Drug War

Let me start this frank and short. I think the war on drugs is an obscenity. It is the latest version of the same anti-hedonism that made the Victorians declare sex to be unmentionable. It is Witch-Hunt American-Style.

I do not think there is anything inherently immoral about drug use. As for drug abuse, a different and distinguishable matter, that is immoral only to the indeterminate extent that any insufficiently justifiable self-destructive behavior might be immoral. It is not the kind of immoral that ought to be illegal, because the primary, direct harm done is to the abuser himself.

As for the secondary and at least theoretically avoidable effects that do harm other people, I think these are less dangerous than the drug war itself and can be handled without it. In fact, much of the secondary damage is the result of drug Prohibition as well as of drug use itself.

And now to the details.

MORALITY. Why should drug use be considered ipso facto immoral? What drugs do is change your mind in one way or another, depending on the drug -- and the person using it. So far, this doesn't sound inherently all-time wrong to me. There may be people who shouldn't try a change of mind, either because they can't be improved or because they can't be trusted. But this (if true) doesn't make drug use wrong for everyone, and doesn't make it right for anyone to claim the moral authority to decide who should or shouldn't use drugs. Why should anyone else be allowed to decide what to do with my mind?

Consider the typical intentional effects of various and sundry drugs. Tobacco has only a slight effect on mood. The mood and tempo effect of caffeine is somewhat greater. Alcohol starts out a stimulant, ends up a depressant. Heroin (and other opiates) allow a kind of dulled placidity, zombieish in extremes. Marijuana increases sensitivity to stimuli, and can cause, as they say, alterations in perception. Yummy. LSD and mescaline definitely cause hallucinations, often together with what can only be called religious ecstasy. Cocaine is a stimulant, a euphoric, and a famous improver of sex.

I don't see anything wrong with any of this. There are quite a few mood-altering activities in the world, and quite a few have strong physiological effects, and quite a few can change your ideas and body as well as your mood, even permanently. Music. Reading. Sex. Haute cuisine. Movies and TV (and the way some people concentrate on the screen it might as well be a hallucination). Sports. Or go join any crowd and watch how your mood swings (and if it's a mob watch your IQ drop through the floor). Most of these recreations are enjoyable only or mostly because of their effect on sensations, emotions, or ideas. And most of them are acceptable most of the time, because most people don't abuse them. The mere fact that drugs are chemicals (quelle horreur) doesn't make them inherently different.

Do drugs force their users to become abusers? Is addiction inevitable? As with alcohol, caffeine and tobacco, certainly many of the illegal drugs cause a physical addiction that requires increasing doses and encourages increasing use. This doesn't happen at all for marijuana, cocaine and the hallucinogens, and for the others doesn't happen right away now, but only gradually. Both the physical addiction and the psychological craving are something a person with a precautious attitude can watch out for.

In fact, it is uncomfortable but not compellingly difficult to kick a mild habit. To the best of my knowledge, most drug users have about the same chance of avoiding an drug habit -- if they know to watch out for it -- as they do of dieting successfully. That's not a good chance, and not the end of the world either. Certainly with alcohol (physically addictive) you don't find abuse among the majority of users, and in fact something like only 10% of the users drink 90% of the booze. The pattern is probably about the same for most illegal drugs; maybe crack is an exception, maybe it's only the propaganda against it that's exceptional.

And anyway, is even addiction inherently immoral? I'm not sure it is. People destroy themselves by falling in love too hard, they do it by being too devoted to their job or their art, they eat themselves or starve themselves to death, or they go out and climb mountains. If someone thinks something is important enough to them to risk death for, I'm not so sure I'm omniscient enough to say that decision is incorrect, much less immoral. I'm also not willing to tell people how much they have to suffer, either by forbidding them emotional pain-killers or trying to force them off same.

You could say that drug use (if self-destructive) is worse than the other forms of self-destruction above because it is selfish -- nobody else benefits from it. A workaholic produces wealth that someone else can benefit from, love implies a lover who benefits, mountain climbing produces heroism to admire, sex can be used to make citizens. Drugs "only" produce personal pleasure. But (even if that were always true) what on earth is wrong with pure and simple private pleasure? And who is more abysmally selfish than the person who demands that he benefit in some way from everything everyone else does, or else he'll force them to stop?

