroin kills about 2,000.
* Aspirin kills about 2,000.
* Marijuana kills 0. There has never been a recorded death due to
marijuana at any time in US history.
Source: National Institude of Drug Abuse Research Monographs
Over 500,000 Americans die each year as a result of using alcohol,
tobacco, and other legal and illegal drugs. Alcohol and tobacco
combined account for almost 95% of the total. Another 4% come from
overdoses of legal drugs. Even though millions of Americans use
illegal drugs every year (over 26 million in 1990 according to the
government), these drugs are responsible for only about 1% of these
deaths. If banning drugs to protect people from themselves makes
sense, it makes more sense to ban alcohol and tobacco. Yet there is no
call for such a ban, because Prohibition has already failed, as would a
ban on tobacco. When will the government learn that all attempts at
prohibition will fail in a free society?
STUDIES OF DRUG POLICY
The following studies are the most significant studies of drug policy ever
conducted. All of these studies recommended a non-criminal approach to
drugs.
To date, no significant study has supported the current "War on Drugs"
policy.
Drug Use in America: Problem in Perspective, National Commission on
Marihuana and Drug Abuse, , 1973:
The first recommendations of the commission were:
1. Possession of marihuana for personal use would no longer be an
offense, but marihuana possessed in public would remain contraband
subject to summary seizure and forfeiture.
2. Casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration,
or Insignificant remuneration not involving profit, would no longer be
an offense.
The Nation's Toughest Drug Law: Evaluating the New York Experience,
published by the Joint Committee on New York Drug Law Evaluation, of the
Association of the Bar of the City of New York in 1977.
This commission was formed to review the Rockefeller drug laws, the
toughest in the nation. The report basically concluded that tougher
sentences had provided little, if any, benefit. Instead, they had increased
the incentive for drug sellers to commit violence and had clogged the
criminal justice system. The report also found that tougher penalties had
done nothing material to reduce drug use but had instead exacerbated some
of the existing problems with drug abuse.
The Facts About Drug Abuse, The Drug Abuse Council, 1980. A 1972
report to the Ford Foundation, "Dealing With Drug Abuse," concluded that
current drug policies were unlikely to eliminate or greatly affect drug
abuse.
1. Psychoactive substances have been available throughout recorded
history and will remain so. To try to eliminate them completely is
unrealistic.
2. The use of psychoactive drugs is pervasive, but misuse is much less
frequent, and the failure to make the distinction between use and
misuse creates the impression that all use is misuse and leads to
addiction.
3. There is a clear relationship between drug misuse and pervasive
societal ills such as poverty, racial discrimination, and
unemployment, and we can expect drug misuse so long as these adverse
social conditions exist.
4. The price of an effective strategy to eliminate drug misuse through
the criminal law would be perceived by many Americans as too high in
terms of invasions of privacy and abrogations of individual liberties.
5. Drug laws and policies attend insufficiently to the problems of people
misusing drugs and too much to the properties of drugs themselves, as
though the drugs were somehow inherently to blame.
6. Too many Americans have unrealistic expectations about what drug
policies and programs can accomplish.
7. We have a regrettable tendency to blame our drug problems on others,
failing to recognize that our drug problems are products of our own
national experience.
The council's directors then offered a set of suggestions, Principal among
them are the following,
1. Treatment for drug dependence should be available chiefly because
people need help, rather than as a crime control or behavior control
method.
2. There should be a major study of the effects of drug laws and their
enforcement on personal decisions to use or not use illicit drugs.
3. Legislative efforts to decriminalize at both state and federal levels
the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use should
continue.
4. The report ends with the recommendation: "... that serious
consideration be given to the use of state and local option as a means
of attempting solutions appropriate in one place but not in others.
Local options could encourage greater flexibility and ingenuity rather
than reliance on an unrealistic, rigid homogeneity in national drug
policy. We need to respond to the diversity of people who use and
misuse drugs, base all our policies on a consistent set of principles
seeking to discourage misuse, and keep our seemingly innate drug-using
behavior within reasonable limits through means. which do not
themselves produce more harm than they prevent.
An Analysis of Marihuana Policy, National Research Council of the
National Academy of Sciences, 1982.
The committee recommended that the country
experiment with a system that would allow states to set up their own
methods of controlling marijuana as is now done with alcohol. Under this
approach, federal criminal penalties would be removed, and each state could
decide to legalize the drug and impose regulations concerning hours of
sale, age limits, and taxation.
