Legalizing Drugs?

Posted by Don Henry Ford Jr. - January 13, 2005 at 6:35 pm

The Supreme Court has taken a step in the right direction by giving judges more discretion at sentencing time. But we still have a long way to go. Unlike some, maybe most that read columns on this site, I am not in favor of total legalization of drugs. If I were, getting that done is an unattainable goal. It ain’t going to happen. But there are some things we might be able to get done. Perhaps getting marijuana decriminalized or at least reducing the penalties for getting caught with it to an acceptable level. Like a small fine and no jail time. Holland’s example seems to be working. Oddly enough, less, rather than more of the teen-agers in that country smoke the stuff.

Cocaine and heroin are powerful distillates. Too damn powerful. Same with crystal meth. Perhaps we could push for tolerance of the herbal elements from which these are derived or maybe even drinks containing moderate amounts of these substances. Coca leaves to chew. Or a soft drink with a bit of cocaine in it. But in their concentrated form these are dangerous substances with addictive and destructive qualities. Make no mistake about it. Total legalization of cocaine and heroin is akin to letting people walk around with loaded automatic weapons. A lot of people, once they start taking this stuff, cannot quit. They will take it until they die. (I know. Many say the same about cigarettes and alcohol.)

I do not however think the solution will be found in incarcerating people who choose to break these laws. Better alternative punishments would be the loss of rights, (driver’s licenses, etc.), fines, and publication of names of those caught. Reconciliation must be provided for those willing to enter treatment and educational programs formed with the money saved by closing down about half of the prisons we now operate.

And here is something else you ain’t going to like. To slow drug use, you have to target the user. Demand starts from the bottom up, not the other way around. While drugs are addictive, there would be no producers were there not consumers. We can’t continue to put all the blame on foreign countries producing drugs as long as we keep throwing so much money on the stuff.

If we were to totally wipe out the suppliers (which ain’t gonna happen), someone would step up and produce the stuff right here. Want proof? Homegrown marijuana now supplies about half the demand in the US, perhaps not by weight, but when the potency is taken into account, it does. (A gram of high-grade domestic marijuana may contain as much THC as a half an ounce of typical Mexican marijuana. So consumers buy a couple of grams of this in lieu of an ounce of swag.)

How about providing incentives for those that don’t use illegal drugs. Like cheaper insurance rates, or maybe even a small tax rebate.

Drug use can’t be eliminated. Neither can prostitution. But we don’t throw a prostitute in jail for the rest of his or her life for a ride in the sack. People are going to do this stuff. There have to be better ways of controlling these activities rather than locking people up or shooting them in the back of the head (like China once did).

I don’t have all the answers. These suggestions are that and nothing else. I am interested in hearing alternative viewpoints. So fire away.

I just don’t see total legalization happening in my lifetime.

About Don Henry Ford Jr.

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I'm a writer, horseman, cattleman, former marijuana smuggler and an ex-con--fluent in three languages (English, Spanish and Texan).

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Legalization, or at least Legal Bulk Coca

Submitted January 14, 2005 - 6:08 am by Andrew Grice (not verified)