Just to set the record straight, there have been some drug-stimulated insights that have produced art and scientific discoveries. That's just gravy; "products" aren't needed to morally defend drug use.

You can't even call drug use "unnatural". (Mind you, anything people do is by definition part of human nature, or else they couldn't do it. "Natural" is a tautology, and "unnatural" is just a sneak word for immoral.) But in any case people however primitive have always everywhere used the locally available drug(s). So have animals, apparently enjoying the effects. It appears that recreational drug use is at minimum a quirk shared by many different kinds of animal intelligence, embedded in our nature as animals. You can easily suspect that "altered states" might be a need as deeply rooted as sex.

Finally, I should bring up the idea many people seem to have that drugs somehow call out the evil or reckless side of a person, or even create one. That is nonsense. Drugs can alter your emotions and your perceptions of the outside world, and this can be risky. I'd say it's about as risky as driving a couple of tons of metal at 60 mph only a marginal amount of reflex time away from similar or larger chunks of metal, all containing substantial amounts of potential high explosive. However, most people do manage this, after significant training, with some engineered safety precautions, and with cooperation and assistance from other drivers. The same is true for drugs. (And drug users aren't really any bigger fools than car drivers -- all but the least informed tend to avoid drugs that have a reputation for causing bad trips.)

If it were the case that most users of X became superstrong murderous maniacs (as is alleged for PCP, based on purely anecdotal evidence), no matter what their original personality, and no matter how cautiously low the dose, then I would agree it would be wrong to use X and it should probably be illegal. But because I think it wrong to control what someone else does with his own mind, I would not prohibit the drug on any lesser provocation. There isn't good evidence that any of the currently illegal drugs behave like X; it hasn't been possible to distinguish between users' inherent meanness and that deployed under drugs.

In short, I don't find anything wrong with drug use on an individual moral level; I don't even find anything very far outside "normal" life. Drugging is a pleasure of an entirely private nature, it's chemically induced, it can (but doesn't have to) contribute to physical and mental debilitation. None of these things are immoral and there are plenty of recreations with similar traits -- how about TV? -- that people sorta manage to tolerate. Mind you, I don't know that drug use is the most moral direction to live in, but it isn't intrinsically immoral.

It is when we start talking about the indirect effects on other people, not just the primary effects on the individual, that the moral aspects most closely related to political and legal questions come up. Certainly there are some single-celled Puritans who would love to outlaw drugs just because they're pleasurable, just as the same people keep trying to outlaw consensual sex and condemning any enjoyment of it. This anti-hedonism is a perversion that most people don't have very much of. (Though I think almost everyone has a little.) There is also a small culturally insular contingent that basically just can't accept that any decent person would want to use any drugs except the ones that they themselves grew up with, meaning booze, caffeine, and tobacco.

But I think most of the drug war supporters are more concerned with crimes committed by drug users, with collateral damage (like unsafe driving, costs to public health care, shattered families, loss of productivity), and with the possibility that their own children will take up drugs. There are some reasonable concerns here, but reasonable concerns don't necessarily lead directly to reasonable policies.

A law, to be worth having, must be (1) morally sound, and (2) enforceable. "Morally sound" means to me that people are harmed by law enforcers only to the extent that they avoidably, demonstrably harm another person, and that they are never rewarded for causing harm. "Enforceable" means that the information needed to identify malefactors and demonstrate that harm was done can be gathered without tending to cause more harm than the alleged crime. Considering the drug laws in this light leads to the conclusion that they are neither morally sound nor enforceable.

The drug laws punish people who are not doing anything intrinsically immoral -- because if drug use is not immoral (by my earlier arguments), then drug sales aren't either. Furthermore, the laws create the opportunity for artificially high, black-market profits to be gained by drug sales. This in effect rewards the really immoral activities currently associated with drug marketing: i.e., sales to children, intimidation, murder, etc. As in any black market, the scummiest are the richest.