In the same vein as all the previous major objective studies, this report
stated that excessive marijuana use could cause serious harm, that such use
was rare, and that, on balance, the current policy of total prohibition was
socially and personally destructive. The report placed great emphasis on
building up public education and informal social controls, which often have
a greater impact on drug abuse than the criminal law. Regarding the
possibility of disaster for our youth under legalization, the report
observed:
There is reason to believe that widespread uncontrolled use would not occur
under regulation. Indeed, regulation might facilitate patterns of
controlled use by diminishing the "forbidden fruit" aspect of the drug and
perhaps increasing the likelihood that an adolescent would be introduced to
the drug through families and friends, who practice moderate use, rather
than from their heaviest-using, most drug-involved peers,
The Twentieth Annual Report of the Research Advisory Panel for the
State of California, 1989. The report noted that we had followed a path of
prohibition over the last
fifty years and concluded that this policy "has been manifestly
unsuccessful in
that we are now using more and a greater variety of drugs, legal and
illegal." In addition, the failure of prohibition has resulted in "societal
overreaction (that] has burdened us with ineffectual, inhumane, and
expensive treatment, education and enforcement efforts." They recommended a
move toward the formulation of "legislation aiming at regulation and
decriminalization" and the winding down of the war on drugs.
The Research Advisory Panel made three specific recommendations for initial
legislative action. These were
1. permit the possession of syringes and needles;
2. permit the cultivation of marijuana for personal use; and
3. in order to project an attitude of disapproval of all drug use, take a
token action in forbidding the sale or consumption of alcohol in
state-supported institutions devoted in part or whole to patient care
or educational activity.
The panel recommended immediate and innovative action, concluding it is
"incontrovertible that whatever policies we have been following over the
past generations must not be continued unexamined and unmodified since our
actions to date have favored the development of massive individual and
societal problems."
A Wiser Course: Ending Drug Prohibition, A Report
of the Special Committee on Drugs and the Law of the Association of the Bar
of the City of New York, June 1994. The Bar of the City of New York studied
the issue of drugs and drug policy for about five years and concluded that
the only reasonable way to correct the current problems would be to repeal
the Federal laws on these drugs in their entirety and allow the states to
develop their own programs, similar to the situation with alcohol.
The recommendations in these reports were endorsed by (among others) the
American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, The American
Association for Public Health, the National Education Association, and the
National Council of Churches.
Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence, Cannabis, 1968 (The Wooten
Report):
Typical findings included the following:
1. There is no evidence that in Western society serious physical dangers
are directly associated with the smoking of cannabis.
2. It can clearly be argued on the world picture that cannabis use does
not lead to heroin addiction.
3. The evidence of a link with violent crime is far stronger with alcohol
than with the smoking of cannabis.
4. There is no evidence that this activity ... is producing in otherwise
normal people conditions of dependence or psychosis, requiring medical
treatment.
Departmental Committee on Morphine and Heroin Addiction, Report,
1926 (The Rolleston Report): This landmark study by a distinguished group
of British doctors appointed by the government codified existing practices
regarding the maintenance of addicts on heroin and morphine by individual
doctors and recommended that they continue without police or medical
society interference.
The LaGuardia Committee Report, Mayor's Committee on Marihuana, The
Marihuana Problem in the City of New York, commissioned by Mayor Fiorello
LaGuardia, written by the New York Academy of Medicine, and published by
the City of New York in 1944. Among its conclusions: "The use of marihuana
does not lead to
morphine or heroin or cocaine addiction".
"Drug Addiction: Crime or Disease? Joint Committee of the American
Bar Association and the American Medical Association on Narcotic
Drugs,Interim and Final Reports, 1961: The report observed, "Drug addiction
is
primarily a problem for the physician rather than the policeman, and it
should not be necessary for anyone to violate the criminal law solely
because he is addicted to drugs." The report concluded that drug addiction
was a disease, not a crime, that harsh criminal penalties were destructive,
that drug prohibition ought to be reexamined, and that experiments should
be conducted with British-style maintenance clinics for narcotic addicts.
Interdepartmental Committee, Drug Addiction, Second Report, 1965
(The Second Brain Report): Brain II urged that
1. doctors who wished to prescribe "restricted drugs" to addicts for the
purpose of maintenance be required to obtain a special license from
the Home Office;
2. treatment centers be established for treating addicts who were to be
regarded as sick and not criminal; and
3. doctors and other medical personnel be mandated to "notify" the Home
Office when they encountered an addict in the course of their
professional work. Originally, the category of restricted drugs
included heroin and cocaine; now, dipipanone has been added.
The core of the British system remains. Approximately 200 doctors with
special licenses are
free to prescribe all drugs, including the restricted medicines, for
maintenance of addicts. Also, any
doctor, unlike those in the U.S., may prescribe all of the other drugs for
maintenance, including, for
example, injectable morphine and methadone.