Why might we eventually see something akin to a total legalization of drugs? Because the alternatives are truly intolerable. Non-legalization reforms of the prohibition system can do immense good for many. Things such as reducing sentences, lessening incarceration rates, implementing rational harm reduction strategies and offering free voluntary treatment can help a lot. But what they can't do is eliminate the massive and massively corrupting drugs industry.
Yes, if cocaine and heroin become legal and freely available, some additional people may use those substances and develop serious problems. But if that's the only major drug problem in a legalized world, it's a quantum leap above the myriad traumas created by prohibition. And in a fundamental way, at least this potential problem of additional addicts would be faced foremost by those who have chosen to risk the consequences of drug use. Who among us now chooses to have their government and police officials corrupted by the narco? What Colombian farmer chooses to have poison sprayed over his fields and children? Who but the gun merchant chooses their city to be terrorized by militarized police and heavily armed dealers?
But I can suggest one reform short of cocaine legalization that would cripple the international cocaine smuggling industry. Fully legalize the coca leaf. If people in drug consuming countries like the United States could freely purchase large supplies of coca leaf, they could refine it into cocaine themselves. Cocaine and its manufacture could be kept illegal, but by allowing people to easily make cocaine without any outside help - there would no longer be a point to smuggling the stuff. Not by boat or the in bellies of the poor.
There would still be cocaine use and presumably problems with cocaine sales, but even this would be a serious improvement over the present situation. Instead of an industry with top down distribution modes which inherently favor the establishment of powerful and intractable criminal organizations, drug warriors would face a drugs industry composed of small and localized "mom and pop" operations - far less threatening to society as whole.
I can't say how realistic or attainable a goal legal bulk coca would be in the drug consuming countries. But if we're going to press for drug reforms short of legalization, it's long past time we started talking about steps that would transform not only law enforcement but the drugs industry itself into a less malignant force.

coca leaf

Submitted January 14, 2005 - 11:46 am by Don Henry Ford Jr.

I like the idea of legalizing the leaf.

And to be honest, I don't personally care about others doing all the drugs they want to do.

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

In Holland for example, legalizing marijuana in controlled situations has worked well. But when they allowed people to go to a certain park to shoot hard drugs, it did not work. Dead bodies every morning. People who would not attend to their needs.

You ever take a close look at a heroin junkie's arm and hollow unseeing eyes?

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.

This will not happen.

Do away with the current system of punishment. Yes.

Legalize. No.

Drug abuse should be treated as the illness it is, not as a crime.

Laws should be written for the best interests of the people, using some common sense.

You don't give a gun to a kid. Or show them porno flicks in school. And you don't give substances to people that will overcome their will and put them on a path of self destruction.

Look, I respect the argument. My mentor where writing is concerned, Charles Bowden, shares the view that all of this should be legalized. And he is a very intelligent man.

But I just don't think many that express that view have been as far down the path of addiction as I once was.

responsibility without prohibition

Submitted January 14, 2005 - 12:42 pm by Sean Donahue

My mind is with Andrew and my heart is with Don on this one.

Having spent the better part of two years in a relationship with a heroin addict and seen the level of destruction and dysfunction an intelligent and compassionate person can reach, I find myself having a visceral physical reaction whenever the drug is mentioned. I guess prior to watching that process I had lulled myself into thinking of it as just a more intense opium high. Now I understand what Terrence McKenna meant when he wrote in Food of the Gods that addiction creates an absolute algebra of need, in which a person's entire intention and consciousness can become focussed on a single need. And I understand the powerful use of heroin and cocaine as population control agents.

Of course it is criminalization that makes it possible for so many of the elements of heroin and cocaine related population control to be fully implemented.

I've also found myself greatly disillusioned about the so-called treatment system in this country, which for the most part seems to me to be a system of glorified brainwashing -- isolation, reprograming, and the shifting of dependency from a chemical to the twelve step cult.

The most fundamental failure of so-called treatment is its failure to address the root issues behind addiction. There is a strong correllation between opiate addiction and post traumatic stress disorder (one of the reasons why soldiers in Vietnam became such reliable customers for the CIA's cartel and why they brought it back to neighborhoods where trauma brought on by the systemized violence of racism and classism (Oscar Olivera's "war of everyday life")w as pretty much a collective and universal experience.) For many trauma survivors shutting down the pain receptors in the brain is the most effective means of preventing the resurgence of repressed trauma and the first thing they find that lets them sleep through the night. The failure to really address trauma and its related mental health issues keeps people plugged into the treatment system for life -- whether through methadone and suboxone administration or through the twelve step system. This of course serves the ruling class well, preventing people from addressing the political dimensions of their trauma, and keeping them relatively dependent and pliable.

