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FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 257 ALTERN. MEDICINE Ref: EAR00024Date: 06/21/97
From: ALEX VASAUSKAS                                        Time: 08:34am
\/To: JANE KELLEY                                         (Read 2 times)
Subj: Marijuana [2/3] [03/15]

 >>> Part 3 of 15...
have at one time or another consumed, or exposed themselves to, an
illegal drug.  But the estimate authorized by the federal agency
charged with such explorations is that there are not more than 1
million regular cocaine users, defined as those who have used the drug
at least once in the preceding week.  There are (again, an informed
estimate) 5 million Americans who regularly use marijuana; and again,
an estimated 70 million who once upon a time, or even twice upon a
time, inhaled marijuana.  From the above we reasonably deduce that
Americans who abuse a drug, here defined as Americans who become
addicted to it or even habituated to it, are a very small percentage
of those who have experimented with a drug, or who continue to use a
drug without any observable distraction in their lives or careers.
About such users one might say that they are the equivalent of those
Americans who drink liquor but do not become alcoholics, or those
Americans who smoke cigarettes but do not suffer a shortened lifespan
as a result.
Curiosity naturally flows to ask, next, How many users of illegal drugs
in fact die from the use of them?  The answer is complicated in part
because marijuana finds itself lumped together with cocaine and heroin,
and nobody has ever been found dead from marijuana.  The question of
deaths from cocaine is complicated by the factor of impurity.  It would
not be useful to draw any conclusions about alcohol consumption, for
instance, by observing that, in 1931, one thousand Americans died from
alcohol consumption if it happened that half of those deaths, or more
than half, were the result of drinking alcohol with toxic ingredients
extrinsic to the drug as conventionally used.  When alcohol was
illegal, the consumer could never know whether he had been given
relatively harmless alcohol to drink - such alcoholic beverages as we
find today in the liquor store - or whether the bootlegger had come up
with paralyzing rotgut.  By the same token, purchasers of illegal
cocaine and heroin cannot know whether they are consuming a drug that
would qualify for regulated consumption after clinical analysis.
But we do know this, and I approach the nexus of my inquiry, which is
that more people die every year as a result of the war against drugs
than die from what we call, generically, overdosing.  These fatalities
include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for
commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed
by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become
addicted.
This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of
cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of
those drugs.  Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per
week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000.
The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to
come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars,
whatever.  We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would
provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug
situation, requires of him $1,000.
My mind turned, then, to auxiliary expenses - auxiliary pains, if you
wish.  The crime rate, whatever one made of its modest curtsy last year
toward diminution, continues its secular rise.  Serious crime is 480
per cent higher than in 1965.  The correlation is not absolute, but it
is suggestive: crime is reduced by the number of available enforcers of
law and order, namely policemen.  The heralded new crime legislation,
passed last year and acclaimed by President Clinton, provides for
100,000 extra policemen, even if only for a limited amount of time.
But 400,000 policemen would be freed to pursue criminals engaged in
activity other than the sale and distribution of drugs if such sale and
distribution, at a price at which there was no profit, were to be done
by, say, a federal drugstore.
So then we attempt to put a value on the goods stolen by addicts.  The
figure arrived at by Professor Duke is $10 billion.  But we need to add
to this pain of stolen property, surely, the extra-material pain
suffered by victims of robbers.  If someone breaks into your house at
night, perhaps holding you at gunpoint while taking your money and your
jewelry and whatever, it is reasonable to assign a higher "cost" to the
episode than the commercial value of the stolen money and jewelry.  If
we were modest, we might reasonably, however arbitrarily, put at $1,000
the "value" of the victim's pain.  But then the hurt, the psychological
trauma, might be evaluated by a jury at ten times, or one hundred times,
that sum.
But we must consider other factors, not readily quantifiable, but no
less tangible.  Fifty years ago, to walk at night across Central Park
was no more adventurous than to walk down Fifth Avenue.  But walking
across the park is no longer done, save by the kind of people who climb
the Matterhorn.  Is it fair to put a value on a lost amenity?  If the
Metropolitan Museum were to close, mightn't we, without fear of
distortion, judge that we had been deprived of something valuable?
What value might we assign to confidence that, at night, one can sleep
without fear of intrusion by criminals seeking money or goods
exchangeable for drugs?
Pursuing utilitarian analysis, we ask: What are the relative costs, on
the one hand, of medical and psychological treatment for addicts and,
on the other, incarceration for drugs?  It transpires that treatment is
seven times more cost-effective.  By this is meant that one dollar
spent on the treatment of an addict reduces the probability of
continued addiction seven times more than one dollar spent on
incarceration.  Looked at another way: Treatment for addicts is not now
available for almost half of those who would benefit from treatment.
 >>> Continued to next message...
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FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 257 ALTERN. MEDICINE Ref: EAR00025Date: 06/21/97
From: ALEX VASAUSKAS                                        Time: 08:34am
\/To: JANE KELLEY                                         (Read 2 times)
Subj: Marijuana [2/3] [04/15]

 >>> Part 4 of 15...
Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate
drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and
maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the
drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and
psychological treatment.
I have spared you, even as I spare myself, an arithmetical consummation
of my inquiry, but the data here cited instruct us that the cost of the
drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than
would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of
non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment
with drugs.  We have seen a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco
over the last thirty years, and this is not because tobacco became
illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers,
to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health, even as, we can
assume, a growing number of Americans desist from practicing unsafe sex
and using polluted needles in this age of AIDS.  If 80 million
Americans can experiment with drugs and resist addiction using
information publicly available, we can reasonably hope that
approximately the same number would resist the temptation to purchase
such drugs even if they were available at a federal drugstore at the
mere cost of production.
And added to the above is the point of civil justice.  Those who suffer
from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it.  This does not
mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight.  It
does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those
citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and
property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs
sought after by the minority.
