Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs,alt.drugs
From: [e--w] at [hip.atr.co.jp] (Eric Woudenberg)
Subject: "Dethrone the Drug Czar" New York Times Op-Ed piece
Date: Tue, 18 May 1993 13:19:08 GMT

This is from the Sunday, May 9, New York Times OP-ED page.
Whitman Knapp is a Senior United States District Judge for the
Southern District of New York.

DETHRHONE THE DRUG CZAR
by Whitman Knapp

The nation was fortunate in President Clinton's selection of Lee Brown
as Director of the Office of National Drug Control.

Having been police commissioner in Atlanta, Houston and New York, Mr.
Brown has been in key positions to observe that a half-century of the
Federal war against drugs has had a simple result: Each year, the
Government has spent more on enforcing drug laws than it did the year
before. Each year, more people have gone to jail for drug offenses.

Yet each year there have been more drugs on the streets.

Surely, Mr. Brown can have no interest in simply spending more money
and filling more prisons. Indeed, he might well conclude that his
mission is to find out how to eliminate his new job.

Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate economist, has a simple
explanation of the upward spiral with which Mr. Brown must contend.
Law enforcement temporarily reduces the drug supply and thus causes
prices to rise. Higher prices draw new sources of supply and even new
drugs into the market, resulting in more drugs on the street. The
increased availability of drugs creates more addicts. The Government
reacts with more vigorous enforcement, and the cycle starts anew.

Mr. Friedman and those who share his views propose a straightforward
way out of this discouraging spiral: Decriminalize drugs, thus
eliminating the pressure on supply that creates an ever-bigger market.
This, they contend, will reduce demand and reverse the cycle, much as
a similar approach has cut into alcohol addiction.

I do not claim competence to evaluate this theory. But after 20 years
on the bench, I have concluded that Federal drug laws are a disaster.
It is time to get the Government out of drug enforcement. As long as
we indulged the fantasy that the problem could be solved by making
America drug free, it was appropriate that the Government assume the
burden. But that ambition has been shown to be absurd.

Attorney General Janet Reno's statement on Friday that she hopes to
refocus the drug war on treatment show's admirable determination that
the drug problem is primarily a local issue, more properly the concern
and responsibility of state and city governments.

If the possession or distribution of drugs were no longer a Federal
crime, other levels of government would face the choice of enforcement
or trying out Milton Friedman's theory and decriminalizing. If they
chose the second route, they would have to decide whether to license
drug retailers, distribute drugs through state agencies or perhaps
allow drugs only to be purchased with a physician's prescription.

The variety, complexity and importance of these questions make it
exceedingly clear that the Federal Government has no business being
involved in any of them. What might be a hopeful solution in New York
could be a disaster in Idaho, and only state legislatures and city
governments, not Congress, can pass laws tailored to local needs.

What did the nation do when it decided to rid itself of the
catastrophes spawned by Prohibition? It adopted the 21st Amendment,
which excluded the Government from any role in regulation of alcoholic
beverages and strengthened the powers of the states to deal with such
matters.

That is precisely what the Congress should do with respect to drugs.
It should repeal all Federal laws that prohibit or regulate their
distribution or use and devise methods for helping the states to
exercise their respective powers in those areas.

But having created the problem by decades of ill-considered
legislation, congress can't just throw it back to the states without
helping finance the efforts. That raises a host of complex problems,
including apportionment of Federal monies among the states,
restrictions on how the monies may be used, the ratio of Federal
dollars for enforcement to those spent on treatment and the role of
nongovernmental organizations that treat addicts.

Such problems will not lend themselves to easy resolution. After all,
Prohibition was allowed to wreak havoc for a mere 14 years, while the
drug warriors have been at it for many decades. Under Lee Brown's
leadership, we may hope for a return to sanity.

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Comments:

An article like this appearing in the NYT cannot be a bad sign.

It would be nice if someone who knows what Milton Friedman has
actually said about legalizing drugs could sanity check the theory
that was attributed to him here. The notion that reducing the supply
causes prices to go up which then increases the supply and the number
of users seems to have a false ring to it.

I sense that the drug policy pendulum is beginning to reach apogee. 
The only thought which clouds my relief is that we could now be stuck
with a terminally "Half-Fast" end to the WOD. Specifically,
decriminalization but not legalization. Decriminalization is good in
that it keeps drug violations from resulting in what will soon be
considered "criminally insane" jail sentences, but does nothing to
stop corruption, street crime, drug contamination, artificially high
prices and the blackout on truthful drug information.

I can only encourage us to keep up the fight, mostly by being 
persistent in questioning government policy. Why are we
only decriminalizing? Why not legalizing? As someone said a long time
ago on alt.drugs, decriminalization solves none of the real problems.

Eric Woudenberg