Of course the mindless opposition of the substance abuse establishment to any drugs other than caffeine, sugar, and tobacco also serves to limit options. Behind closed doors mental health professionals have admitted to me the useful role of ganja in helping recovering addicts take the edge off the anxiety and desperation of their cravings. And I think that in theraputic and shamanic settings, psychedellics have tremendous potential as tools for trauma work.

But really what the treatment system today amounts to is a diversionary program to keep middle and upper class drug offenders out of prison and to make the drug control regime appear more humane. Only shifting the discourse about addiction from the realm of criminal "justice" to the realm of public health will bring about any kind of serious discussion of what works for really breaking addiction.

One more twist in my rant -- and that is that I think that we in the counterculture need to take responsibility for creating a nuanced and informed discourse around the many kinds of chemicals that we can use to change our consciousness and both the positive and negative aspects of those possibilities. I think too often we emphasize the "counter" and forget the "culture" -- the role we have in passing on our own knowledge and experience and creating an oral tradition around experimentations in consciousness.

Just as with sexuality loving and conscious polyamory is a truer opposite to monogamy than the complete obliteration of responsibility that many define as the only alternative to monogamy, wise and informed use of plants and their chemical derivatives and synthetic analogues is a much truer alternative to mindless prohibitionism than the anything goes mentality that gets posed as the only alternative. I am not talking about legal regulation of any drug. As Ammon Hennacy used to say "Awww judge what good are your laws? The bad ones don't follow 'em, the good ones don
't need 'em." What I am talking about is a culture of truth telling. Abbie Hoffman wrote about the distinction between "mind drugs" and "body drugs." Terrence McKenna wrote about the liberatory potential of psychedellics and the ability of heroin, cocaine, alcohohol, sugar, caffeine, and television to enslave. I think we need to anchor ourselves firmly in that tradition. (I realize of course that by invoking Terrence and Abbie I am wading into territory where Al has the potential to rhetorically kick my ass. But if such an ass kicking is warranted, bring it on.)

Strategic and Moral Case for Legalizing Cocaine

Submitted January 14, 2005 - 12:47 pm by Al Giordano

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.

some common ground here

Submitted January 14, 2005 - 7:06 pm by Don Henry Ford Jr.

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.

Here I think we are on the same page. A drink of tea made from coca leaf or perhaps some raw opium is quite different than the distilled powder form of these drugs.

Take tobacco for intstance. A lot of people smoke it and do OK. But if you concentrate the nicotene from one pack and inject it into your body, you will die.

I see cocaine and heroin in similar light.

You point out an interesting thing. I did quit cocaine--probably because I had enough of it--about 500 grams of pure stuff to bury my head into. I soon reached the point where it was either quit or die. I gave away the last four ounces to get the shit out of my sight.

Most never have enough to come to this conclusion. Some that do don't survive the experience.

(I don't know if it's true, but I once heard a Colombian claim that more Colombians die smoking American tobacco each year than Americans snorting Colombian cocaine.)

Perspective on drug deaths

Submitted January 14, 2005 - 7:55 pm by Andrew Grice (not verified)

What you've heard is certainly true. Compare these numbers:
(courtesy of Clifford A. Schaffer and published online at http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/basicf
ax.htm )
"The number of drug deaths in the US in a typical year is as follows:
Tobacco kills about 390,000.
Alcohol kills about 80,000.
Cocaine kills about 2,200.
Heroin kills about 2,000.
Aspirin kills about 2,000.
Marijuana kills 0. There has never been a recorded death due to marijuana at any time in US history.
All illegal drugs combined kill about 4,500 people per year, or about one percent of the number killed by alcohol and tobacco. Tobacco kills more people each year than all of the people killed by all of the illegal drugs in the last century.
Source: NIDA Research Monographs"