I have not spoken of the cost to our society of the astonishing legal
weapons available now to policemen and prosecutors; of the penalty of
forfeiture of one's home and property for violation of laws which,
though designed to advance the war against drugs, could legally be
used - I am told by learned counsel - as penalties for the neglect of
one's pets.  I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a
society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison
because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana.  I
would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would
mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal
equivalent of a My Lai massacre.  And perhaps proceed to recommend the
legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.
Ethan A. Nadelmann
We turned to Mr. Nadelmann to pursue the inquiry.  Formerly in the
Political Science Department at Princeton, he is now the director of
the Lindesmith Center, a drug-policy research institute in New York
City.  He is the author of _Cops across Borders: The
Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement.
The essayists assembled here do not agree exactly on which aspect of
the war on drugs is most disgraceful, or on which alternative to our
current policies is most desirable, but we do agree, as Mr. Buckley
expected, on the following: The "war on drugs" has failed to accomplish
its stated objectives, and it cannot succeed so long as we remain a
free society, bound by our Constitution.  Our prohibitionist approach
to drug control is responsible for most of the ills commonly associated
with America's "drug problem." And some measure of legal availability
and regulation is essential if we are to reduce significantly the
negative consequences of both drug use and our drug-control policies.
Proponents of the war on drugs focus on one apparent success: The
substantial decline during the 1980s in the number of Americans who
consume marijuana and cocaine.  Yet that decline began well before the
Federal Government intensified its "war on drugs" in 1986, and it
succeeded principally in reducing illicit drug use among middle-class
Americans, who were least likely to develop drug-related problems.
Far more significant were the dramatic increases in drug- and
prohibition-related disease, death, and crime.  Crack cocaine - as
much a creature of prohibition as 180-proof moonshine during alcohol
prohibition - became the drug of choice in most inner cities.  AIDS
spread rapidly among injecting drug addicts, their lovers, and their
children, while government policies restricted the availability of
clean syringes that might have stemmed the epidemic.  And
prohibition-related violence reached unprecedented levels as a new
generation of Al Capones competed for turf, killing not just one
another but innocent bystanders, witnesses, and law-enforcement officials.
There are several basic truths about drugs and drug policy which a
growing number of Americans have come to acknowledge.
Most people can use most drugs without doing much harm to themselves or
anyone else, as Mr. Buckley reminds us, citing Professor Duke.  Only a
tiny percentage of the 70 million Americans who have tried marijuana
have gone on to have problems with that or any other drug.  The same is
true of the tens of millions of Americans who have used cocaine or
hallucinogens.  Most of those who did have a problem at one time or
another don't any more.  That a few million Americans have serious
problems with illicit drugs today is an issue meriting responsible
national attention, but it is no reason to demonize those drugs and the
people who use them.
 >>> Continued to next message...
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FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 257 ALTERN. MEDICINE Ref: EAR00026Date: 06/21/97
From: ALEX VASAUSKAS                                        Time: 08:34am
\/To: JANE KELLEY                                         (Read 2 times)
Subj: Marijuana [2/3] [05/15]

 >>> Part 5 of 15...
We're unlikely to evolve toward a more effective and humane drug policy
unless we begin to change the ways we think about drugs and drug
control.
Perspective can be had from what is truly the most pervasive drug
scandal in the United States: the epidemic of undertreatment of pain.
"Addiction" to (i.e., dependence on) opiates among the terminally ill
is the appropriate course of medical treatment.  The only reason for
the failure to prescribe adequate doses of pain-relieving opiates is
the "opiaphobia" that causes doctors to ignore the medical evidence,
nurses to turn away from their patients' cries of pain, and some
patients themselves to elect to suffer debilitating and demoralizing
pain rather than submit to a proper dose of drugs.
The tendency to put anti-drug ideology ahead of compassionate treatment
of pain is apparent in another area.  Thousands of Americans now smoke
marijuana for purely medical reasons: among others, to ease the nausea
of chemotherapy; to reduce the pain of multiple sclerosis; to alleviate
the symptoms of glaucoma; to improve appetite dangerously reduced from
AIDS.  They use it as an effective medicine, yet they are technically
regarded as criminals, and every year many are jailed.  Although more
than 75 per cent of Americans believe that marijuana should be
available legally for medical purposes, the Federal Government refuses
to legalize access or even to sponsor research.
Drugs are here to stay.  The time has come to abandon the concept of a
"drug-free society." We need to focus on learning to live with drugs in
such a way that they do the least possible harm.  So far as I can
ascertain, the societies that have proved most successful in minimizing
drug-related harm aren't those that have sought to banish drugs, but
those that have figured out how to control and manage drug use through
community discipline, including the establishment of powerful social
norms.  That is precisely the challenge now confronting American
society regarding alcohol: How do we live with a very powerful and
dangerous drug - more powerful and dangerous than many illicit drugs -
that, we have learned, cannot be effectively prohibited?
Virtually all Americans have used some psychoactive substance, whether
caffeine or nicotine or marijuana.  In many cases, the use of cocaine
and heroin represents a form of self-medication against physical and
emotional pain among people who do not have access to psychotherapy or
Prozac.  The market in illicit drugs is as great as it is in the inner
cities because palliatives for pain and depression are harder to come
by and because there are fewer economic opportunities that can compete
with the profits of violating prohibition.
Prohibition is no way to run a drug policy.  We learned that with
alcohol during the first third of this century and we're probably wise
enough as a society not to try to repeat the mistake with nicotine.
Prohibitions for kids make sense.  It's reasonable to prohibit drug-
related misbehavior that endangers others, such as driving under the
influence of alcohol and other drugs, or smoking in enclosed spaces.
But whatever its benefits in deterring some Americans from becoming
drug abusers, America's indiscriminate drug prohibition is responsible
for too much crime, disease, and death to qualify as sensible policy.
