Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002
Subject: #247 Drug Czar Demonstrates Ignorance Of Reform
Drug Czar Demonstrates Ignorance Of Reform
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DrugSense FOCUS Alert # 247July 23, 2002
Federal drug czars aren’t hired to solve drug problems – they are
hired to maintain drug prohibition. If you had any doubt about this,
check the recent oped piece by John Walters in the Wall Street Journal.
Walters starts by equating any reform with legalization, and the truth
quotient goes downhill from there. For an excellent line by line
analysis (and correction) of Walters’s lies and obfuscations, see
Richard Cowan’s commentary at Marijuananews.com this week –
http://www.marijuananews.com/news.php3?sid=558
Please write a letter to the Wall Street Journal to say that the drug
war is bad enough without John Walters’s prohibition of honest criticism.
Thanks for your effort and support.
WRITE A LETTER TODAY
It’s not what others do it’s what YOU do
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CONTACT INFO
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Contact: wsj.ltrs@wsj.com
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
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Pubdate: Fri, 19 Jul 2002
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2002 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact: wsj.ltrs@wsj.com
Website: http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: John P. Walters
Note: Mr. Walters is director of the National Office of Drug-Control Policy.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/walters.htm (Walters, John)
DON’T LEGALIZE DRUGS
The charge that “nothing works” in the fight against illegal drugs has
led some people to grasp at an apparent solution: legalize drugs .
They will have taken false heart from news from Britain last week,
where the government acted to downgrade the possession of cannabis to
the status of a non-arrestable offense.
According to the logic of the legalizers, it’s laws against drug use,
not the drugs themselves, that do the greatest harm. The real problem,
according them, is not that the young use drugs , but that drug laws
distort supply and demand. Violent cartels arise, consumers overpay
for a product of unknown quality, and society suffers when the law
restrains those who “harm no one but themselves.”
Better, the argument goes, for the government to control the trade in
narcotics. That should drive down the prices (heroin would be “no more
expensive than lettuce,” argues one proponent), eliminate violence,
provide tax revenue, reduce prison crowding, and foster supervised
injection facilities.
Sounds good. But is it realistic? The softest spot in this line of
reasoning is the analogy with alcohol abuse. The argument goes roughly
like this: “Alcohol is legal. Alcohol can be abused. Therefore,
cocaine should be legal.” Their strongest argument, by contrast, is
that prohibition produces more costs than benefits, while legalized
drugs provide more benefits than costs.
But legalizers overstate the social costs of prohibition, just as they
understate the social costs of legalization. Take the statistic that
more than 1.5 million Americans are arrested every year for drug
crimes. Legalizers would have us believe that otherwise innocent
people are being sent to prison (displacing “true” criminals) for
merely toking up. But only a fraction of these arrestees are ever
sentenced to prison. And there should be little question that most of
those sentenced have earned their place behind bars.
Some 24% of state prison drug offenders are violent recidivists, while
83% have prior criminal histories. Only 17% are in prison for “first
time offenses,” while nominal “low-level” offenders are often
criminals who plea-bargain to escape more serious charges. The reality
is that a high percentage of all criminals, regardless of the offense,
use drugs . In New York, 79% of those arrested for any crime tested
positive for drugs .
Drug abuse alone cost an estimated $55 billion in 1998 (excluding
criminal justice costs), and deaths directly related to drug use have
more than doubled since 1980. Would increasing this toll make for a
healthier America? Legalization, by removing penalties and reducing
price, would increase drug demand. Make something easier and cheaper
to obtain, and you increase the number of people who will try it.
Legalizers love to point out that the Dutch decriminalized marijuana
in 1976, with little initial impact. But as drugs gained social
acceptance, use increased consistently and sharply, with a 300% rise
in use by 1996 among 18-20 year-olds.
Britain, too, provides an instructive example. When British physicians
were allowed to prescribe heroin to certain addicts, the number
skyrocketed. From 68 British addicts in the program in 1960, the
problem exploded to an estimated 20,000 heroin users in London alone
by 1982.
