Youthful Experimentation

It's always entertaining to see a young political science major try his hand at defending the drug war. Here's Conor Shapiro from The Daily Aztec (San Diego State University) regurgitating the Drug Czar's talking points:

The recent Daily Aztec column, "Legalization will win U.S. war on drugs," and its idea that drugs should be legalized left me astonished. In that train of thought, giving addicts more access to fulfill their fix is winning the war on drugs. Sure it will, just like allowing children a fast food lunch option at school will curtail obesity.

All kinds of problems right off the bat here. First, adults and children are not the same. Comparing how we deal with adults with an addiction and how we deal with children and the foods they are offered is a meaningless comparison. Children should not be allowed to obtain drugs, and we shouldn't treat adults like children when it comes to making choices. And as we've discovered, drug prohibition undermines the efforts to protect children because it keeps the supply chain in the hands of people who have much less incentive to keep drugs out of children's hands.

In the same way that you wouldn't legalize speeding on freeways for the reason that everyone already does it, legalizing lethal drugs will only harm individuals and our communities.

Another false comparison. For one, we don't put people in jail for speeding. Two, speeding on a freeway (that we all share) is much different than a person deciding to use drugs within their own home. I actually have disagreements about how the enforcement of speeding on the highways is done, but that's a topic for another day.

Laws are implemented and enforced on a rational basis, where the state has a compelling interest to protect the well-being of its citizens.

While the government does have a duty to protect the well-being of its citizens, it is folly for it to attempt to protect citizens from themselves. This is the problem with drug prohibition. It's an attempt to intervene in individual choices which are not even necessarily harmful to the individual. And even in cases where they are harmful, the limit that the government should be able to go is to educate the public about the dangers.

Legalizing these drugs negates our societal values and contradicts the social welfare.

As for "our societal values", it's not the government's role to dictate morality (man, I've been writing that a lot recently). The government's role is to guard the rights of its citizens against those who seek to impose morality on or to victimize others. As for "contradicting the social welfare", I don't even know where to begin. Drug prohibition itself has been a major driver of the violence, poverty, and lack of opportunity that continues to divide America into the haves and have-nots. The haves will continue to be able to do drugs without facing consequences (do you think Paris Hilton or Britney Spears will ever see jail time for cocaine possession? or Ted Haggard for meth possession?), while the have-nots between Colombia and Southern California who supply them with those drugs often face long jail terms whenever they're caught. What effect do you think that has on the social welfare, Conor?

This shouldn't be a liberal or conservative argument.

It's not. Both liberals and conservatives know you're wrong.

It should be about the right thing to do.

And the right thing to do is to stop putting harmless adults in jail in a futile attempt to shut down a multi-billion dollar industry driven by people who correctly believe that they have the right to decide what to put into their own bodies.

It's in no way the government's role to condone the sale of narcotics that produce such horrific consequences.

Then put your money where your mouth is and demand we bring back alcohol prohibition.

Is the war on drugs mismanaged? Absolutely. Under funded? No doubt.

It's underfunded? Well, what's the right level of funding then? Why don't you do some research on all those times when a drug war has been won, and give us the figure?

Is the aforementioned cause enough for abolition of its practice? Absolutely not.

OK then. Tell us how to make it work.

Success in the war on drugs shouldn't be measured by the elimination of the black market. The goals should be: limiting usage and impeding potential users, while utilizing law enforcement to raid drug cartels and safely protect others from this immoral lifestyle.

Sounds good. In the mid-1990s, officials in Zurich, Switzerland set out to reach those goals. Over the next ten years, overdoses dropped, crime went down, and the number of new users dropped 82%. How did they do it? They legalized heroin use and opened treatment clinics for addicts.

It's utterly impossible to prevent a small black market from existence.

No, it's not. There's no black market in alcohol now beyond people who enjoy home-brewing beer. All it takes to wipe out a black market is to accept the fact that government has no purpose trying to impose morality on others through prohibitions and exorbitant sin taxes.

However, it isn't entirely unrealistic to witness a decline in narcotics and its accompanying contraband.

But it is unrealistic to expect to create that decline by imposing criminal sentences on the people who use and sell those narcotics. When declines happen, they happen because of factors unrelated to enforcement, generally by drugs going out of fashion or people finding alternative ways of getting high.

The pro-legalization argument uses alcohol and cigarettes as flimsy references to legal substances that the government seems to have no problem overlooking. However, upon closer examination, this couldn't be further from the truth. Tobacco companies have faced an uncountable amount of lawsuits, and laws limiting the usage of cigarettes are expanding faster than oil profits. In short, legislative action has just begun to scratch the surface of restricting sales and usage of cigarettes and alcohol. Just look at the surgeon general's warning on any pack of cigarettes.

