As I was saying, I am against legalizing drugs because I am a stoner dirtbag who believes that a human being—given half a chance—will get shit-witted and do stuff that sucks.
Retired general Barry R. McCaffrey, Clinton’s director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, who was otherwise known as the Drug Czar, which is easily the coolest government job title ever—sort of like hip young Anastasia got Nicholas II and the Czarina to ditch Rasputin and go to a Phish concert…It really makes you think how the Russian revolution could have been mellower. I mean, it does if you’ve had a couple of tokes. But I digress. The Drug Czar, in his report to Congress, used arguments against drugs that could be used against anything. Notice how these quotes—with slight modifications that I’ve penciled in—make an effective plea for banning the penis: “[Penis] abuse impairs rational thinking and the potential for a full, productive life….[Penises] drain the physical, intellectual, spiritual, and moral strength of America [and its bladder]…. Crime, violence, workplace accidents, family misery,[penis]-exposed children, and addiction are only part of the price imposed on society [by penises].” The worst thing about these arguments is that the Drug Czar was right—about drugs and penises.
On the other hand, the Drug Czar’s report also contained some powerful reasoning in favor of drug legalization, although I don’t think it meant to, unless Jerry Garcia isn’t really dead but assumed a disguise and went undercover as a mole in the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Funny how you never saw all ten of General McCaffrey’s fingers. The federal drug control budget went from an average of $11.25 billion a year during the elder Bush administration to $17.9 billion in 1999. But the Drug Czar’s report said that half a million more Americans used drugs in 1997 than in 1991. Over the same period the number of marijuana smokers increased by 700,000, which is the population of a medium-sized city (a city with record Mallomar sales). And adolescent dope-takers went from 1.4 million to 2.6 million, which explains Eminem, Tommy Hilfiger clothes, and why the kid behind the McDonald’s counter gets lost on his way to the french fries. Meanwhile, between 1991 and 1998, the price of a gram of cocaine declined from $68.08 to $44.30, and the price of a gram of heroin fell by $549.28. These are figures obtained by the DEA. God knows how cheap smack is if you don’t show your badge when buying it. Jerry was doing a great job at the ONDCP.
The people fighting drugs may be a fifth column. But the people fighting drug prohibition are working for the other side, too. There is, for example, the legalizers’ argument that banning drugs is ridiculous when it’s the perfectly legal substances, alcohol and tobacco, that cause most of America’s health problems. Like, after we’re through with the hooch and the Luckies, let’s go stand out in a thunderstorm with car aerials in our hands.
Then there’s the argument that, if drugs were legal, the free market would somehow keep people from taking them. Steven Duke and Albert Gross, authors of America’s Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade Against Drugs, claim that the number of drug bums wouldn’t increase after legalization because “the use of heroin and cocaine in a free market system would adversely affect the quality of the lives of the users.” Am I missing something about the current non–free market system? Is there a special Joy Popper VISA card that gives me frequent overdose discounts?
Legalizing drugs will lower their price, the more so if price is measured not only in dollars but also in time spent with dangerous maniacs in dark parking lots, not to mention time spent in jail. If drugs turn out to be a case study showing that price has no connection with demand, every economics textbook will have to be rewritten. This will be an enormous bother if all the economists are stoned.
Maybe there’s some other way to avoid more drug-taking. The pro-legalization Netherlands Drug Policy Foundation has a pamphlet containing the following sentence: “Young people who want to experiment with drugs will be stimulated to learn to do so in a controlled way.” Our boy Hans is doing so well in history and mathematics, but he’s flunking LSD.
A certain weird—not to say high and spacey—optimism can come over people when they discuss opening the floodgates on the Grand Coulee dam of drug legislation and letting America’s river of junk bunnies, blow fiends, hop hounds, pipe hogs, mezz rollers, hypo smeckers, and yen-shee babies find their own level. Milton Friedman believes the crack epidemic was the result of cocaine being against the law. He says crack “was invented because the high cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to provide a cheaper version.” Milton Friedman is a brilliant man, a courageous defender of liberty. I respect Milton Friedman. I revere Milton Friedman. But from drugs Milton Friedman doesn’t know. Crack is less expensive than powdered cocaine—for ten seconds. It was the marketing guys who thought up crack, not the people in accounting.
I’ve read a lot of stuff by Ethan Nadelmann, who has a PhD from Harvard and an MA from your alma mater, Max, the London School of Economics. Nadelmann is the director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy research institute funded by George Soros. Nadelmann is no vulgar legalizer but a champion of the medically pragmatic and the politically possible. He is one of the most sophisticated advocates of drug law reform. And even he can get fuzzy: “Perhaps the most reassuring reason,” Nadelmann writes, “for believing that repeal of the drug prohibition laws will not lead to tremendous increases in drug-abuse levels is the fact that we have learned something from our past experiences with alcohol and tobacco abuse.” Ethan, what I have learned from my past experiences with alcohol and tobacco abuse is that I am a pig dog—a pig dog with a bad cough and a liver that looks like Chechnya.