And the laws aren't enforceable, precisely because they are aimed at mutual-consent activities. This means that nobody involved wants the police around; nobody involved wants to be a witness; nobody involved is going to bring a complaint. In practice, therefore, police can't avoid tactics such as wiretapping, improper searches, paid informers, entrapment, infiltration, and bounty hunting (i.e., giving police the proceeds from confiscated property). Mind you, these practices do show up in enforcing laws against real crimes (especially murder and theft), but they are and must be absolutely endemic in victimless crimes enforcement. That reflects the inherent unenforceability of the laws.

To the extent that people intend and use drug laws to reduce the incidence of theft and murder (et al.), the laws fall into the category of preventive law. Preventive law is a very dangerous thing and should be used minimally if at all; it is not at all appropriate for a victimless activity like drug use. The usual rule of evidence is that it must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In preventive law, an inference is substituted for evidence. That is, it is inferred that a drug user might commit theft, rather than proved that he did, and he is then convicted and punished on the basis of a law that depends on that inference. This is no different in principle from convicting a suspected thief on the basis of his personal habits without having evidence to link him "beyond a reasonable doubt" to any actual theft.

Then there is the question of collateral damage and its prevention. Again, this is preventive law. What is worse is that for some of these types of damage the punishment imposed is far out of proportion to the damage being prevented. Being an unproductive employee should not be handled by a jail sentence or fine, but by disemployment. Being a neglectful (as distinct from abusive) parent, by supervision. Being an expensive medical patient, by disconnection from subsidized care. Being suicidal, by treatment and persuasion.

The fact is that we already have perfectly good laws against murder, robbery, theft, child abuse, and unsafe driving. Let these be enforced with vigor, for a change; but don't invent new illegalities that are supposed to somehow prevent these crimes from occurring. That is just as much voodoo criminology as the idea that crime would be prevented by illegalizing guns or jailing all the young urban black males. After all, crime existed before crack, guns, rock music, TV, and all the other fads whose abolition is sold as a panacea.

The above is just a political philosophy lead-in to my practical point, which is that the war on drugs is more dangerous than drug use itself. Many of the nasties that are commonly attributed to drugs alone are at least partly caused by the illegality of the drugs. You can see a precis of this effect in recent history -- the Prohibition era. The illegalization of alcohol engendered nationwide and international criminal organizations, murderous warfare between those gangs, corruption of police and government. It also led to criminalization of a wide range of citizens and a number of poisonings by adulterated "bathtub gin." There are the usual reports that cirrhosis deaths decreased during Prohibition. But statistics can't be utterly trusted here: doctors would have been glad to protect posthumous reputations by concealing the true cause of death. Most important, Prohibition didn't stop or apparently diminish alcohol use. The Great Experiment failed.

The ill effects of drug prohibition fall into several categories, some of them just now mentioned for alcohol Prohibition. Drug laws increase crime and corruption. They encourage the sale of unsafe drugs. They lead to massive disinformation. And they provide a reflexive rationalization for increased government control of our lives.

CRIME AND CORRUPTION. The most direct effect of drug laws on crime is to magically convert anyone who seeks out drug recreation (or enlightenment) into a criminal. This country did not make opiate or cocaine use illegal until well into the 20th century. Was it really necessary to turn some number of otherwise law-abiding people into criminals? I doubt it. What a gift to blackmailers, what a stupid burden to put on law-enforcement agencies.

Follow up that last comment briefly; drug laws also encourage crime by diverting police resources from real crimes -- the ones that inherently cause harm -- to drug "crimes." Think of the money, court time, police effort, and scientific work (on drug detectors) that are currently spent on drugs, but could be much more effective if directly used on thefts, robberies, and murders. These are, after all, the events that trigger the most concern about drugs. (I can also mention here the waste of resources on cutting drug production in foreign countries by threats and bribes. But that doesn't affect crime in this country, no matter how much it may worsen conditions elsewhere.)