There is a wide range of choice in drug-policy options between the
free-market approach favored by Milton Friedman and Thomas Szasz, and
the zero-tolerance approach of William Bennett.  These options fall
under the concept of harm reduction.  That concept holds that drug
policies need to focus on reducing crime, whether engendered by drugs
or by the prohibition of drugs.  And it holds that disease and death
can be diminished even among people who can't, or won't, stop taking
drugs.  This pragmatic approach is followed in the Netherlands,
Switzerland, Australia, and parts of Germany, Austria, Britain, and a
growing number of other countries.
American drug warriors like to denigrate the Dutch, but the fact
remains that Dutch drug policy has been dramatically more successful
than U.S. drug policy.  The average age of heroin addicts in the
Netherlands has been increasing for almost a decade; HIV rates among
addicts are dramatically lower than in the United States; police don't
waste resources on non-disruptive drug use but, rather, focus on major
dealers or petty dealers who create public nuisances.  The
decriminalized cannabis markets are regulated in a quasi-legal fashion
far more effective and inexpensive than the U.S. equivalent.
The Swiss have embarked on a national experiment of prescribing heroin
to addicts.  The two-year-old plan, begun in Zurich, is designed to
determine whether they can reduce drug- and prohibition-related crime,
disease, and death by making pharmaceutical heroin legally available to
addicts at regulated clinics.  The results of the experiment have been
sufficiently encouraging that it is being extended to over a dozen
Swiss cities.  Similar experiments are being initiated by the Dutch and
Australians.  There are no good scientific or ethical reasons not to
try a heroin-prescription experiment in the United States.
Our Federal Government puts politics over science by ignoring extensive
scientific evidence that sterile syringes can reduce the spread of AIDS.
Connecticut permitted needle sales in drugstores in 1992, and the
policy resulted in a 40 per cent decrease in needle sharing among
injecting drug users, at no cost to taxpayers.
We see similar foolishness when it comes to methadone.  Methadone is
to street heroin more or less what nicotine chewing-gum and skin
patches are to cigarettes.  Hundreds of studies, as well as a National
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FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 257 ALTERN. MEDICINE Ref: EAR00027Date: 06/21/97
From: ALEX VASAUSKAS                                        Time: 08:34am
\/To: JANE KELLEY                                         (Read 2 times)
Subj: Marijuana [2/3] [06/15]

 >>> Part 6 of 15...
Academy of Sciences report last year, have concluded that methadone is
more effective than any other treatment in reducing heroin-related
crime, disease, and death.  In Australia and much of Europe, addicts
who want to reduce or quit their heroin use can obtain a prescription
for methadone from a GP and fill the prescription at a local pharmacy.
In the United States, by contrast, methadone is available only at
highly regulated and expensive clinics.
A warning of the prohibitionists is that there's no going back once we
reverse course and legalize drugs.  But what the reforms in Europe and
Australia demonstrate is that our choices are not all or nothing.
Virtually all the steps described above represent modest and relatively
low-risk initiatives to reduce drug and prohibition-related harms
within our current prohibition regime.  At the same time, these steps
are helpful in thinking through the consequences of more far-reaching
drug policy reform.  You don't need to go for formal legalization to
embark on numerous reforms that would yield great dividends.  But these
run into opiaphobia.
The blame is widespread.  Cowardly Presidents, unwilling to assume
leadership for reform.  A Congress so concerned with appearing tough on
crime that it is unwilling to analyze alternative approaches.  A drug
czar who debases public debate by equating legalization with genocide.
A drug enforcement/treatment complex so hooked on government dollars
that the anti-drug crusade has become a vested interest.
But perhaps the worst offender is the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration - not so much the agents who risk their lives trying to
apprehend major drug traffickers as the ideologically driven
bureaucrats who intimidate and persecute doctors for prescribing pain
medication in medically appropriate (but legally suspicious) doses, who
hobble methadone programs with their overregulation, who acknowledge
that law enforcement alone cannot solve the drug problem but then
proceed to undermine innovative public-health initiatives.
I am often baffled by the resistance of conservatives to drug-policy,
reform, but encouraged by the willingness of many to reassess their
views once they have heard the evidence.  Conservatives who oppose the
expansion of federal power cannot look approvingly on the growth of
the federal drug-enforcement bureaucracy and federal efforts to coerce
states into adopting federally formulated drug policies.  Those who
focus on the victimization of Americans by predatory criminals can
hardly support our massive diversion of law-enforcement resources to
apprehending and imprisoning nonviolent vice merchants and consumers.
Those concerned with overregulation can hardly countenance our current
handling of methadone, our refusal to allow over-the-counter sale of
sterile syringes, our prohibition of medical marijuana.  And
conservatives who turn to the Bible for guidance on current affairs can
find little justification there for our "war on drugs" and the people
who use and sell them.
Kurt Schmoke
Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore may be the only sitting politician who
advocates, if not outright legalization, reforms in that direction.
But even if he is lonely, he is not hopeless on the question of
democratic political enlightenment.  Mr. Schmoke was first elected
mayor in 1987.  He is a graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes
Scholar.
Serious problems require serious minds.  That may help explain why
William F. Buckley Jr. was one of the first public figures to
acknowledge that the war on drugs is a failure.  I don't know how Mr.
Buckley's early apostasy about the war on drugs was greeted by his
conservative colleagues - although it's not hard to guess - but I
remember the reaction in 1988 to my own call for a national debate on
that war.  A leading congressional liberal called me the most dangerous
man in America.  A national magazine referred to me as "a nice young
man who had a bright future." Many of my political supporters
encouraged me to drop the subject and stick to potholes.
Potholes are important, but, as Mr. Buckley argued to the New York Bar
Association, dropping the subject of the war on drugs means dropping
any hope of solving some of America's most difficult social problems.
The war on drugs isn't a solution in search of a problem.  It's a
problem in search of a solution.
How big a problem?  Very big.  As Mr. Buckley points out, "More people
die every year as a result of the war on drugs than die from what we
call, generically, overdosing." He is similarly correct in noting that
blanket prohibition is a major source of crime: it inflates the price
of drugs, inviting new criminals to enter the trade; reduces the number
of police officers available to investigate violent crime; fosters
adulterated, even poisonous, drugs; and contributes significantly to
the transmission of HIV.  These are not problems that are merely
tangential to the war on drugs.  These are problems caused, or made
substantially worse, by the war on drugs.