Mind block mixed with gratitude

Submitted January 15, 2005 - 3:29 pm by Laura Sanders

This IS real democracy at work, truly. The last couple of days I have been reading these pieces on legalization of drugs. What has fascintated and thrilled me is the sharing of different facts, ideas, and opinions on this issue. Al, Don Henry and Andrew, you all have made great points, though differing in some aspects. The cool thing is that here we share, discuss, and look for common ground for a workable solution. That to me is democracy, and it is refreshing. In the U.S. illusion of democracy, whichever of you gentleman had the most $$$$ to get YOUR beliefs front page and beaten into your readers psyche would be "the right one" (yes,there is a sarcastic pun intended in that quote)

There are so many thoughts and feelings I have sat down and tried to write the last two days as I digested what all of you have written. I want to contribute, yet I know I can't write in the objective, thoughtful way I want. The bare truth is I can't get it out because of Wendy.
Wendy was a loving, caring, vibrant young woman. She was one of those people we say lights up a room when they walk in. Wendy was a great listener and had a huge heart. Everyone who knew Wendy saw all these wonderful things about her, except for Wendy. At this exact time last year she had her life on track, free from cocaine and heroin. She was in college and back to her spiritful, loving self. Then the demon, money, entered her life in the form of her student loan.
Those educated by her student loan money are those left behind who loved her so dearly--the heroin she bought with that money supplied her last hit.

It is beyond me right now to get past my sadness to put an objective thought together. But peace comes with living the things that Wendy taught me in her life, and in her passing from this life.
The subject of drugs and what they can destroy is just too close to my heart at this particular time.

Don Henry, you are proof that sharing your story helps liberate someone, thanks, today I was one of those people.
Al, thanks for the link to Stanton Peele and your perspective.
Andrew, thanks for those objective facts and figures.

Wouldn't the bare facts be so much easier to sort out without the human toll this battle?
4000+ isn't a huge number for comparison, but each of those numbers were someone's child, partner, friend at some point in their lives.

Destruction in the name of protection

Submitted January 14, 2005 - 9:14 pm by Andrew Grice (not verified)

Yes, actually. I've known some drug addicts well. Some too well. But despite the horrors I've seen, I don't think any addict is better off because of prohibition. Quite the opposite.
But I'd rather talk about another addict I knew well. No law tried to save him and I doubt any could have. In his last years, my father drank himself to death. Like any addiction, alcoholism is complex beast and he'd been that way for many years. But toward the end he'd gone to a whole new level, drinking as never before. I'd like to say I'd have done anything to save him, but there was nothing I could do. Perhaps turning South East Michigan into a prohibition police state with the rotting corpses of executed bootleggers lining every road would have done the trick. But anything short of that would have just caused him to drink black market booze.
I'm glad he didn't have to. It hurt me deeply to lose him like that, but my Dad was a good man. Why should he have been forced to risk arrest or blindness from a bad batch of wood alcohol? Why should his neighbors have been forced to suffer a return of alcohol prohibition and the Purple Gang just to protect him from himself?
No, of course you don't give guns to kids. Children need to be protected and every parent knows part of that is protecting them from themselves. But children and adults aren't the same thing. No good comes from treating all of humanity as children. That's exactly what prohibition does.
If you're my friend and you've let me know that you've quit drinking but you're having troubles with it, I'm not going to bring a bottle to your house. Sure, I'll give you a hand protecting yourself from yourself, but you're a grown-up. I'm not going to suffer the death of freedom in my world to keep you on the wagon. That's on you.
My plea to every opponent of legalization is to please accept that you just can't protect people from themselves. The determined will always find a way around your protection. Instead, let's protect people from the things they have no control over. For many many millions of us it's prohibition itself, with its militarized enforcers, its overflowing prisons and its dangerous crime that we really need to be protected from.

Alcohol

Submitted January 14, 2005 - 10:42 pm by Don Henry Ford Jr.

There is no drug I know of that savages its victim more than alcohol. I too have watched a family member drink himself to death.

My sympathies.