The most fundamental effect of drug prohibition on crime is economic and therefore unavoidable. All illegal items are sold on the black market, and black market prices are always much higher than free market prices for the same things. This comes about because of monopolization (by criminal gangs) and because of protection costs (bribes to informers, police, and politicians, and payments to hit men and "enforcers"). In fact, most of the cost of illegal drugs comes from their illegality; and it is the cost that drives "drug-related crime" by users. You don't see massive numbers of thefts committed by winos; their Thunderbird or Ripple is so cheap they can usually get by on begging.

The "drug-related crime" committed by sellers is also economically driven. It takes the high profitability of the black market to make it worthwhile to commit and risk murder. It takes a high-profit-margin item to make it worth a dealer's while to sell to children directly and in person. You don't see the big liquor companies hiring hit men (although the alcohol pushers did just that during Prohibition) or sending salesmen to schools. They would lose more than they gained, as shown by the uproar about cigarette advertising to teenagers.

But the motivations run just the opposite way for illegal drugs. Once you have used drugs, you're open to legal punishment; also to losing your job and other civilian punishments. What more do you have to lose by dealing? And once you're subject to the much higher penalties for dealing, you may not have much to lose by stealing or killing. After all, they may not catch you for that (partly because there are so many cops and judges tied up on drug offenses). In short, the incremental costs for each downward step may very well be less than the incremental gain, particularly given the low odds of paying those costs. The more severe the drug-crime punishments are compared to drug-free punishments, the more true this is. If there were to be a death penalty for having marijuana and a death penalty for murder, why would stop a pragmatic "criminal mentality" from doing both?

Economics are also part of what leads to corruption of police, courts, and politicos. Clearly the payoffs from high-profit drug sales are going to be as attractive to policemen as to beginning drug dealers, and the incentives to go further and further are the same. The narcs themselves have numerous potentially lucrative opportunities to become dealers and, what is more, dealers less likely to be punished than most. But economics aren't all there is to police corruption by drug laws.

There is also another type of specifically moral corruption of enforcers. Narcs frequently have to pretend to be dealers and users to infiltrate drug rings. You can't tell me that the lying, double- dealing, entrapment, sneak spying and so on that narc work requires can't corrupt good policemen. Act just like a criminal long enough and you are very likely to become one. Police work is morally tiring at best, because of the risks and the power that police have to undergo, but narc work puts other police work way behind.

The kind of criminogenesis I've been talking about can be expected from any black market product or service, of course, including the genuine crimes like extortion and assassination. That is precisely why the invention by law of black market commodities should be minimized. Murderers and extortioners and their employers are rare birds and the possibility for creating crime by outlawing them is correspondingly small. People who enjoy drugs are extremely common, so the criminogenesis is enormous. My conclusion is that since drug use (and so sales) are not inherently immoral to start with, there is more crime to be gained than lost by prohibiting it.

UNSAFE PRODUCTS. Drug buyers have no control over the quality of the drugs they get. They have no legal recourse. They can't often get reliable information about which dealers won't cheat them. The end result of this is drugs that are less than what was promised or that are adulterated, sometimes with harmless chemicals like sugar, sometimes with poisons like strychnine, sometimes with other drugs stronger than what the buyer wanted. In Prohibition days, booze sold as gin was likely to be lightly flavored water, or mixed with methanol ("wood alcohol").

Of course all this leads to deaths and ailments. Many of the deaths ascribed to overdoses are actually from poisoning. Some of the true overdoses come from unknowingly getting a much stronger concentration of drug, or type of drug, than the user was ready for. And I suspect that some of the deaths wouldn't happen if users could get medical care without risking legal punishment. (In the same way, much of the AIDS and hepatitis epidemic wouldn't happen if users could safely get cheap needles.)

Once again, the lack of quality control comes not from any built-in feature of drugs but from their illegality. You sure don't see companies like Seagrams (or even Perrier!) getting away with poisoning people. Even minutely. Nor do the pharmaceutical companies get away with that.