That is why I have long advocated that the war on drugs be fought as a
public-health war.  This is sometimes called medicalization, or
regulated distribution.  Under this alternative to the war on drugs,
the government would set up a regulatory regime to pull addicts into
the public-health system.  The government, not criminal traffickers,
would control the price, distribution, and purity of addictive
substances - which it already does with prescription drugs.  This would
 >>> Continued to next message...
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FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 257 ALTERN. MEDICINE Ref: EAR00028Date: 06/21/97
From: ALEX VASAUSKAS                                        Time: 08:34am
\/To: JANE KELLEY                                         (Read 2 times)
Subj: Marijuana [2/3] [07/15]

 >>> Part 7 of 15...
take most of the profit out of drug trafficking, and it is profits that
drive the crime.  Addicts would be treated - and if necessary
maintained - under medical auspices.  Children would find it harder,
not easier, to get their hands on drugs.  And law enforcement would be
able to concentrate on the highest echelons of drug-trafficking
enterprises.
I do not specifically endorse the idea of a federal drugstore,
particularly if that means selling drugs to people who are not already
physically or psychologically addicted. On the other hand, I do support
a national commission to study all possible alternatives (including
legalization) to our failed strategy of blanket prohibition.  This
commission would be similar to the 1929 Wickersham Commission, which
President Hoover set up to study how to enforce alcohol prohibition
more strictly. Although Hoover tried to conceal the results, the
commission concluded that alcohol prohibition was, in the words of
Walter Lippmann, a "helpless failure." I believe that an objective and
nonpartisan inquiry would come to the same conclusion about the war
on drugs.
I also support Mr. Buckley's idea of approving a "utilitarian" calculus
to the war on drugs.  Congress is quite enthusiastic about weighing the
costs and benefits of health care, welfare, community development, and
other domestic programs.  It should apply a similar analysis to the war
on drugs, a war that is now costing the Federal Government $14 billion
a year.
In weighing the costs and benefits, Congress would not have to start
from scratch.  There have been many studies and experiments, including
our needle-exchange program in Baltimore.  This program costs $160,000
a year.  The cost to the state of Maryland of taking care of just one
adult AIDS patient infected through the sharing of a syringe is
$102,000 to $120,000.  In other words, if just two addicts are
protected from HIV through the city's needle exchange, the program will
have paid for itself.
But a cost-benefit analysis for the war on drugs would do more than
offer a guide to the sensible allocation of federal dollars.  It would
also make advocating changes in the war on drugs less politically risky
for elected officials.  Unfortunately, that risk has kept most
political leaders in lockstep support of the war on drugs.
I understand their reluctance to call for an end to blanket
prohibition, especially since individual mayors and governors cannot,
by themselves, end the war on drugs or its devastating effects on their
communities.  However, I also believe that the political risks of
debating and criticizing the war on drugs have been overstated.  I have
been reelected twice since 1988.  In my most recent election, last
year, my opponent specifically attacked my call for a new strategy in
the war on drugs.  She advocated "zero tolerance," which is more of a
slogan than a policy, and said she would sign the Atlanta resolution,
which supports the status quo.  In spite of her distortions of my
record on drug policy, I won re-election by a 20-point margin, the
widest margin in my political career.
Although I strongly believe that changes in national drug policy must
be national in scope, I have nevertheless tried to demonstrate that
some reforms can be made on local level.  For example, in 1993 I formed
a Mayor's Working Group on Drug Policy Reform, and I have since
implemented most of its major recommendations.  These recommendations
included providing for more community policing; encouraging Baltimore's
teaching hospitals to make addiction treatment a larger part of their
curriculum; and, most important, developing the needle-exchange program
mentioned above.
Needle exchange was my top legislative priority 1994.  We could not
begin the program without a change in the state's drug-paraphernalia
laws.  In the previous two years, lawmakers had been reluctant to go
along, in part out of fear that they would be accused of condoning drug
use. But in 1994, we were able to convince the legislature that needle
exchange would not increase drug use but instead would save lives, and
perhaps even reduce crime.
The most politically effective argument in selling needle exchange was
that it would slow the spread of AIDS.  That is because 70 per cent of
new AIDS cases in Baltimore are related to intravenous drug use, and
AIDS is now the number-one killer of both young men and young women in
Baltimore. (This crisis is not unique to Baltimore, and the problem is
especially horrendous for African-Americans.  A recent report entitled
_Health Emergency: The Spread of Drug-Related AIDS among African-
Americans and Latinos_, shows that 73,000 African-Americans have drug-
related AIDS or have died from it.  Among people who inject drugs,
African-Americans are almost 5 times as likely as whites to be
diagnosed with AIDS.  And for African-Americans, the risk of getting
AIDS is 7 times greater than the risk of dying from overdose.)
I'm proud that Baltimore now has the largest government-run needle
exchange program in the country.  That program is being thoroughly
evaluated by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene.  I
expect that evaluation to show that needle exchange is saving lives, a
claim that the war on drugs has not been able to make for instead more
than eighty years.
Mario Cuomo once made an observation that both liberals and
conservatives should feel comfortable endorsing.  He said that
policymakers must distinguish between ideas that sound good and good
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FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 257 ALTERN. MEDICINE Ref: EAR00029Date: 06/21/97
From: ALEX VASAUSKAS                                        Time: 08:35am
\/To: JANE KELLEY                                         (Read 2 times)
Subj: Marijuana [2/3] [08/15]

 >>> Part 8 of 15...
ideas that are sound.  The current war on drugs is an idea that sounds
good, but it is not a good idea that is sound.  After hundreds of
billions of dollars spent trying to stop the supply and demand of
drugs, after the break-up of thousands of families because of the 
arrest of a nonviolent drug offender, after eight decades of failure,
how much longer will the war on drugs continue?