Slowly but surely though, it is becoming illegal once again to drink outside of the home. Most states have open container laws; all have DWI laws, and public intoxication laws.

As for the cops and guns: I always hear the line about dangerous armed dealers and smugglers. I never once took a loaded gun to a drug deal. I had a lot of them pointed at me and got shot at once.

By people toting badges.

political considerations

Submitted January 14, 2005 - 10:28 pm by Don Henry Ford Jr.

In Charles Bowden's book, Down by the River, (in my opinion, the best book ever written about the Mexican--American drug trade), I found some startling figures.

According to Bowden, during Amado Carrillo's reign as the premier Mexican drug trafficker, drug revenue provided 60% of the Mexican economy and perhaps as much as 20% of the US economy.

I look at this and wonder what would happen if this source of money dried up.

The illegal drug trade is the second largest business on earth, second only to war.

Obviously those that run governments don't really want to kill that business any more than they want to kill the business of war.

In my experience, a very small portion of drug proceeds end up in the hands of the indeginous peoples that grow the raw product--more perhaps than what they would earn growing legal crops--but still a pittance.

Only the wealthy elite (usually of europeon descent) get rich (playing both sides). Just like in so called legitimate business.

The question about drug addiction is really a non-factor. In truth these power mongers of the world don't give a damn about the people, either there or here. So long as it isn't their kid doing the bleeding.

Rooting out the weed

Submitted January 15, 2005 - 3:53 pm by Bill Conroy

First, in the general sense of the word, I do believe drug use should not be a criminal offense, but I think the term “legalization” has too many connotations that denote somehow that people with that stance are in favor of pushing drugs.

With that said, I think the terminology of the whole debate needs to be redefined because the words are so loaded. I like to think of my stance as being anti-prohibition.

If you think about it, legal drugs -- like prescription pills -- are extremely dangerous as well. Look at what the pharmaceutical companies have unleashed on us in terms of painkillers like Vioxx, which we now find may cause heart attacks, and drug-pusher pharmaceutical brass knew as much when it was unleashed. Why isn't that kind of “legal drug pushing” considered criminal when it causes death?

I look at the drug war on two levels -- without getting into too many complexities.

First there are the drugs, which in any form can be good or bad. Moonshine can kill you faster than beer, but both include alcohol to a degree or more. Indigenous people have used peyote for centuries in the quest for self-discovery and spiritual enlightenment; it is a product of nature. LSD, on the other hand, is synthesized and can be deadly in the wrong combination. So we are really talking about formulas. Nature's formula is always better in my mind. In any event, I do not believe drug possession or use should be criminal.

As far as the potent man-made formulas – like crack, smack and meth – well that certainly is an example of the devil being in the details if I ever saw it. People determined to partake of those formulas will find a way, regardless of whether we have prohibition or not. History is the best evidence of that. So I say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t – and at least if prohibition was eliminated, we would know better where the devil is and what he’s up to.

I’ve lost friends, smart people, to the needle. I don’t take it lightly. But they died in the full throes of prohibition, so how should I be comforted by the fact that prohibition is the only path? I’ll steal a line from the gun nuts: Drugs don’t kill people; people kill people. At least if prohibition was ended, and we had a large supply of clean needles readily available for users, we might be able to reduce the spread of AIDS. Because I know firsthand that when addicts can’t find their needle, they’ll use whatever needle is available – even intelligent people fully aware of the risks who can otherwise manage their heroin cravings.

The other factor is the money. That's where the real evil usually sneaks in. That's where I think we do need oversight. None of the suppliers would be in the business if there were not money to be made. We all know that the money trail in the drug market is global in nature and includes black market and corporate white-collar players.

Shit, I remember tracking a trail of some $9 million from a bank in Mexico just across the border that was transferred by armored car across the bridge to a small bank in Roma, Texas -- which only had some $600,000 in foreign deposits at the time that $9 million went into its coffers. From the Roma bank it was wired to a major corporate bank in NYC, and then the trail vanished.