The problem with illicit drugs is that nobody knows anything about them—except for those of us who found out too much, and we have memory problems. There are precedents for this. Tobacco smoking among educated people began in the sixteenth century, and it took those educated people until 1964 to figure out that tobacco killed them. Beer has been around since Neolithic times. That means wives have had ten thousand years of experience handling husbands who’ve been ice fishing. And my wife still can’t reason with me when I’m blotto. So how is society supposed to cope with XTC, which dates back only to the second Reagan administration? We may be talking A.D. 20,001 before anybody knows what to do about a complete stranger who hugs you on the dance floor and says she’s in love with the purple aura that’s shining out your nose and ears.
Drug research doesn’t add much to the debate. Eighty-five percent of the world’s research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction is funded by the U.S. government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. The scientists studying drugs are getting their money from the politicians who made drugs illegal. Do you think the scientists want to get more money? What kind of conclusions do you think the scientists will reach? Compare and contrast these conclusions with the conclusions reached by scientists funded by the Medellín cartel.
Even assuming that the scientists aren’t crooked, imagine the problems involved in studying something that’s illegal, secret, shameful, sometimes heavily armed, and always stupid. And imagine doing this when you’re pretty stupid yourself, as the Department of Health and Human Services famously is. The DOH’s National Household Survey on Drug Abuse is cited all over the place whenever drug policy is discussed. The Household Survey is America’s main source of information on everything from sniffing paint (14.2 percent of white non-Hispanics aged eighteen to twenty-five have used inhalants) to dipping snuff (0.1 percent of blacks aged twelve to seventeen are current users of smokeless tobacco). And do you know how the survey takers get the—to use a dated but apposite slang expression—inside dope? They go door-to-door and ask people. They really do.
“Hi, I’m from the government. Do you use illegal drugs?”
To which everyone responds, “Yes siree Bob. Come on in, we’re just cooking up a batch of meth.”
Then the survey takers “adjust for nonresponse through imputation,” which is called, in layman’s terms, making things up.
It??
?s hard to exaggerate official ignorance about drugs. In the aftermath of Clinton/Lewinsky et al., America’s governing class will confess to most things, but what you can’t get a political figure to admit is that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. An admirable exception is William von Raab, who was customs commissioner under President Reagan. Commissioner von Raab instituted the Zero Tolerance policy, which meant if you sailed into Miami with so much as one soggy roach in the scuppers of your bazillion-dollar yacht, you lost the whole bikini barge. Drug law reformers did not like von Raab, but I did. Zero Tolerance gave me hours of pleasure just thinking about planting blunts on the floating gin palaces of Donald Trump, Ted Turner, and their ilk.
Anyway, von Raab came up with Zero Tolerance because, as he says, “You can be for legalization or against legalization, and no one knows what you mean.” The commissioner decided to find out what we mean when we say it’s illegal to import drugs into the United States. He found out we didn’t mean it. I had drinks with von Raab the other night. “Zero Tolerance,” he told me, smiling with satisfaction, “was something of a public relations disaster.”
When von Raab was appointed customs commissioner, Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady asked him a straightforward question: “How does the cocaine business work?” The secretary wanted to know what it costs to grow coca and refine it, who the farmers and middlemen are, what kind of profits they make, how the distribution network is organized, who provides venture capital—all the things a good Republican normally wants to find out about a company he plans to squash like a bug. Commissioner von Raab didn’t know. He called a meeting of the various federal law enforcement agencies. They didn’t know. Upper ranks asked middle ranks. Middle ranks asked lower ranks. “Finally,” says von Raab, “someone found an article in High Times.”
U.S. drug policy was being guided by the incoherent scribblings of some half-starved freelancer who…wait a minute, I was a half-starved freelancer back then. That article could be by me. I may have been in control of U.S. drug policy. I wish I’d known. “Cocaine comes from—um, Mars,” I would have written, “and enters the United States only on yachts owned by Donald Trump and Ted Turner.”
Maybe, when we’re arguing about drugs, we should stick to what we do know, Max. And we do know a few things. Drugs have bad effects. Even chamomile does—to judge by the morons who drink herb tea. And let’s not kid ourselves with the likes of medical marijuana initiatives. Incidentally, I’ve got a good idea for a bumper sticker: MEDICAL MARIJUANA MAKES ME SICK!
But the bad effects of drugs themselves—as opposed to the bad effects of drug laws, drug gangs, drug money, or, for that matter, drug legalization—are bad effects mostly on us drug users. And we’re bad already. There are worse things than overdosing that John Belushi could have done. He could have lived to make infomercials. We don’t deserve sympathy. And we don’t deserve help. What we deserve is to have drugs legalized. No, subsidized. No, given to us free until we’re put to bed with a shovel and are out of everybody’s way. You may think that draconian drug laws are hard-hearted, that mandatory minimum sentences are horrible. And, indeed, sending federal agents to troll the Lilith Fair parking lot so that nineteen-year-olds can spend ten years in the pen for selling grocery-store ’shrooms is not warm and caring. But legalization is cold too. Smoking crack is a way for people who couldn’t afford college to study the works of Charles Darwin.
