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It's Time For A New Approach To Policies Involving Illegal Drugs

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Should drugs be decriminalized? That this question is still being kicked around after decades of debate through the war on drugs is indicative of how drug policy has hit a wall. No victory was ever declared because drugs remain a scourge on society, with approximately 23 million Americans addicted to illegal and legal substances.

This comes against the backdrop of an overcrowded U.S. prison system whose population is one-fifth drug offenders, and recent reforms in Europe oriented toward harm reduction rather than criminal justice. Having failed to eradicate or even make large inroads against drug use and with current policy unsustainable, America is now obligated to come up with a new approach.

Current drug policies in the U.S. and Europe are usually contrasted crudely to paint a false picture. America is not a nanny state and Europe is not an epicure's delight. Hardly anybody in the U.S. is incarcerated for personal drug abuse – nearly all are locked up for selling and related criminal offenses. Likewise, in Europe drug production and dealing is still illegal even as usage has been decriminalized in the Netherlands and Portugal and ignored in several other countries. But legal allowances are tightly controlled in Holland while Portugal has drug panels that recommend treatment or fines for those caught abusing.

The decriminalization of drug abuse – whether de facto or de jure – leaves in place and encourages the existence of the drug trade and the attendant worldwide violence and corruption that comes with it. What if we legalized drug commerce in order to abate that? In Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford Press, 2011), three experts say that almost all of the increase in consumption from legalization would occur with problem rather than casual users. Noting that four-fifths of the alcohol drinks sold is consumed by one-fifth of the drinking population, the authors write:

". . . when we create a licit industry selling an abusable drug, the resulting businesses will have a strong profit incentive to create and sustain abusive consumption patterns, because people with substance-abuse disorders consume most of the product. Supplying moderate or controlled use is merely a side business. So if we create a licit cannabis or cocaine industry, we should expect the industry's product design, pricing, and marketing to be devoted to creating as much addiction as possible."

The death and violence attributed to the drug trade would be transferred to and could even be surpassed in a legalized drug market. An open season for currently illicit drugs would probably make society's alcohol problem pale in comparison.

Drugs and Drug Policy, written by Mark Kleiman, Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken, is the product of scholarly work but comes in the form of a guidebook of answers to questions simple and complex about everything to do with the two topics. It is fit for both the policymaker and the concerned parent (how many books can this be said of?) because it combines a rigorous analytical approach to drugs without skipping over the social reasons the topic deserves to be discussed in the home.

Kleiman, Caulkins and Hawken's review of the nuances of the drug issue can't help but elicit an appreciation for the variety of approaches against drug use that could supplement or substitute for our current top-down one.

In the nostalgia of the baby boomers for their youth and the failure of oft-ridiculed school anti-drug programs aimed at Generations X and Y in the eighties and nineties, drugs are still not completely out of fashion. But that could change as better arguments undo decades of misdirection. The authors remind us that Abraham Lincoln was one of the most effective crusaders in the cause of making substance abuse unfashionable when he delivered his eloquent Temperance Address as an Illinois state legislator. Recently the writer Walter Russell Mead called for a boycott of drugs among the Hollywood/hipster/idealist crowd as protest against the social devastation caused by the international drug trade.

Cultural pressure and personal willpower should not be discounted, as Kleiman, Caulkins and Hawken relate that most drug users quit on their own without formal treatment. Recent experience shows that progress can be made, like with the rollback of the crack cocaine epidemic (although political scientist James Q. Wilson now warns that those gains are in jeopardy of being reversed as a new generation comes of age without having witnessed the horrors of crack).

The most successful alternative to locking up for long periods of time those caught in the drug web appears to be the Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement Model (HOPE). This program, whose results Hawken has evaluated in her own research, puts criminally active drug users on strict probation with regular randomized drug tests. Violators get immediate but short jail sentences and treatment is mandated for repeat offenders. This strategic application of jail time and treatment combined with the ability to move cases without the need for judges has made HOPE a superior alternative to conventional drug courts.

Moving low-risk offenders into HOPE-style programs and deploying drug war resources against the most violent criminals and activity, as advocated in Drugs and Drug Policy, makes the most sense to fulfill U.S. drug policy goals. It would enable us to continue to penalize drug abuse while Europeans condone it and redouble efforts in the fight against large-scale drug crimes that continue to ravage our cities. Between the banality of the legalization movement found on the left (and in some parts on the right) and the failure of the entrenched heavy-handed approach, this is a third way that takes a chance on getting better results without diluting our opposition to drug use.