DISINFORMATION. It is very difficult to get reliable information about the properties of drugs, the behavior of drug users, and the effectiveness of drug-control measures. All the parties who could provide information are unreliable sources by way of conflict of interest. Government agencies (right down to your local sheriff) have got funds to gain by scaring the citizenry into fits. Anti-abuse or rehabilitation agencies have customers to gain with scare tactics and pressure. So do the news media; again, nothing sells like scare stories, and the sob stories about "the victims of drugs" run a close second. On the other side, the drug sellers and users definitely can't just be trusted for facts. What's worse, they can't hardly be heard from except anonymously (meaning not quite credibly) without getting stomped by law.

So here we have government policies that can't be judged based on the overwhelming majority of publicly available data. Certainly this can happen in a lot of situations, such as wars, but this case is worse than many because of the unity of purpose of the government and the media and some scientists who pretend to be objective (while coining money from drug treatment centers and anti-drug studies funded by government). It is absolutely incredible to me that so many people can fail to wonder about the conflicts of interest that their anti-drug advisers are involved in. It is additionally incredible that people can avoid recognizing the "sampling bias" that comes from the suppression of the users' point of view.

It's especially incredible when you think about the scare stories that have been presented and debunked in the past. Take "Reefer Madness". This is a film (post-Prohibition era) that shows marijuana users as dangerous frenetic fiends. Sorry folks, it just don't happen that way. But people believed that garbage in 1936; they thought that coffee was dangerous in Bach's time (check out the history of his Coffee Cantata); and they're just as bamboozled now.

Consider also the scare story that has showed up about every drug from marijuana to cocaine: drug X makes you paranoid! Well of course drug users are paranoid -- a large powerful chunk of society IS conspiring to get them. But I haven't yet seen a drug warrior who had the decency to mention that as an alternate hypothesis. Nope, it's always claimed that it's the chemical action of the drug that directly and unavoidably induces insanity. As far as I know, cocaine and amphetamine abuse frequently leads to paranoia; the link between other illegal drugs and paranoia is more tenuous.

And then there's the public-service propaganda, for example, what the official sources tell schoolchildren and their parents. You would hardly know that drugs were pleasurable from listening to that bilge; oh no, kids do drugs only because of mean nasty sneering Peer Pressure, not because drugs are fun. When the students learn better from personal experience it's no wonder they decide the rest of what they've been told must also be lies or foolishness. And the Sunday-supplement lists of "danger signs for parents to watch for" are even worse; if parents took them seriously, every kid in the country would have to be under suspicion.

I'm sure drug use can do harm. Even authors who support drug relegalization (every drug started out legal) admit that some users have health and sanity problems from drug overuse. But the problems are probably not as severe or unavoidable as popular wisdom would have you believe. The only drug users who get noticed, after all, are the ones who GET themselves noticed: criminals, "loony" communalists, people who get in too deep. Harmless moderate users who live happy productive lives don't get noticed. Religious people ("cultists" and "fundamentalists" and "fanatics") have had the exact same disinformation problem, especially after Jonestown. Usually, only the rotten ones and troublemakers make good stories, only the troubled ones "need" to be "helped" (you've heard of "deprogramming"?), only crises can be Capitolized on.

Speaking of misinformation and harm allegedly done by drugs, one irony is that the emotional effects of many drugs tend to depend on what the user expects of the drug. This is especially true for the psychedelics, like LSD, mescaline, hashish (admittedly according to anecdotal evidence). Someone who tries LSD and believes the media stories about bad trips and flashbacks is more likely to get them just because of that belief, just as someone who is in pain or anxiety when they use the drug is likelier to have a bumpy ride.

I can't honestly say that drug disinformation is a problem resulting entirely from the Prohibition of drugs. (After all, there is also plenty of propaganda even against the legal varieties of sex; some kids still get told that masturbation causes insanity, blindness, and hairy palms.) Much of the propaganda comes from people's ignorance, willingness to believe Authority, and the usual xenophobia. But the fact that the people who run the courts and police, the people who have research funds and punishment power, are unified against drugs has got to be a major obstacle to getting information and making rational decisions about drug use.

