Legalization of narcotics: myths and reality

When the high priests of America's political right and left as articulate as the National Review's William F. Buckley and The New York Times' Anthony Lewis peddle the same drug legalization line, it is time to shout caveat emptor--buyer beware. The boomlet to legalize drugs like heroin, cocaine, and marijuana that they, and magazines like New York, are trying to propagate is founded in myths, not realities, and it is the nation's children who could suffer long-lasting, permanent damage.

Myth: There has been no progress in the war on drugs.

Reality: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' National Household Drug Survey, the nation's most extensive assessment of drug usage, reports that, from 1979 to 1994, marijuana users dropped from 23,000,000 to 10,000,000, while cocaine users fell from 4,400,000 to 1,400,000. The drug-using segment of the population also is aging. In 1979, 10% were over age 34; today, almost 30% are. The number of hardcore addicts has held steady at around 6,000,000, a situation most experts attribute to unavailability of treatment and the large number of addicts in the pipeline.

Myth: Whether to use drugs and become hooked is an adult decision.

Reality: It is children who choose. Hardly anyone in America begins drug use after age 21. Based on everything known, an individual who does not smoke, use drugs, or abuse alcohol by 21 is virtually certain never to do so. The nicotine pushers understand this, which is why they fight so strenuously to kill efforts to keep their stuff away from kids.

Myth: Legalized and not would be only for adults and not available to children.

Reality: Nothing in the American experience gives any credence to the ability to keep legal drugs out of the hands of children. It is illegal for them to purchase cigarettes, beer, and liquor. Nevertheless, 3,000,000 adolescents smoke, an average of half a pack a day, constituting a $1,000,000,000-a-year market; and 12,000,000 underage Americans drink, a $10,000,000,000-a-year market.

Myth: Legalization would reduce crime and social problems.

Reality: Any short-term reduction in arrests from repealing drug laws would evaporate quickly as use increased and the criminal conduct--assault, murder, rape, child molestation, vandalism, and other violence--that drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines spawn exploded. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that criminals commit six times as many homicides, four times as many assaults, and almost one and a half times as many robberies under the influence of drugs as they do in order to get money to buy drugs.

Myth: The American experience with prohibition of alcohol supports drug legalization.

Reality: This ignores two important distinctions: Possession of alcohol for personal consumption was not illegal, and alcohol, unlike illegal drugs such as heroin and cocaine, has a long history of broad social acceptance dating back to the Old Testament and ancient Greece. Largely because of this, the public and political consensus favoring Prohibition was short-lived. By the early 1930s, most Americans no longer supported it. Today, though, the public overwhelmingly favors keeping illegal drugs illegal.

Despite these differences, which made Prohibition more difficult to enforce than the current drug laws, alcohol consumption dropped from 1.96 gallons per person in 1919 to .97 gallons per person in 1934, the first full year after Prohibition ended. Death rates from cirrhosis among men came down from 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 to 10.7 per 100,000 in 1929. During Prohibition, admission to mental health institutions for alcohol psychosis dropped 60%; arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct went down 50%; welfare agencies reported significant declines in cases due to alcohol-related family problems; and the death rate from impure alcohol did not rise.

Neither did Prohibition generate a crime wave. Homicide increased at a higher rate between 1900 and 1910 than during Prohibition, and organized crime was well-established in the cities before 1920.

I put these facts on the record not to support a return to Prohibition, something I strongly oppose, but to set the historical record straight and temper the revisionist view of legalizers who take their history from celluloid images of 1930s gangster movies.

Myth: Greater availability and legal acceptability of drugs would not increase use.

Reality: This defies not only experience, but human nature. In the 1970s, the U.S. de facto decriminalized marijuana. The Shafer Commission appointed by Pres. Richard Nixon recommended decriminalization, as did Pres. Jimmy Carter. The result was a soaring increase in marijuana use, particularly among youngsters. Today, just 11% of Americans report seeing drugs available in the area where they live; after legalization, there could be a place to purchase drugs in every neighborhood.

Today, the U.S. has 50,000,000 nicotine addicts, 18,000,000 alcoholics and alcohol abusers, and 6,000,000 illegal drug addicts. It is logical to conclude that, if drugs are easier to obtain, less expensive, and socially acceptable, more individuals will use them. Experts such as Columbia University's Herbert Kleber believe that, with legalization, the number of cocaine addicts alone would jump beyond the number of alcoholics.

Myth: Legalization will save money by allowing the government to spend less on law enforcement and permit taxation of drug sales.