That’s how dirty money travels through the system, like a mouse through the belly of a snake. And everyone along the way digests their cut -- so no one asks too many questions, in either the black market or the corporate market.

If we really wanted to attack the evil side of the drug trade, we'd shut down those money pipelines. But under prohibition, that will never happen. Law enforcement isn't given the resources or directives to really crunch the money laundering system that props up the greed in the drug trade.

Now, and this I am still working out, if we were to end prohibition with respect to the use and possession of all drugs, with a "buyer beware" awareness to such a system and strong addiction services, and we completely (or as near possible) shut down the money laundering end of the trade, what would happen?

First, I believe drug-sale transactions under such a system would suddenly be forced into the light of day. If you decided to sell dope, the money trail would be very traceable. So if you were moving bad product, pushing this stuff on kids (like the cigarette companies do now), or monopolizing the trade through violent means, you could and would be shut down – if we truly meant business. It would be the violence and greed that would be the crime, not the drugs.

Of course, this would require a massive re-alignment of our prison-industrial complex. Law enforcement would be going after the real abusers in the drug war, the criminal hearts who have no regard for life, and they would be busting them on charges of murder, extortion, money laundering, etc. If you really could zero in on the greed that drives the evil side of the drug trade, or at least make malevolent suppliers and enablers -- the big players, banks and rich businessman, which is all they are -- truly the targets, the production of drugs could very well be decentralized, localized and governed by community norms, as opposed to the militarized national system of enforcement we now have under prohibition that has ruined so many lives.

If you as a local farmer want to plant a crop, harvest it and sell it, with everyone, including law enforcement, tracking every dime you put into it and earn from it, so be it. The money trail is the target of scrutiny, not the crop. But by the same token, if a community decides it does not want certain suppliers making its products available in the community -- whether that is greedy Joe or the huge corporations that would undoubtedly spring up to cash in on the trade -- they can make that decision. Homegrown and nothing else could be the law of town. Suppliers who break that law (not users) pay the price. But it's a commerce crime, not a drug crime.

And such a system would automatically drive down prices, because it takes the cost of risk (which creates scarcity) out of the supply chain. That would further drive greedy suppliers to other more “lucrative” trades – such as selling excess government military weapons. (But that’s another black market for another day – one that the drug prohibition forces seem to tolerate hypocritically.)

Low-cost drugs? That has to be bad, right – at least if you’re a prohibitionist? Well, government will surely fix that problem in the market with taxes. That will create even more incentive for folks to grow their own – assuming the government can be kept out of our homes. And if you don’t want to do drugs, well, you can simply say, “No to drugs,” just like you say "no" to whiskey, or cigarettes or Vioxx.

I just don’t buy the argument that if prohibition was ended, all of our kids would suddenly start doing more drugs. Certainly, I don't want my teenagers smoking crack, but the way things are now, if they had a mind too, they could find it on just about any street corner in the barrio or inner city. I've been in these places. Here's a line based on one of my experiences:

But I learned a lot about the city from Morgan. He showed me the economy of poverty, the drug houses that sold coke, smack, and crack by the pound every night; the kitchen tables covered with thousands of dollars in $10 and $20 bills; the 12-year-old kids who stood guard at the doors of the drug houses, holding shotguns as big as they were.

Tell me, how could a system where illicit money is criminalized and drug prohibition ended be any worse than what we have now?

This line of logic is not perfect, lot of bugs to work out, and clearly there would still be losers, gamers and abuse in an anti-prohibition environment, but it may be a fair tradeoff on the current system, where there clearly are a lot of losers as well -- only they tend to be poor folks instead of the fat cats benefiting from the current system.

Like I said, I'm still working this over in my mind. I think most of us agree on the goal, but the terms, the words we use, maybe they need to be rethought, so that we get at the roots, not just the leaves, of this weed, of this so-called war on drugs.

Language

Reporter's Notebook: Don Henry Ford Jr.