That is the culminating irony. People who have been told a lot of fairy tales, whether horror stories or happy endings, are not going to be able to handle the diversities of real life very well. To the extent that the drug war has to use propaganda -- and that seems to be a requirement of every war or "war" -- it tends to perpetuate drug misuse. You don't even have to argue (what is partly true) that the constant harping on drugs tends to advertise them and make drug use look like some kind of glamorous heroic adventure. Just realize that blockage of information flow, however well-meaning, prevents sensible decision-making.

And the decision about whether to do drugs is always going to be there, just as it always has been. One thing history shows is that whatever Prohibitions do, they don't really prohibit. Not without exterminating.

POLICE STATE. What Prohibitions do best is provide excuses for power grabs. You don't even have to postulate a conspiracy here; just look at the incentives for people in government. Politicians and bureaucrats and enforcers go into gov't work because they want to change things. They frequently believe these changes will be for the better. This being the case, they will lend aid to any cause that lets them advance their own particular agenda of improvements without hurting their own standing with voters. Right now, thanks to decades of propaganda, the drug war is right up there with aspirin, baseball, and VCRs for voter approval. So it follows that the drug war will be used for an infinity of purposes, even by politicians who are not just trying to showboat or gain power for its own sake.

But I would think that, among the number of measures that have taken advantage of the drug war, there should be something to offend nearly everyone. Consider.

The attempts to prevent "laundering" of drug money have meant a massive increase in surveillance of many economic activities. Moderately large purchases of gold coins are now being tracked by the Feds because of their cleansing potential. So are cash withdrawals larger than a rather small limit -- less than $10,000, if I remember right. Banking privacy is just about gone, even in Switzerland. I suspect most of these measures are really aimed at simplifying and extending tax collection, but the ostensible reason has been the drug war.

Manuel Noriega was overthrown largely "because" of his alleged involvement in drug traffic. (But was it coincidental that the US also gained better control of the Panama Canal?) The US government has been continuing to put the pressure on South American countries to restrain drug production and trade. It's not just South American countries, either -- Turkey, Southeast Asia, and probably others have also come up for attention. I personally object to training special police squads and supplying weapons and money to help out countries whose governments keep tripping over human rights. But the US has always had some pet tin-horn despots on the dole; the drug war just seems to supply a new excuse.

We've started seeing a wave of ultra-police activity. There's the Zero Tolerance rule, under which any drug discovery however small can lead to the confiscation of your possessions and their sale for government profit. There's the scandalously strong support for urine testing as a condition of employment. There's the popular feeling in favor of vigilante action against unpopular people who are supposedly drug dealers or users. There's the proposal to make drug trials shorter and simpler (that is, remove procedural protections), and the even worse idea of putting users into rehabilitation (read: brainwashing) concentration camps. There's the DEA persecution of people who make equipment (like hydroponics gardens) that might be used for drug purposes. There's the case of the Stanford professor who was investigated and fired for supporting drug use while being employed at a university with government contracts.

This is very scary stuff. This is why I don't regard "witch hunt" as too strong a term to use. And the really scary thing is that the American public (and even the ACLU!) doesn't seem to care how far all of this goes, or whether drug use really diminishes, as long as there are plenty of self-serving government press release "news" items about large arrests and enormous dollar amounts of drugs confiscated in raids. And plenty of nasty-looking people being arrested as dealers on "true" police shows. I can't even altogether blame the good old gov't for this threat to individual liberties. Even when We the People are acting like hysterical paranoids, we still get the kind of government we accept.

I don't think it is too farfetched to suspect that the drug war is being used to distract citizens from the government's inability to handle the real problems in the country. Certainly that pattern of distraction has been seen in other, more dictatorial countries, with other scapegoats and other bloodier wars. And certainly the government doesn't seem to be able to produce any significant lasting improvement in domestic affairs, or probably even foreign affairs.

I can't help wondering about the motives of the American drug warriors as a group, although it's not the kind of wondering that does any good. Here we have a country that is stifling on bureaucracy, hyper-litigation, egalitarian disinterest in excellence, the craving for immediate satisfaction, the belief that technology solves everything, and probably quite a few other things. (It would make a very long sentence indeed if I listed every maybe problem that I've ever brooded about.) Everyone knows something is going wrong here, and we can't any longer expect to live better than our parents. There are a lot of unhappy people who would like very much to have someone to blame, someone who isn't themselves. Especially, someone who isn't suffering as much and therefore must be causing the trouble... the same motive that made medieval urban Christians burn the cleaner-living Jews for having less problem with the bubonic plague.