Reality: While legalization temporarily might take some of the burden off the criminal justice system, such a policy would impose heavy additional costs on the health care and social service systems, schools, and the workplace. Like advocates of legalization today, opponents of alcohol prohibition claimed that taxes on the legal sale of alcohol would increase revenues dramatically and help erase the deficit. The real-world result has been quite different.

Myth: Drug use is an issue of civil liberties.

Reality: This is a convenient misreading of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Legalizers cite Mill to argue that the state has no right to interfere in the private life of a citizen who uses drugs; only when an action harms someone else may the state take steps to prevent it. They ignore the fact that Mill's conception of freedom does not extend to the right of individuals to enslave themselves or to decide that they will give up their liberty. Mill wrote with blunt clarity: "The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom."

Drug addiction is a form of enslavement. It "alters pathologically the nature and character of abusers," says Phoenix House president Mitchell Rosenthal. Even Mill at his most expansive would admit that the state can take action not just to free addicts from chains of chemical dependency that take away the freedom to be all that God meant them to be, but to prevent those bonds from shackling them. A nation devoted to individual freedom has an obligation to nourish a society and legal structure that protect people from the slavery of drug addiction.

Even Mill's most libertarian contention--that the state can regulate only those actions which directly affect others--does not support individual drug abuse and addiction. Such conduct does affect others directly, from the abused spouse and baby involuntarily addicted through the mother's umbilical cord to innocent bystanders injured or killed by adolescents high on crack cocaine. The drug abuser's conduct has a direct and substantial impact on every taxpayer who foots the bill for the criminal and health cost consequences of such actions.

Certainly a society that recognizes the state's compelling interest in banning (and stopping individuals from using) lead paint, asbestos insulation, unsafe toys, and flammable fabrics hardly can ignore its interest in banning cocaine, heroin, marijuana, methamphetamines, and hallucinogens. Indeed, refusing to include drug use in the right of privacy, the Supreme Court has approved state laws that prohibit even the sacramental use of peyote. With the exception of Alaska, state courts have held that possession of marijuana in the home is not protected by the right of privacy.

Myth: Legalization works well in European countries.

Reality: The ventures of Switzerland, England, the Netherlands, and Italy into drug legalization have had disastrous consequences. Switzerland's "Needle Park," touted as a way to restrict a few hundred heroin addicts to a small area, turned into a grotesque tourist attraction of 20,000 heroin addicts and junkies that had to be closed down before it infected the city of Zurich. England's foray into allowing any doctor to prescribe heroin quickly was curbed as heroin use increased.

In the Netherlands, anyone over age 17 can drop into a marijuana "coffee shop" and pick types of marijuana like one might choose flavors of ice cream. Adolescent pot use there jumped nearly 200% while it was dropping by 66% in the U.S. As crime and availability of drugs rose and complaints from city residents about the decline in their quality of life multiplied, the Dutch parliament moved to trim back the number of marijuana distribution shops in Amsterdam. Dutch persistence in selling pot has angered European neighbors because its wide-open attitude toward marijuana is believed to be spreading pot and other drugs beyond the Netherlands' borders.

Italy infrequently is mentioned by advocates of legalization, despite its lenient drug laws. Personal possession of small amounts of drugs has not been a crime in Italy since 1975, other than a brief period of recriminalization between 1990 and 1993. (Even then, Italy permitted an individual to possess one dose of a drug.) Under decriminalization, possession of two to three doses of drugs such as heroin generally was exempt from criminal sanction. Today, Italy has 300,000 addicts, the highest rate of heroin addiction in Europe. Seventy percent of all AIDS cases in Italy are attributable to drug use.

In contrast, Sweden offers an example of a successful restrictive drug policy. After a brief period of permitting doctors to give drugs to addicts, Sweden adopted the American policy of seeking a drug-free society in 1980. By 1988, Sweden had seen drug use among young Army conscripts drop 75% and use by ninth-graders fall 66%.

What is most disturbing about the arguments for legalization is that they glide over the impact such a policy would have on American children. The U.S. assuredly is not the Garden of Eden of the Old Testament. Dealing with evil, including drugs, is part of the human experience. Nevertheless, there is a special obligation to protect youngsters from evil, and drugs are first and foremost an issue about children. It is adolescent experimentation that leads to abuse and addiction.

Today, most kids don't use illicit drugs, but all of them, particularly the poorest, are vulnerable to abuse and addiction. Russian roulette is not a game anyone should play. Legalizing drugs not only is playing Russian roulette with children, it is slipping a couple of extra bullets into the chamber.

Mr. Califano, president of The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, New York, was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare during the Carter Administration and served as Pres. Lyndon Johnson's top aide for domestic affairs from 1965 to 1969.

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