Ignoring failed drug war policies is not the problem; it's coming up with anything better.
By Mark A.R. Kleiman
A
break in the ideological ice that has kept global drug policy frozen for 40 years,
as Moisés Naím calls for here, would
be welcome news. But simply substituting antiprohibitionist slogans for
drug-war slogans, though it adds variety, does not give us clarity.
There
are two distinct "drug problems." First -- logically, not in
importance -- is the damage that drug toxicity, intoxication, and addiction can
do to people who consume drugs, and lead them to do to other people. That we
might call the "drug problem" proper.
The
existence of that drug problem has led to a variety of efforts to reduce drug
consumption by making various drugs more expensive, harder to find, or legally
risky to possess: taxes on alcohol, restrictions on tobacco marketing, bans on
sales of alcohol and tobacco to minors, bans on any sale of cocaine or heroin
for nonmedical use, bans on any sale whatever of MDMA ("ecstasy"). Every
such tax, regulation, or prohibition creates opportunities for profitable
evasion: moonshining, cigarette smuggling, a street-corner drunk buying a six-pack
for a teenager, a patient selling prescription narcotics, illicit production
and sale of alcohol during the Prohibition era or of cannabis, cocaine, heroin,
and methamphetamine today.
Those
illicit markets sometimes generate violence and disorder, and the higher prices
they create stimulate income-producing crime by some drug users. The
enforcement effort also generates harm: arrest, incarceration, bribery,
gunfights between enforcers and dealers. The problem of the illicit market
constitutes the second "drug problem."
Drug
warriors tend to focus narrowly on the drug abuse problem and reject any
attempt to limit the harms done by trafficking and enforcement, other than by
putting dealers out of business. But the logic of the market dictates that
incarcerated dealers will be replaced as long as there are customers willing to
pay illicit-market prices. After more than a generation of fighting this war,
there is overwhelming evidence that drug-law enforcement is a weak tool at best
for reducing drug consumption. That evidence strongly suggests that enforcement
agencies should concentrate on minimizing the drug-market threats to public
safety and order rather than waste their efforts in a fruitless quest to reduce
drug supply.
Alas,
the fact that enforcement mostly fails to reduce drug consumption does not
imply that we have some magical process called "education and treatment"
that will be more effective. In fact, we do not. Nor is "decriminalization"
-- easing up on drug users -- a panacea. Most of the harms from illicit markets
and drug enforcement come from dealers, not users; and decriminalization alone does
nothing to reduce the revenues, or the violence, of drug-trafficking
organizations.
The
United States could -- and should -- greatly de-escalate its domestic drug war,
halving the number of dealers behind bars, without greatly increasing drug
abuse. It should redirect enforcement to reducing violence and disorder. Americans
should insist that offenders under community supervision -- who consume a
substantial share of all illicit drugs -- refrain from illicit drug use, or
face quick, brief, but certain jail stays. That process has reduced
methamphetamine use among Honolulu's probationers to an extent that
drug-treatment providers could only dream of.
Internationally,
Americans should stop allowing the fantasy of drug-supply reduction to dominate
U.S. foreign policy toward Mexico and Afghanistan.
But
all of that will require careful thought and skillful execution. Both no-brainer
"solutions" to the drug problem --"a drug-free society" and
"ending the drug war" -- are equally delusional. The two drug
problems are both here to stay. Let's learn to deal with that fact.
Mark A.R. Kleiman is professor of public
policy at the University of California, Los Angeles; the author of Against
Excess: Drug Policy for Results; and
the editor of the
Journal of Drug
Policy Analysis. Princeton
University Press will publish his new book When Brute Force Fails: How to Have
Less Crime and Less Punishment
this summer.
Juan Carlos REYES/AFP/Getty Images
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