Drugs have bad effects; likewise the war against drugs. In the first place, the paradigm stinks. War excuses everything. You can drop an A-bomb on the Japanese. No sacrifice is too great, no expense is too high to win a war. This is why politicians love the war thing. War is steroids and free weights for government. Budgets, bureaucracies, and the whole scope of legal and regulatory authority get pumped and buff. This is why we have the War on Poverty and the War on Cancer. But you don’t cure lymphoma by dropping an A-bomb. Rather the reverse. If poverty surrenders, do we put the poor on trial like the Nazis at Nuremberg? And whom do you draft in a war against drugs? Certainly not eighteen-year-old boys. They’re the enemy. Some people, including a number of fricasseed residents of Nagasaki, think that “the War on _____” isn’t a good idea, even during a war.
Furthermore, it is very expensive to mistake Robert Downey, Jr.’s impulse-control problems for an attack on Pearl Harbor. There’s the federal government’s aforementioned $17.9 billion antidrug budget, plus an almost equal amount of state and local spending, plus the more than $8.6 billion it costs to keep war-on-drugs POWs incarcerated. That’s about $44 billion dollars a year to stop the use of narcotics. And even so, government gets outspent. The Drug Czar’s office itself estimated that Americans spend $57 billion a year getting beamed up by Scotty.
The drug war has also taken a toll on an institution that’s even more noble and venerated than our wallet. Drug control zealotry has led to what constitutional scholar Roger Pilon calls “the drug exception to the Bill of Rights.”
I.
Freedom of religion—except for religions involving peyote.
II.
Right to keep and bear arms—except when you point one at ninja-dressed members of a SWAT team that breaks through the wrong door at 3 A.M.
III.
Quartering soldiers in our houses—to be fair I haven’t noticed any soldiers actually in the house, but some National Guard helicopters have been hovering over my backyard marijuana patch.
IV.
No unreasonable searches and seizures—except mandatory random piss tests.
V.
No self-incrimination—except that urine in the bottle.
VI.
Right to counsel—except if the government suspects your lawyer is being paid with drug money.
VII.
Right to trial by jury—except in the case of RICO property forfeitures
VIII.
No cruel or unusual punishments—except to those caught selling ’shrooms at rock concerts.
IX.
The enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to deny others—except when it looks like you might have drugs in your car.
X.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution—are reserved to the DEA.
So let’s protest and sing folk songs—“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ up your nose”—and stuff flowers into…mmm…the jaws of drug-sniffing dogs at airports. Peace now!
But, Max, how shall we make our peace with drugs? All societies regulate the consumption of intoxicants either by law or by custom or by waiting until you pass out and rubbing Limburger cheese under your nose and putting a live frog in your BVDs. The most libertarian of governments would have some regulations, at least to protect the frog.
One easy and uncontroversial reform would be to get rid of insane penalties. Even McCaffrey favored something called “equitable sentencing policies,” which would have eliminated one or two federal mandatory minimums for simple possession. I personally think that people caught with drugs should be made to go door-to-door with the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse questionnaire.
As for legalization, each drug ought to be considered individually and judged upon its own merits. What fun to be on the jury. First, take the case of marijuana. Pot has become America’s alternative brewski. Weed is not going away, especially since weed is, in fact, a weed and grows like one. Besides, how much can you really say against a drug that makes teenage boys drive slow?
Nonetheless I’m reluctant to see marijuana legalized. No drug will be permitted by law in the United States without being licensed, regulated, taxed, and hemmed about with legalization like alcohol is. No advocate of legalization is asking for anything else. Ethan Nadlemann says marijuana should be “decriminalized, taxed, and regulated.” Governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson favors moving the drug economy “from illegal to legal, where it’s taxed and regulated.” And Milton Friedman bases his arguments for repeal of drug prohibition on the assumption that drugs would be “hand
led exactly the same way alcohol is now handled.”
So, instead of the National Guard hovering over my marijuana patch, I’ll have the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, ATF&D (Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Doobies), the Internal Revenue Service, and the EPA. Instead of going to jail for growing pot, I’ll go to jail for violation of the federal wetlands protection act. And marijuana will have legal standing so the next time some adolescent puffs a goofbutt and walks through a glass patio slider, me and every other old hippie selling nickel bags will be a defendant in a gigantic class action lawsuit—same as the gun and cigarette companies. Since only the richest corporations in the world will be able to stand the expense and bother of selling marijuana, we’ll end up trying to get a virtual high off a digital joint delivered via Internet from AOL/ Time-Warner.
All that is nothing compared to the cow-having that would be involved in legalizing anything other than marijuana. In fact, legalizing hard drugs won’t happen. Americans are remarkably puritanical—when they aren’t high as kites. And to understand this aspect of our national character, it helps to have a bad hangover. What probably will happen, rather than legalization, is therapy. America will go from the punishment mode to the treatment mode with hard-drug users. We do it already when we catch our own kids using hard drugs—if we have the lawyers, doctors, and money. What was a crime will be a disease. Junkies will get an Rx for heroin. Addiction will be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. “You can’t fire my client, he’s stoned.”