I once told a television reporter that the war on drugs was our
domestic Vietnam.  Conservatives and liberals disagree about the
justice of that war.  But we generally agree that the strategy for
fighting it didn't work, and as a result the war lasted too long and
cost too many lives.  The same is true of the war on drugs.  It's time
to bring this enervating war to an end.  It's time for peace.
Joseph D. McNamara
We turned next to a former police chief - Mr. McNamara was chief of
police in Kansas City, Mo., and San Jose, Calif. - to inquire into the
special problems of the war on drugs on the street.  Mr. McNamara, who
has a doctorate in public administration from Harvard, is the author of
four books on policing and is currently a research fellow at the Hoover
Institution.
"It's the money, stupid." After 35 years as a police officer in three
of the country's largest cities, that is my message to the righteous
politicians who obstinately proclaim that a war on drugs will lead to a
drug-free America.  About $500 worth of heroin or cocaine in a source
country will bring in as much as $100,000 on the streets of an American
city.  All the cops, armies, prisons, and executions in the world
cannot impede a market with that kind of tax-free profit margin.  It is
the illegality that permits the obscene markup, enriching drug
traffickers, distributors, dealers, crooked cops, lawyers, judges,
politicians, bankers, businessmen.
Naturally, these people are against reform of the drug laws.  Drug
crooks align themselves with their avowed enemies, such as the Drug
Enforcement Administration, in opposing drug reform.  They are joined
by many others with vested economic interests.  President Eisenhower
warned of a military-industrial complex that would elevate the defense
budget unnecessarily.  That military-industrial complex pales in
comparison to the host of industries catering to our national
puritanical hypocrisy - researchers willing to tell the government what
it wants to hear, prison builders, correction and parole officers'
associations, drug-testing companies, and dubious purveyors of anti-
drug education.  Mayor Schmoke is correct about the vested interests in
the drug war.
Sadly, the police have been pushed into a war they did not start and
cannot win.  It was not the police who lobbied in 1914 for passage of
the Harrison Act, which first criminalized drugs.  It was the
Protestant missionary societies in China, the Woman's Christian
Temperance Union, and other such organizations that viewed the taking
of psychoactive substances as sinful.  These groups gradually got their
religious tenets enacted into penal statutes under which the "sinners'
go to jail.  The religious origin is significant for two reasons.  If
drugs had been outlawed because the police had complained that drug use
caused crime and disorder, the policy would have been more acceptable
to the public and won more compliance.  And the conviction that the use
of certain drugs is immoral chills the ability to scrutinize rationally
and to debate the effects of the drug war.  When Ethan Nadelmann
pointed out once that it was illogical for the most hazardous drugs,
alcohol and nicotine, to be legal while less dangerous drugs were
illegal, he was roundly denounced.  A leading conservative supporter of
the drug war contended that while alcohol and nicotine addiction was
unhealthy and could even cost lives, addiction to illegal drugs could
result in the loss of one's soul.  No empirical proof was given.
The demonizing of these drugs and their users encourages demagoguery.
William Bennett, the nation's first drug czar, would cut off the heads
of drug sellers.  Bennett's anti-drug rhetoric is echoed by Joseph
Califano, the liberal former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare,
now chairman of the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University.  Last June, the center hysterically suggested (with great
media coverage) that binge drinking and other substance abuse were
taking over the nation's colleges, leading to an increase in rapes,
assaults, and murders and to the spread of AIDS and other sexually
transmitted diseases.  The validity of the research in Califano's
report was persuasively debunked by Kathy McNamara-Meis, writing in
Forbes Media Critic.  She was equally critical of the media for
accepting the Center's sensational statements.
Conservatives like Bennett normally advocate minimal government.
Liberals like Califano would ordinarily recoil from the draconian
prison sentences and property seizures used in the drug war.  This
illustrates why it is so difficult to get politicians to concede that
alternative approaches to drug control need to be studied.  We are
familiar with the perception that the first casualty in any war is
truth.  Eighty years of drug-war propaganda has so influenced public
opinion that most politicians believe they will lose their jobs if
their opponents can claim they arc soft on drugs and crime.  Yet,
public doubt is growing.  Gallup reports that in 1990 only 4 per cent
of Americans believed that "arresting the people who use drugs" is the
best way for the government to allocate resources.
It was my own experience as a policeman trying to enforce the laws
 >>> Continued to next message...
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FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 257 ALTERN. MEDICINE Ref: EAR00030Date: 06/21/97
From: ALEX VASAUSKAS                                        Time: 08:35am
\/To: JANE KELLEY                                         (Read 2 times)
Subj: Marijuana [2/3] [09/15]

 >>> Part 9 of 15...
against drugs that led me to change my attitude about drug-control
policy.  The analogy to the Vietnam War is fitting.  I was a willing
foot soldier at the start of the modern drug war, pounding a beat in
Harlem.  During the early 1960s, as heroin use spread, we made many
arrests, but it did not take long before cops realized that arrests did
not lessen drug selling or drug use.
I came to realize just how ineffective we were in deterring drug use
one day when my partner and I arrested an addict for possession of a
hypodermic needle and heroin.  Our prisoner had already shot up, but
the heroin charge we were prepared to level at him was based on the
tiny residue in the bottle cap used to heat the fix.  It was petty, but
then-and now-such arrests are valued because they can be used to claim
success, like the body counts during the Vietnam War.
In this case the addict offered to "give" us a pusher in exchange for
letting him go.  He would lure the pusher into a hallway where we could
then arrest him in the act of selling drugs.  We trailed the addict
along Lenox Avenue.  To our surprise, he spoke to one man after another.
It suddenly struck me as humiliating, the whole scene.  Here it was,
broad daylight.  We were brilliantly visible, in uniform, in a marked
police car: and yet a few feet away, our quarry was attempting one drug
transaction after another.  The first two dealers weren't deterred by
our presence - they were simply sold out, and we could not arrest them
without the goods.  We finally arrested the third pusher, letting the
first addict escape, as we had covenanted.  The man we brought in was
selling drugs only to support his own habit.
