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 Violent crime dropped 65 percent in the year Prohibition was repealed.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.