Obama: Time to Debate Legalization

Printed in The New Hampshire, "From the Right" February 4th, 2011

Last Thursday, President Barack Obama took questions submitted online in video and text format in the spirit of his State of the Union address two days earlier. The President has conducted these in previous years, but this year's town hall was a bit different. The most popular video this year was one from retired deputy sheriff MacKenzie Allen, a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). He took his time to ask the president whether there should come a time for us to discuss the possibility of legalization, regulation and control of all drugs in hopes of an alternative to the current system of zero-tolerance prohibition. Where the President would've laughed this question off to the anxious-to-please audience in D.C. in years past, this year he chose to air and answer Mr. Allen's question. In his answer, President Obama called the policy change an "entirely legitimate topic for debate" and stated his desire to move to a more public health-centered approach rather than one focused on prosecution and incarceration. This is significant because since the beginning of the administration, the President and his Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowski claimed that "legalization is not in [their] vocabulary."

Drug prohibition costs the federal government $15 billion per year. Although dwarfed in comparison to the $600 billion or so that we pay for Social Security, the drug war bureaucracy has not been immune to the waste and bloat that plagues many programs, including SSI. Federal departments like the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) have existed for several decades, yet their spending yields almost no discernable results. After 40 years of increasing enforcement and interdiction efforts (and stagnant funding for education and harm-reduction), little has been accomplished as far as reducing youth use-rates and organized crime in our inner cities.

To assess cost effectiveness, drug prohibition can be evaluated on multiple criteria, but I feel its only right to use the government's own criteria. Nowadays, the government combats drugs using two sets of tactics: reducing demand and reducing supply. Demand reduction takes the form of drug education programs like DARE and Congressionally-mandated advertising campaigns like the National Youth Anti-Drug Campaign. Supply reduction tactics include domestic interdiction efforts to intercept drugs crossing the border of Mexico and international eradication efforts such as Plan Columbia in 1999 to spray coca fields. In actuality, neither of these methods has produced results that justify the enormous costs of the massive police and prison bureaucracy needed to maintain them.

Demand reduction in prohibition means changing the minds of those who choose to use drugs, whether that use harms the user or not. This policy relies on citizens to magically start listening to government messages about drugs and react accordingly, a similar strategy to herding cats. What our government doesn't comprehend is the innate human desire to alter one's consciousness. People have sought after intoxicating substances in nature since they stepped foot on earth and won't be stopping anytime soon. Indeed, demand for drugs rarely changes. Reducing harms associated with drug use starts with an open, honest conversation about drugs and in providing medical help for those who become addicted.

To assess supply reduction efforts, assuming an unchanging demand for drugs, we can look for a change in the price of drugs to observe changes in the market; such is the case with a black market in which consumers are kept in the dark concerning product quality and the production process. We see that in 1982, the price of a gram of pure cocaine was $667; in 2007 it was $122. If prohibition had effectively reduced the supply of cocaine in the market, the price would've increased, not decreased by two-thirds over 25 years. This trend continues for other illegal drugs as well.   

Unfortunately for us, drug prohibition didn't work (nobody remembers the 1920's?). The time is now to adopt measures that effectively reduce harms associated with drug use instead of ignoring it. The time is now to end the unjust imprisonment of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens. The time is now to cut budgetary waste and restore the right of free ingestion for all people. A burgeoning drug war bureaucracy threatens not only the fiscal health of our nation, but the liberty of its citizens, the most precious thing we entrust to our government.