The idea that we can “solve” our complex drug problem by simply
legalizing drugs raises more questions than it answers. For instance,
what happens to the citizenship of those legally addicted? Will they
have their full civil rights, such as voting? Can they be employed as
school bus drivers? Nurses? What of a woman, legally addicted to
cocaine, who becomes pregnant? Should she be constrained by the very
government that provides for her habit?
Won’t some addicts seek larger doses than those medically prescribed?
Or seek to profit by selling their allotment to others, including
minors? And what about those promised tax revenues — how do they
materialize? As it is, European drug clinics aren’t filled with
productive citizens, but rather with demoralized zombies seeking a
daily fix. Won’t drugs become a disability entitlement?
Will legalization eliminate violence? The New England Journal of
Medicine reported in 1999 on the risks for women injured in domestic
violence. The most striking factor was a partner who used cocaine,
which increased risk more than four times. That violence is associated
not with drug laws, but with the drug . A 1999 report from the
Department of Health and Human Services showed that two million
children live with a parent who has a drug problem. Studies indicate
that up to 80% of our child welfare caseload involves caregivers who
abuse substances. Drug users do not harm only themselves.
Legalizers like to argue that government-supervised production and
distribution of addictive drugs will eliminate the dangers attributed
to drug prohibition. But when analyzing this “harm reduction”
argument, consider the abuse of the opiate OxyContin, which has
resulted in numerous deaths, physicians facing criminal charges, and
addicts attacking pharmacies. OxyContin is a legally prescribed
substance, with appropriate medical uses — that is, it satisfies
those conditions legalizers envision for cocaine and heroin. The point
is clear: The laws are not the problem.
Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed that drugs place us in a
dilemma: “We are required to choose between a crime problem and a
public heath problem.” Legalization is a dangerous mirage. To address
a crime problem, we are asked to accept a public health crisis. Yet if
we were to surrender, we would surely face both problems —
intensified.
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ADDITIONAL INFO to help you in your letter writing
efforts
3 Tips for Letter Writers http://www.mapinc.org/3tips.htm
Letter Writers Style Guide http://www.mapinc.org/style.htm
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SAMPLE LETTER (SENT)
To the editor of the Wall Street Journal:
Drug czar Walters used a familiar rhetorical ploy to defend the drug
war in Friday’s Journal (Don’t Legalize Drugs, 19 July 2002). First,
misrepresent the most damaging charges; then lie while dispatching the
straw men thus created.
Critics haven’t claimed ‘nothing works;’ rather, they point out US
policy is clearly failing– and 73% of the public agrees. Worse, while
those failures are being brazenly ignored, even more money and
manpower are squandered and collateral social damage continues.
Nor did critics claim drug laws ‘distort supply and demand.’ Our
policy’s worst effects– as has been repeatedly pointed out– flow
from the illegal markets our laws create as lucrative criminal monopolies.
Although many such ploys were used, space allows just one more
example; Walters’ claim that, deaths directly related to drug use have
more than doubled since 1980, and the question if, increasing this
toll (would) make for a healthier America. First, the numbers aren’t
comparable because criteria for such deaths were arbitrarily changed
in the interval; also Public Health experts attribute fifty percent of
drug deaths directly to their illegality. Finally; how do Walters’
repeated claims of policy success square with increased deaths?
Wouldn’t a successful policy have reduced them?
It’s reassuring that recent rhetoric attributing corporate fraud to a
few bad apples is neither unique nor unprecedented; we are led to fear
however, that devious federal rhetoric in defence of regulatory
failure may have quietly become a ‘traditional American value’ while
we weren’t looking.
Tom O’Connell,
MD
IMPORTANT: Always remember to include your address and phone
number.
NOTE: If you choose to use this letter as a model please modify it at
least somewhat so that the paper does not receive numerous copies of
the same letter and so that the original author receives credit for
his/her work.
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TARGET ANALYSIS – Wall Street Journal
There are more than 75 letters to the WSJ in the MAP archive. A
sampling of recent letters shows some as short as 93 words and some as
long as 340 words, with an average of about 180 words.
The published letters can be viewed here:
http://www.mapinc.org/mapcgi/ltedex.pl?SOURCE=Wall+Street+Journal+(US)
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Prepared by Stephen Young – www.maximizingharm.com DrugSense FOCUS
Alert Specialist