Another inherent difficulty in drug enforcement is that violators are
engaging in consensual activity and seek privacy.  Every day, millions
of drug crimes similar to what took place in front of our police car
occur without police knowledge.  To enforce drug laws the police have
to resort to undercover work, which is dangerous to them and also to
innocent bystanders.  Drug enforcement often involves questionable
ethical behavior by the police, such as what we did in letting a guilty
person go free because he enticed someone else into violating the law.
Soldiers in a war need to dehumanize the enemy, and many cops took on
drug users as less than human.  The former police chief of Los Angeles,
Darvi Gates, testified before the United States Senate that casual
users should be taken out and shot.  He defended the statement to the
Los Angeles Times by saving, "We're in a war." New York police officers
convicted of beating and robbing drug dealers (their boss at the time
is now Director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control
Policy) rationalized their crimes by saving it was impossible to stop
drug dealing and these guys were the enemy.  Why should they get to
keep all the money?
Police scandals are an untallied cost of the drug war.  The FBI, the
Drug Enforcement Administration, and even the Coast Guard have had to
admit to corruption.  The gravity of the police crimes is as disturbing
as the volume.  In New Orleans, a uniformed cop in league with a drug
dealer has been convicted of murdering her partner and shop owners
during a robbery committed while she was on patrol.  In Washington DC,
and in Atlanta, cops in drug stings were arrested for stealing and
taking bribes.  New York State troopers falsified drug evidence that
sent people to prison.
And it is not just the rank and file.  The former police chief of
Detroit went to prison for stealing police drug-buy money.  In a small
New England town, the chief stole drugs from the evidence locker for
his own use.  And the DEA agent who arrested Panama's General Noriega
is in jail for stealing laundered drug money.
The drug war is as lethal as it is corrupting.  And the police and drug
criminals are not the only casualties. An innocent 75-year-old African-
American minister died of a heart attack 'struggling with Boston cops
who were mistakenly arresting him because an informant had given them
the wrong address.  A rancher in Ventura County, California, was killed
by a police SWAT team serving a search warrant in the mistaken belief
that he was growing marijuana.  In Los Angeles, a three-year-old girl
died of gunshot wounds after her mother took a wrong turn into a street
controlled by a drug-dealing gang.  They fired on the car because it
had invaded their marketplace.
The violence comes from the competition for illegal profits among
dealers, not from crazed drug users.  Professor Milton Friedman has
estimated that as many as 10,000 additional homicides a year are
plausibly attributed to the drug war.
Worse still, the drug war has become a race war in which non-whites are
arrested and imprisoned at four to five times the rate whites are, even
though most drug crimes are committed by whites.  The Sentencing
Research Project reports that one-third of black men are in ail or
under penal supervision, largely because of drug arrests.  The drug war
has established thriving criminal enterprises which recruit teenagers
into criminal careers.
It was such issues that engaged law-enforcement leaders-most of them
police chiefs-from fifty agencies during a two-day conference at the
Hoover Institution in May 1995.  Among the speakers was our colleague
in this symposium, Mayor Kurt Schmoke, who told the group that he had
visited a high school and asked the students if the high dropout rate
was due to kids' being hooked on drugs.  He was told that the kids were
dropping out because they were hooked on drug money, not drugs.  He
 >>> Continued to next message...
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 * Origin: Who's Askin'? (1:17/75)
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FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 257 ALTERN. MEDICINE Ref: EAR00031Date: 06/21/97
From: ALEX VASAUSKAS                                        Time: 08:35am
\/To: JANE KELLEY                                         (Read 2 times)
Subj: Marijuana [2/3] [10/15]

 >>> Part 10 of 15...
also told us that when he went to community meetings he would ask the
audience three questions. 1) "Have we won the drug war?" People
laughed. 2) "Are we winning the drug war?" People shook their heads.
3) "If we keep doing what we are doing will we have won the drug war in
ten years?" The answer was a resounding No.
At the end of the conference, the police participants completed an
evaluation form.  Ninety per cent voted no confidence in the war on
drugs.  They were unanimous in favoring more treatment and education
over more arrests and prisons.  They were unanimous in recommending a
presidential blue-ribbon commission to evaluate the drug war and to
explore alternative methods of drug control.  In sum, the tough-minded
law-enforcement officials took positions directly contrary to those of
Congress and the President.
One hopes that politicians will realize that no one can accuse them of
being soft on drugs if they vote for changes suggested by many
thoughtful people in law enforcement.  If the politicians tone down
their rhetoric it will permit police leaders to expose the costs of our
present drug-control policies.  Public opinion will then allow policy
changes to decriminalize marijuana and stop the arrest of hundreds of
thousands of people every year.  The enormous savings can be used for
what the public really wants-the prevention of violent crime.
Robert W. Sweet
To ponder the legal and judicial problems that arise from the drug war
we turned to Robert Sweet, a District Judge in New York City.  He has
served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and as Deputy Mayor of New York
City under John Lindsay.  He is a graduate of Yale and of Yale Law
School.
Why does a sitting judge, constitutionally charged with enforcing the
laws of the United States, seek the abolition of the criminal penalties
attached to drug use and distribution?  The answer in my case stems
from personal experience, leading to the conviction that our present
policy debases the rule of law and that its fundamental premise is
flawed.
In college in the Forties, while experimenting with the drug of
choice - alcohol - I cheerfully sang the lyrics of "Cocaine Bill and
Morphine Sue," without any understanding of the reality behind the
words.  As an Assistant United States Attorney in the Fifties, I
accepted the enforcement of the drug laws without question.  In the
Sixties, as Deputy Mayor of the City of New York, I supported methadone
and various modalities of treatment and rehabilitation.  After becoming
a federal trial judge in 1978, I presided over drug trials and sought
to impose just sentences ranging from probation to twenty years.