Again, do you honestly believe that making alcohol and tobacco illegal drugs is the right thing to do? Putting a warning label on a pack of cigarettes doesn't create a black market. Forcing cigarette companies to be honest about the health effects of their product does not create a black market. Drunk-driving laws do not create a black market for booze. But it's the black markets that make drug prohibition so dangerous.

Tobacco is also linked to a little thing called cancer, which is the leading cause of death in the country. More shockingly, "one in every five deaths in America is smoking related," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Every year smoking kills more than 276,000 men and 142,000 women."

I'm starting to feel sorry for this kid. He's in college. He should have more of a clue than to believe that this statistic has any relevance to his argument.

These figures would increase enormously if more severe drugs were readily available.

Really? How so? Are you saying that more people would smoke cigarettes if other drugs are legal?

I'm thoroughly unconvinced that usage will somehow decrease or remain stagnant with increased availability.

Well, then step aside and let the people who actually pay attention to this stuff speak authoritatively on it. I've already mentioned what happened in Zurich when they decided to stop treating heroin use as a criminal act and instead treated addicts as medical patients. The number of new users plummeted. Why? Because doing heroin was no longer the cool thing to do. It was what those sick people down at the clinic were doing and it lost its glamor. And this revelation has led to programs that are now yielding results in Sydney, Vancouver, and a bunch of other European cities.

It seems to me ( because of my human fallibilities ) if I walk past fresh, hot donuts, I might buy one. However, if it's difficult to find the mouth-watering donuts, I just may skip out.

Sure, and the point is that addicts can't do that. You don't cure addiction that way, instead you drive the market. And the way that the market gets driven by addicts, with a supply chain that must be hidden from law enforcement, creates violence and exposes children to unnecessary harm.

I'm not advocating the outlaw of donuts or comparing illegal drugs to them. I wish to prove that easier and more availability is much more likely to cause an increase of usage, not a reduction.

But you're missing one major point in that assessment. You've already had a donut and you know you like it. What the recent program in Switzerland proved is that the key to driving down drug addiction is to give people as little an incentive to start using it. Take meth, for instance. If San Diego had a clinic where meth addicts were treated by doctors and seen as victims of drug addiction (and meth addicts are especially ravaged by their addiction), yet you could also walk into a pharmacy, fill out a registration and fork over some money for some meth, do you really think people who've never done it before would sign up? Of course not! That's why these legalization programs work.

Think of it this way, would you want your 15-year-old brother to have easier access to hard drugs? Of course not - narcotics have ruined far too many youth lives already. Lifting these deterrents is flirting with tragedy.

Absolutely not. A 15-year-old in the United States right now has easier access to marijuana than he does to alcohol. Why? Because the people who sell marijuana don't check ID. That's the point here. One of the major reasons to implement legalization and regulation programs is to keep these addictive substances out of the hands of young people. In the current system, the supply chain runs through people's homes and oftentimes through underage sellers themselves. That's a terrible way to keep kids from experimenting with them.

Here's a hypothetical thought: If hard drugs become legal, the need for prescriptions would discontinue.

Not at all. Where does that notion even come from?

Why worry about whether or not your doctor will prescribe Ritalin or any other pharmaceutical, when cocaine and heroine are available over the counter?

That doesn't even make sense. I'm actually worried that Conor knows even less about what these drugs do than what he was brainwashed with in high school.

Surely, the pro-legalization argument wouldn't advocate doctor-prescribed permission to take these deadly drugs.

Doctors don't tell people to drink vodka or smoke cigarettes either. But dealing with addicts is a unique aspect of medical care that needs to be based on science.

Unless, by "doctor" they meant by a deranged high school student. The argument is oxymoronic with emphasis on the latter.

What?

Giving up or throwing in the towel isn't an option that most Americans consider.

It's a mindset that's working beautifully in Iraq too.

Legalizing lethal drugs because of our inability to eliminate the demand is irrational and has disastrous repercussions.

Even though it's completely rational and has not had disastrous repercussions in any of the places it's already been done.

If this logic was standard policy, laws wouldn't be necessary. Lethal drug legalization should raise bright red flags for every political party.

Well, Conor, I hate to break this to you, but if this is your angle into the world of political science, you were born a few decades too late. This train left the station, derailed, and is heading for the cliff.