Well, it is no longer socially acceptable in this country to get down on blacks or Jews or foreigners in general. (Although there is some pretty thorough anti-Japanese sentiment; how dare they be more successful than God's Own Country?) So who for a scapegoat? Why, obviously, all those nasty drug users and sellers. They're in our schools; that's why no one learns enough. They're in our labor force; that's why our productivity is down. Lots of money is going into non-taxable black-market drugs made in foreign countries; that's why we don't have enough money. And then, of course, there are the more tangible and partially real links to crime and illness; but I already did what I could to debunk the mythical parts of those.

Think about just one quotidian example of this scapegoating. You always hear the statistic "Something like 50% of the driving fatalities are associated with drink or drugs." Well, fine. Maybe it's even true. What about the other 50%? Presumably those fatalities are associated with the non-drug-users who are all upset about the other half. Those drug-free citizens don't ask for the additional traffic enforcement that would help reduce 100% of the bad driving -- it might after all catch them doing 75 mph every day on their commute. No, they want random pull-overs and compulsory testing to get at the drugging 50%.

THE 97% SOLUTION

You already know what I'm going to suggest as an alternative to the drug war. That is legalization for adults. At least of most of the drugs; I'm not too sure about concentrated cocaine. This takes the economic pressure off the user, the massive profit away from the seller, and the money out of the pockets of the corrupt enforcers. It also allows some objective information to be disseminated and quality control to be established. And it removes a major crutch for political and police self-aggrandizement.

I could tolerate some regulation of drug use, along the lines of licenses for drug users. I already compared drug use to car use, in terms of commonplace hazard usually avoided by training and mechanical aids. Perhaps the government could take a similar tack. People who wanted to use drugs might have to be periodically trained and tested in drug properties and danger signs. They would show the resulting licenses in order to buy drugs. The license would be revoked if the user was ever found under the influence in certain public places (including on the road), or during any nuisance or dangerous activity, or with a working gun in the same house. I'm not sure what social conventions or mechanical aids (like traffic lights for driving) would be appropriate assists toward sensible drug use. It would greatly improve people's ability to handle drugs if they could get reliable measured doses, with medical information packets and advice, without having to pay outrageous prices or deal with violent criminals.

This is not an panacea (which I should write in big red flashy letters). You will still see some people destroy their lives with drugs. You will still see children (mostly teens) get started on drugs, in spite of their illegality for minors. You will see some effect of drugs in terms of lost productivity, alarming behavior in public, dangerous driving, and medical costs that burden insurance companies and taxpayers. But it is my belief that the money crimes associated with drugs will largely vanish, that it will be easier to keep drugs away from children because they won't be economic prime targets or salesmen, that the total number of people hooked on all addictive drugs together will not be much larger than it is now, and that those people will be easier to deal with when they don't have to hide from police.

Some of the drug-assisted problems I just mentioned could be better dealt with in a more fundamental context than their drug aspects. Go for better enforcement on traffic violations and crimes against property and persons. That will improve chances of catching all the cases, not just those that happen to involve drugs. Reduce health insurance compensation to people who can be shown to have willfully risked damaging their health, whether with cigarettes, heavy over-eating, body-contact sports, rapid-fire pregnancies, or drugs. Stop making it difficult for employers to fire employees who aren't up to par, whether or not it's because of drugs.

Maybe with the drug war out of the way we could find out what the quondam illegal drugs are good for. It seems foolish to think that there is no temporary distortion of the mind that could not have beneficial effects, even if "only" simple pleasure. More than this has been claimed for drugs, especially the psychedelics. But I don't think we will know why these drugs have so often been associated with spiritual endeavors, as peyote (mescaline) with Native American religion, until we can accept drug use as a legal, morally neutral tool instead of the latest thing in humanly punishable Original Sin.