Perhaps now is the time to think about it. These may be the most difficult times in the history of the Republic since the Civil War. We are engaged in two foreign wars and a Wall Street melt down. Our economy has been in free fall. Runaway health care costs continue to be a drag on the economy and will likely impede a recovery. We are sending reinforcements to Afghanistan because we are in serious danger of loosing ground to the resurgent, insurgent Taliban. We are sending troops, equipment and millions of dollars to secure our southern borders from cartel drug violence and penetration from Mexico, in an effort to stem a drug war that we cannot win because of the law of supply and demand. Our population spends more money and gets less of a return for health care than any other country on earth and our new President is struggling for a way to fund his promise of health care reform. It is possible, just possible that if we think broadly and logically enough that the seed of resolution of all of these crises lies in rethinking our war on drugs and the possibility of surrender- not on the sale or distribution, but on the decriminalization of use.
After pointing out that we have a larger percent of our population behind bars than any other “civilized” country, Judge Kane turned to the cost of managing the system.
CharonQC: We have not got a choice there. But basically, you also gave some interesting figures, about the cost of imprisoning drug offenders.
Judge Kane: It is atrocious. It costs I think, I am not sure what the present figures are but it is something in the neighborhood of $30,000.00 a year to house a prisoner in the federal prison system and it is closer to $6,000.00 a year to put that person under some kind of probation. So we are putting in people in our prisons that do not need to be there, who are not violent or dangerous and another consequence is that we are allowing a number of very dangerous people to go about the streets because we are crowded in our prisons with nonviolent offenders.
CharonQC: We have got a similar problem in the United Kingdom with the pressure on prison places.
Judge Kane: I am not saying that we have a monopoly on idiocy.
Judge Kane goes on to further describe the “idiocy” of creating black market fortunes in a war we are not and cannot win. He believes that the fears of widespread addiction following legalization are unfounded and the afflicted, addicted would be better served by treatment.
Judge Kane: I get so terribly frustrated being on the bench and watching this revolving door of miscreants coming in and out for no real reason at all. We are not protecting our children, our families by this sort of thing and what we are doing is creating a very attractive black market where people are making enormous profits and they do not pay any taxes on them.
One other figure that is a little bit difficult to calculate but it has been done to my satisfaction and that is in the 1800s before heroine and opium were outlawed in the United States, the addiction rate was 1.7. 1.7% of the population became addicted. During the period of regulation before the war on drugs, the number was 1.7 and now, it is still 1.7. All of the money that we pour into this is given with the false representation that somehow we are preventing drug addiction. We are not. What we do prevent is to some extent we provide drug experimentation and occasional use but we are certainly not doing anything about drug addiction. I think it ought to be treated. I think it ought to be treated like tuberculosis or alcoholism
The late Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning economist from the University of Chicago, in a 1991 interview on the national public affairs talk show, “America’s Drug Forum” also underscored both the cost and the futility of our drug enforcement laws.
Friedman: It does harm a great many other people, but primarily because it's prohibited. There are an enormous number of innocent victims now. You've got the people whose purses are stolen, who are bashed over the head by people trying to get enough money for their next fix. You've got the people killed in the random drug wars. You've got the corruption of the legal establishment. You've got the innocent victims who are taxpayers, who have to pay for more and more prisons, and more and more prisoners, and more and more police. You've got the rest of us who don't get decent law enforcement because all the law enforcement officials are busy trying to do the impossible.
Dr. Friedman describes how our policy of drug criminalization creates an attractive government supported monopoly for drug cartels and in looking at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of government is to protect the cartel and is doing an excellent job.
Friedman: Excellent. What do I mean by that? In an ordinary free market--let's take potatoes, beef, anything you want--there are thousands of importers and exporters. Anybody can go into the business. But it's very hard for a small person to go into the drug importing business because our interdiction efforts essentially make it enormously costly. So, the only people who can survive in that business are these large Medellin cartel kind of people who have enough money so they can have fleets of airplanes, so they can have sophisticated methods, and so on.
In addition to which, by keeping goods out and by arresting, let's say, local marijuana growers, the government keeps the price of these products high. What more could a monopolist want? He's got a government who makes it very hard for all his competitors and who keeps the price of his products high. It's absolutely heaven.
The futility and cost of our drug war policy has not been lost on Mexico’s President Filipe Calderon who recently who has been currying favor with the United States by making the fight against drug traffickers a focus of his administration. He proposed legislation in Mexico recently to decriminalize the possession of small quantities of cocaine and other drugs for addicts who agreed to undergo treatment. Mexico is experiencing a surge in drug use in his country. See Malkin and Lacey, “Mexican President Proposes Decriminalization Some Drugs,” The New York Times, October 2, 2008.
One of the incredible ironies of our times is the confluence of our drug war policy and our Middle East war policies. A recent United Nations report from Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Drug Office, indicated that Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years that the Taliban is cutting back cultivation and stockpiling reserves of the drug which it uses to fund its insurgency against the United States and NATO troops. According to UN estimates, the Taliban made as much of $300 Million Dollars on the drug trade last year. That buys a lot of weapons and ammunition in Afghanistan. Another irony is described by Mr. Maria Costa is that as American forces try to tamp down the opium trade in Afghanistan they are actually assisting the Taliban because it helps drive up the price, buys more weapons and at the same time alienates the poor Afghan farmers who depend on the crop to live. See Kraeutler, “UN Reports That Taliban Is Stockpiling Opium,” The New York Times, November 28, 2008.
What if, at one stroke, we could reduce crime in the United States, empty our prisons of non violent offenders, make room for violent offenders, enlighten the treatment of drug addictions, pull troops from our borders, substantially reduce the cost of law enforcement, eliminate the clogging of our courts and at the same time deal a devastating blow to the Taliban in Afghanistan and to other narcotic driven economies who support domestic and foreign terrorism and use the money saved to fund health care for all Americans, shouldn’t we give that some thought? Difficult times require bold thinking.
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