Then Congress enacted mandatory minimum sentences, and judicial
discretion was radically restricted.  The day in the fall of 1988 that
I was mandated to sentence Luis Quinones, an 18-year-old with no prior
record, to ten years of real time because he was a bouncer in an
apartment where drugs were being sold, I faced our national drug policy
and the need to reexamine it.  Assisted by the writings of Professor
Ethan Nadelmann I concluded that our present policy of criminal
prohibition was a monumental error.  A number of other judges have
reached the same conclusion.  Judge Weinstein has characterized our
present policy as "utter futility," and Judge Knapp has likened it to
"taking minnows out of the pond."
As Chief McNamara writes, the realities of criminal prohibition are
becoming recognized.  The first and foremost effect is the creation of
a pervasive and unbelievably powerful underground economy.
The Economist estimates that the markup on cocaine and heroin is not
5,000 per cent, as Messrs.  Buckley and Duke suggest, but 20,000 per
cent.  The drug market in the United States is estimated at $150 billion
a year.  At least one group of distributors in a case before me sold
37,500 kilos of cocaine a month for gross sales of almost $20 million a
month, and this group was but one of a number operating here.
While this economic engine drives forward, so have our efforts to
punish those who operate it.  Today we have the highest incarceration
rate for any Western nation, almost 1 million [There are higher
estimates. -ED.] in jails or prisons at a cost of $20 billion a year.
Federal drug cases have trebled in 10 years, up 25 per cent in 1993
alone, with marijuana cases up 17 per cent.  The total federal
expenditure on the drug war this year under the proposed budget will
exceed $17 billion.  Ten years ago the annual expenditure on the drug
war was $5 billion for all governments, federal, state, and local.
While our expenditures have increased tenfold, the number of Americans
using drugs has remained relatively constant at 40 million.  Steady
users are estimated to be 6 million, with I to 2 million of those
seriously disordered.  Our present prohibition policy has failed,
flatly and without serious question.
Secondly, the rule of law has been debased by the use of criminal
sanctions to alter personal conduct.  Of course, the same effort was
made in the Twenties and Thirties with respect to alcohol, with the
same results.  Al Capone and Nicky Barnes are interchangeable.  Drive-
by shootings, turf wars, mugging, and random violence are all the
direct result of criminal prohibition.  Courts are clogged with drug
cases to such an extent that in some jurisdictions (the Eastern
 >>> Continued to next message...
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--- Maximus 3.01
 * Origin: Who's Askin'? (1:17/75)
---------------

FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 257 ALTERN. MEDICINE Ref: EAR00032Date: 06/21/97
From: ALEX VASAUSKAS                                        Time: 08:35am
\/To: JANE KELLEY                                         (Read 2 times)
Subj: Marijuana [2/3] [11/15]

 >>> Part 11 of 15...
District of New York and the Southern District of Florida, for example)
it is difficult to find the resources to try civil cases; yet, the
street-corner availability of drugs is known to every citizen.
The rights of the individual have been curtailed in the name of the War
on Drugs.  We have seen the elimination of an accused's right to
pretrial release for most charges under the drug laws; heightened
restrictions on post-conviction bail; and invasions into the attorney-
client relationship through criminal forfeiture.
The criteria for securing a search warrant have been relaxed.  In drug
cases, the Supreme Court has permitted the issuance of search warrants
based on anonymous tips and tips from informants known to be corrupt
and unreliable; permitted warrantless searches of fields, barns, and
private property near a residence; and upheld evidence obtained under
defective search warrants if the officers executing the warrant acted
in "good faith." Taken together, these holdings have been characterized
as "the drug exception to the Fourth Amendment."
Police corruption and the unwholesome practice of using confidential
informants (one of whom made over $100,000 in a case before me) have
been noted by Chief McNamara.
Finally, the fundamental flaw, which will ultimately destroy this
prohibition as it did the last one, is that criminal sanctions cannot,
and should not attempt to, prohibit personal conduct which does no harm
to others.  Personal liberty surely must extend to what, when, and how
much a citizen can ingest.
The Framers of our Constitution explicitly acknowledged that the
individual possesses certain rights not enumerated in the text of the
Constitution and not contingent upon the relationship between the
individual and the Federal Government.  When a right has been narrowly
defined as, for example, the right to possess marijuana or cocaine, the
courts have refused to recognize it as one that is fundamental in
nature.  However, when the right to ingest substances is considered in
more general terms as the right to self-determination, that right has a
constitutional foundation as yet undeclared.
To overturn the present policy will not be easy, given the established
bureaucracy, but President Kennedy at the Berlin Wall was correct:
"Change is the law of life." We must recognize that drug use is first
and foremost a health problem, and that, as Professor Nadelmann has
established, mind-altering substances are a part of modern life to be
understood and their effects ameliorated, rather than grounds for
prosecution.
Alcohol and tobacco have a social cost when abused, and society has
properly concluded that abuse of these drugs is a health problem, not a
criminal issue.  Indeed, our experience with the reduction of 50 per
cent in the use of tobacco-the most addicting of drugs, which results
in 400,000 deaths a year-confirms the wisdom of that policy.  To
distinguish between these substances and heroin or cocaine is mere
tautology.
While the medicalization of the issue is going forward, Congress should
accept the recommendations of President Nixon's commission on the drug
laws and of the National Academy of Sciences in 1982 and end the
criminalization of marijuana, which is now widely acknowledged to be
without deleterious effect.  That reform alone would take 450,000
arrests out of the system.
The latest crime bill proposed a study of violence and crime
encompassing drug policy but failed to fund it.  The Surgeon General
proposed such a study and got fired.  Such a study, if fairly
conducted, would compel the abolition of criminal prohibition of drugs
by the Federal Government, permitting all drugs to be treated much the
same as alcohol: restricted by the individual states as to time and
place of sale, barred from minors, subject to truth in advertising, and
made the source of tax revenue.  As with alcohol, those who harm or
pose a threat to others while under the influence of drugs would face
criminal sanctions.
