Time to end the war on drugs?

posted at 12:20 pm on December 5, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Seventy-five years ago today, the nation amended the Constitution to end Prohibition after a disastrous experiment in banning alcohol.  Ethan Nadelmann uses the event to ask Americans whether the time has come to end its decades-long experiment in banning other drugs and allow citizens to make their own decisions on intoxicants.  The appearance of this column at the Wall Street Journal shows how mainstream it has become to question the war on drugs:

The Americans who voted in 1933 to repeal prohibition differed greatly in their reasons for overturning the system. But almost all agreed that the evils of failed suppression far outweighed the evils of alcohol consumption.

The change from just 15 years earlier, when most Americans saw alcohol as the root of the problem and voted to ban it, was dramatic. Prohibition’s failure to create an Alcohol Free Society sank in quickly. Booze flowed as readily as before, but now it was illicit, filling criminal coffers at taxpayer expense.

Some opponents of prohibition pointed to Al Capone and increasing crime, violence and corruption. Others were troubled by the labeling of tens of millions of Americans as criminals, overflowing prisons, and the consequent broadening of disrespect for the law. Americans were disquieted by dangerous expansions of federal police powers, encroachments on individual liberties, increasing government expenditure devoted to enforcing the prohibition laws, and the billions in forgone tax revenues. And still others were disturbed by the specter of so many citizens blinded, paralyzed and killed by poisonous moonshine and industrial alcohol.

Supporters of prohibition blamed the consumers, and some went so far as to argue that those who violated the laws deserved whatever ills befell them. But by 1933, most Americans blamed prohibition itself.

When repeal came, it was not just with the support of those with a taste for alcohol, but also those who disliked and even hated it but could no longer ignore the dreadful consequences of a failed prohibition. They saw what most Americans still fail to see today: That a failed drug prohibition can cause greater harm than the drug it was intended to banish.

Do most Americans fail to see that?  I’m not sure, and the fact that the question has become mainstream speaks to a dawning realization of that reality.  Thirty years ago, talk of legalization remained on the fringe of American politics, mostly among drug users (with obvious interests in that direction) and libertarians.  Reason Magazine would have been the most mainstream publication in those years to even make the argument, and perhaps the Village Voice.  Otherwise, the thought of legalizing recreational drugs was thought politically insane.

No one doubts the destructive nature of most of the substances banned now, except for marijuana, where serious debate exists.  Cocaine and heroin are deeply and physically addictive and deadly, as are most controlled or banned substances.  But should people be left to their own devices and government stay out of the way of their behavior, only intervening when their behavior affects others?  Where would that line get drawn, anyway?

Clearly, what we have been doing hasn’t worked.  At the margins, it impacts behavior, but overall, Americans still create a huge demand that gets fulfilled by criminal enterprises.  That is no different than what Prohibition created, and the effects have been the same: rampant violence, large wealth transfers to organized crime, dilution of law-enforcement efforts, exploding prison populations, and so on.

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  Under that definition, the American idea of a war on drugs is as politically insane as it gets.  Succeeding administrations and Congresses led by both parties keep assuring us that they will turn the corner on the war on drugs, but nothing changes except for the names and the faces.  We have enabled a powerful central government and organized crime to limit our freedoms in every direction as a result of this policy.  We could at least roll back both by returning to the more rational policy on drugs that the US had before prohibition fever hit a century ago.

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