Don Henry writes of drug legalization:

"I just don't believe you'll be able to sell this to the American public..."

And specifically about cocaine he writes:

"I am one who spent many nights chopping cocaine until my eyes would not focus, my heart racing to the point of quitting, yet chopping away nonetheless. Unless you have experienced this, you cannot understand the power this drug can have over people.

I know it has medicinal uses and should be legal for such. But if legalized, you might as well throw away the entire system of drug control, prescription medication, etc...

These are two distinct arguments and, for purposes of clear thinking, I think it is advisable to pull them apart.

1. Political and Strategic Questions

"I just don't believe you'll be able to sell this to the American public," are words that every change agent has heard about any worthy cause. They said it to Martin Luther King about ending legal racial segregation. They said it to Susan B. Anthony about women getting the right to vote. They said it, in fact, to John Adams, the extremist radical who pushed the rest of the landed gentry to declare independence from colonial rule (it took Thomas Paine and his pen to, indeed, "sell" not just independence, but a willingness to fight and die for it, to the then-fledgling "American public.")

But there is another very relevant example in North American history: the repeal of alcohol prohibition.

The story of how alcohol prohibition was repealed is fascinating and a must-study for modern-day drug prohibition opponents. Funny, though, only one coherent book was ever written on the theme (when it comes to drugs and prohibitions, a druggy kind of amnesia sets in after the mistake is acknowledged and the nation "cleans up" from its addictive and harmful policies).

That book is Repealing National Prohibition by David Kyvig (1974, U. of Chicago Press), and its chapters were recently posted online by the Shaeffer Drug Library (ignore the annoying "pop up" ad in the corner if you haven't already set your browser to block them.)

Believe it or not, there once was a time when it seemed that you could not sell repeal of alcohol prohibition to the American public.

But if you read Kyvig's book with some "class analysis" perspective, you can see how, back between 1918 and 1932, the demographics of the "American public" changed from an electorate dominated by protestant tea-totallers to a surging working class made up of Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Catholic, etcetera, new immigrants with distinctly different lifestyles and attitudes concerning alcohol. They became the backbone of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's coalition, and pushed Roosevelt to change his prohibitionist stance to one of pro-repeal at the Democratic National Convention of 1932.

It all happened so fast back then.

And so it will be soon, again.

The demographics of the United States are changing. Withing a a few decades, blacks, Mexican-Americans, and other "minorities" will become a majority. And this is certainly not to say that "white folk" don't include a significant number of prohibition critics and opponents! (Indeed, so much of the problem with the 2004 "election" in the United States is that the underclass is still effectively excluded from voting... but that will work itself out over time.... The question is, how soon? The sooner the better, in terms of the human misery index.)

But that's a political-strategic question of the feasability of a cause.

Don Henry also addresses the matter of what is right, or good policy, with his concerns about what could happen if cocaine were legalized...

2. Is It Good Policy to Legalize Cocaine and Heroin?

Don Henry writes eloquently and honestly of his own bad experience with cocaine. And yet, his portrait of a drug that is impossible to quit using is disproven by the fact that he writes of his own experiences in the past tense.

The fact is, most cocaine users do stop using! And I argue that the prohibition policy acts to impede this natural process of use-to-abuse-to-graduation from the addictive behavior associated with that drug:

• The prohibition raises the price of cocaine to levels that a heavy user, earning a normal salary, cannot afford.
• That high price thus pushes many cocaine abusers into having to sell the drug to have enough around to satisfy their own desired dosage.
• Once inside the cycle of making money off cocaine under prohibition, one is now caught in the most basic of ways: one "has" to have it, not just to snort or smoke or inject, but also to keep making a living.
• For the addictive cocaine user who is not selling the stuff, a "scarcity mentality" sets in: one can never get enough. And has two impacts: First, it creates physiologically painful gaps in the drug's availability for the user, thus intensifying the desire and the fear of going without, literally reprogramming the psychology of the user-abuser to think of nothing else but procuring the drug. And, second, it prolongs and delays the process by which, as drug dealers or rich people for whom there is no scarcity of the cocaine have found, a user naturally evolves to dislike the drug's debilitating health effects over time. Thus, the prohibition policy, in fact, delays and impedes the process of "graduating" from the idea that one "needs" the drug.
• There is an entire "addiction industry" that is dependent on people having the attitude that a drug is "all powerful," that they are "powerless" over their use-and-abuse of a drug, legal or illegal. So much of it is fueled by junk science paid for by those economic forces that benefit from those attitudes. For an alternative point of view, I recommend the work of my friend Stanton Peele; his book, The Diseasing of America, which documents the fact that most "drug abusers" (including of alcohol) who successfully stop abusing do so without entering treatment clinics or going to jail or to 12-step programs! I recommend Stanton's entire website and body of work to anyone seeking a better understanding of the up-to-date true science and data about how addictive behavior works.
• The real problem with "addiction" (I prefer the term "addictive behavior") is economy and class differences...

To wit: It's the difference between wealthy William Burroughs living a productive, indeed heroic, life as a writer and artist and leader of men and women as a functioning heroin junky (no "unseeing eyes" on that head!) and the less fortunate junky who has to rob and connive to pay for an expensive habit, often receiving a "drug" that is mixed with other drugs and additives in an unregulated prohibition economy, and that plunges him and her into a criminal underworld, often into becoming one of its workers, in order to have access to that drug.

And so it was, almost a century ago, with alcohol.

Finally, the term "legalization" means different things to different people. Alcohol and tobacco are "legalized" but the quality of those drugs is also regulated, and there are still "dry towns" and "wet towns" in various states of the Republic: a policy, really, of local autonomy or "home rule" that I believe is the solution to the prohibition problem. There indeed can be regulation hand-in-hand with "legalization" and one need look no farther than the pharmaceutical industry to see both good and bad in that concept.

The problem with the United States population is something bigger than attitudes about drugs: It's the idea that there must be "one solution" for every "problem." Imposing a blanket "legalization" on every community repeats the problem caused by imposing a blanket "prohibition." In a democracy, every locale must be able to determine its own policy... dry towns/wet towns... smoking/no smoking... the fight must be waged on the local level. And for that to happen, drug prohibition on a national scale must be repealed, just as alcohol prohibition was. The feds should just get out of the business of criminalizing (or medicalizing) drug use. And even conservative Americans can hear something in that message that is consistent with their own basic values.