The effect of the underworld drug economy, the debasement of the rule
of law, and the undermining of fundamental fairness and individual
rights under the war on drugs all combine to require that the criminal
prohibition against drug use and distribution be ended.
Thomas Szasz
Dr.  Szasz, of the Department of psychiatry at Syracuse University, has
for many years argued the medical case that proscribed drugs, while
catastrophic in their effect on some people, are, when used by most,
taken without permanent damage.  He has also, in his numerous books,
pleaded the libertarian point, namely that drug-taking is the
individual's business and responsibility.
The war on drugs is a mass movement characterized by the demonizing, as
Chief McNamara suggests of certain objects and persons ("drugs,"
"addicts," "traffickers") as the incarnations of evil.  Hence, it is
foolish to dwell on the drug prohibitionist's failure to attain his
avowed aims.  Since he wages war on evil, his very effort is synonymous
with success.  It is a fatal weakness of prudential critiques of drug
policy that they ignore the "religious" character of the war on drugs.
 >>> Continued to next message...
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--- Maximus 3.01
 * Origin: Who's Askin'? (1:17/75)
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FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 257 ALTERN. MEDICINE Ref: EAR00033Date: 06/21/97
From: ALEX VASAUSKAS                                        Time: 08:35am
\/To: JANE KELLEY                                         (Read 2 times)
Subj: Marijuana [2/3] [12/15]

 >>> Part 12 of 15...
The Crusaders' war on the Infidel dramatized their unwavering devotion
to the True Faith.  The Communists' war on private property dramatized
their unwavering devotion to the ideal of a society free of economic
exploitation.  America's war on drugs dramatizes our unwavering
devotion to the ideal of a "drug-free" society.  The right analogy for
America's war on drugs is not the Vietnam War, but Communism.
The Soviet Union was the embodiment of the principle that private
property is evil.  To protect people from dangerous capitalists, the
USSR criminalized leaving the country without permission.  The Russians
are now paying the price of their anti-capitalist mentality.
Today, the United States is the embodiment of the principle that self-
medication is evil.  To protect people from rejecting protection from
dangerous drugs, the U.S. criminalizes self-medication without a
prescription.  We arc now paving the price of our anti-drug mentality.
William Bennett is right: Drug use and drug controls arc primarily
moral issues.  But whereas Bennett sees self medication as wicked and
drug criminalization as virtuous, I see self-medication as a basic
human right (with unqualified responsibility for its consequences) and
drug criminalization as sinful (hypocritical and unenforceable).
Among the sins of the drug warriors, I view the following as especially
important: 1) destroying Americans' attachment to, indeed their very
understanding of, limited government; 2) converting tort law into an
instrument of economic redistribution and the principle of caveat
emptor into that of caveat vendor; 3) turning doctors into drug
monopolists (by making the purchase of most drugs, especially
"pleasure-producing" drugs, illegal without a physician's
prescription), and perverting the medical criteria of disease and
treatment (by defining certain "bad" choices as diseases, and certain
"good" coercions as treatments); 4) obscuring the obvious fact that all
biologically active substances are potentially dangerous (in certain
doses, to some persons, under certain circumstances); 5) converting the
relationship between doctor and patient from a contract between two
responsible adults into a domination-dependence relationship; and
6) redefining the relationship between drug seller and drug buyer from
a contract between two responsible adults into a victimization
relationship.
In his great work Ancient Law, Sir Henry Maine articulated his famous
general proposition: "The movement of the progressive societies has
hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract." The war on drugs is
but one manifestation, albeit a very important one, of a radical
reversal of this movement.  Gradually, the American polity has become
transformed from a limited government (the Rule of Law) into an
unlimited Therapeutic State (relations based on status).
I reject my fellow panelists' sympathetic stance toward medical drug
controls.  To treat people in great pain effectively, we do not need
more "compassion"; we simply need a social setting where individuals
have legal access to narcotics and where doctors can administer such
drugs in conformity with their patients' wants, without fear of
criminal penalties for overprescribing, or civil penalties for
malpractice, or both.  Prescribing heroin and methadone for addicts is
not the solution, but the very epitome of the problem.  Enough said.
In a secular society committed to individual liberty and personal
responsibility, the legislator's task is to enact laws to govern the
behavior of adults, not children (whose management is primarily the
responsibility of their parents).  Once a person loses sight of this
fact, it is easy to convince him that protecting children from drugs
justifies making drugs difficult to obtain for adults.
Drugs are, of course, not the only dangerous artifacts in our
environment.  Electricity, household appliances and cleansers, and
countless other products of human inventiveness endanger, injure, and
kill children.  We accept these inventions that, in the long run, make
our lives healthier and safer, and adapt to them by teaching children
to cope realistically with the risks they pose.  Harassing adults and
depriving them of rights will not work as a substitute for disciplining
children.
Our obsession with the necessity of drug controls is closely
intertwined with our attitudes toward self-harm and health care on the
one hand, and, on the other hand, with our attitudes toward the
manufacturer's and provider's tort liability for substances and
interventions classified as "medical." In contemporary medical-
political discourse, the issue of free will is raised only to assert
its absence, and hence the unsuitability of market relations in
connection with drugs and health care.  To be sure, it makes no sense
to let people make important choices if we believe that they are unable
to choose, because they are the victims of addiction or mental illness.
We try to prevent our children from putting foreign bodies into their
nostrils or other body cavities.  Why?  Partly because we love them and
partly because their self injury causes us a lot of trouble.  In
proportion as we treat adults like children-lifting the economic burden
of medical care from their shoulders and placing it on everyone else's
shoulders-we create a set of monstrous incentives whose reality we
refuse to acknowledge.  Protecting everyone from having to pay for his
own health care and at the same time making everyone pay for everyone
else's health care not only infantilizes everyone, but encourages
everyone to meddle in everyone else's life (in order to reduce the
medical services others require).
 >>> Continued to next message...
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 X Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 X
--- Maximus 3.01
 * Origin: Who's Askin'? (1:17/75)