Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (54 page)

I understand Danny’s point, and I respect it, and want it to be right—but I don’t think it tells the whole picture.

Here’s an inconvenient fact for those of us who favor reform. There is strong evidence that during alcohol prohibition, fewer people drank, and after it ended, more people drank. It’s hard to tell precisely, because measuring an illegal activity is always tough, but you can look at rates of cirrhosis of the liver, which corresponds with heavy alcohol use, and get a fairly good sense. Drinking seems to have fallen by between 10 and 20 percent
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during Prohibition, and after it ceased, there was a very slow rise back
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over several decades. They weren’t transferring to other intoxicants—there wasn’t anything else. They were staying sober—in substantial numbers. It wasn’t just a fall in drinking either. It was a fall in alcoholism.

Why? The best explanation is that there are significant numbers of people who want to obey the law because it is the law. If something is illegal, that has a deterrent effect all on its own. Then, on top of that, if you ban something, it does become somewhat harder for most people to get hold of. I have complained in this book that the people who support the drug war sometimes use propaganda to promote their cause, so it’s important that I resist the temptation to produce propaganda of my own. Those of us who have come to believe we should end the drug war have to be candid. The evidence suggests there will probably be a modest but real increase in use. Some significant share of that will be people transferring from alcohol, but probably not all of it. It should be acknowledged: one of the successes of prohibition that it probably does hold down drug use somewhat.

I have been trying for more than a year now to absorb what this fact means. When I discussed it with Danny one afternoon in the café at the British Library, he pointed out that most of us don’t object to drug use in and of itself. We worry about the harms caused by drug use. If I told you that your neighbor smoked a spliff or snorted a line of coke last weekend, I doubt you would be deeply concerned. But you would—rightly—be worried if she was a teenager, or if she became an addict, or if she overdosed. It is not drug use that worries us, but the harms caused by drug use.

And the evidence about these harms is quite striking. Legalization slightly increases drug use—but it significantly reduces drug harms.

Let’s start with teenagers. In the best available study, a large number of American teens in surveys explained that they found it easier to buy marijuana
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today than to buy beer or cigarettes. When I first read this, I found it puzzling. I only really understood why one afternoon on my travels when I was told about a road to Damascus that ran through a parking lot in New Jersey.

This story was told to me in the winter of 2012, when I went to Trenton, New Jersey—a concrete wilderness town that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Gaza Strip. In an office overlooking the wheezing city, Fred Martens told me a story about his past. One day in the early 1970s, he had been waiting in the lot outside a shopping mall, to buy marijuana, PCP, heroin, and meth, and then bust the dealer’s ass. This was the era of Dirty Harry, and Fred was an undercover cop who could easily have been Clint Eastwood’s character, packing a Magnum and a sneer. “I had no qualms,” he told me, “about putting a gun in an informant’s mouth and telling him, ‘If you’re fucking lying to me, I’ll blow your fucking brains out. Do you get it?’ ”

But something was about to happen that would make Fred rethink his support for the drug war.

A kid approached him. He seemed to be about twelve years old.

“Mister, mister,” he said, “do me a favor. Could you buy me a bottle of wine in the liquor store?”

Fred kicked him in the ass and snapped, “Get out of here.” He went back to waiting for a drug dealer so he could make his buy and make his bust.

But “that’s when the realization hit me,” he told me. “I’m saying to myself—this kid needs me to get him a bottle of liquor, when he can go get any drug he wants in the parking lot without me. What was better regulated—the liquor, or the drugs in this parking lot? It was . . . an epiphany. What is this all about?” The insight stayed with him as a source of doubt for years, and it made him come out,
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in the end, for legalization.

Nobody in my nephews’ schools, it occurred to me as Fred talked, is selling Budweiser or Jack Daniel’s. But there are plenty of people selling weed and pills. Why? Because the people who sell alcohol in our culture have a really strong incentive not to sell to teenagers: if they do, they lose their license and their business. The people who sell other, prohibited drugs in our culture have a really strong incentive to sell to teenagers: they are customers like everybody else.

If we legalize, there will be a barrier standing between our kids and drugs that does not exist today. This isn’t theoretical; the societies that have tried this have shown it to be the case. Some 21 percent of Dutch teenagers
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have tried marijuana; in the United States, it is 45 percent. I picture my nephews and my niece. If I decide to support legalization, it won’t be despite them—it will be because of them.

Addiction seems more worrying. It is common sense that if more people use drugs, more people will become addicted to drugs. During alcohol prohibition, fewer people drank—and fewer died of alcoholism and the diseases it causes. This weighs really heavily on me. If more people ended up like the people I love, the people who set me on this journey—desperate and broken—that would be a major reason not to change the existing policy.

But then I contrast this evidence with the evidence from Portugal. More people used drugs, yet addiction fell substantially. Why? Because punishment—shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable—traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to stop.

At the end of alcohol prohibition, they didn’t use the massive new tax revenues to invest in educating kids about alcohol, and turning the lives of alcoholics around. Portugal showed us there is another way.

But what about overdose? This, surely, is the hardest point to answer. If more people use drugs, more will end up accidentally taking fatal doses. It seems obvious.

But in fact—as I saw in Vancouver and Geneva—the places that have expanded legal access to hard drugs have seen an enormous fall in overdoses. Why? There are two big reasons. The first is that at the moment, if you buy a drug from a gangster, you have no idea what is in it. Imagine ordering generic “alcohol” from the bar, not knowing whether it is an alcopop or absinthe. You’d be far more likely to drink too much and collapse. In a regulated store, by contrast, you know what you are getting.

The second reason is the iron law of prohibition, which I explained earlier. When you ban a drug, it’s very risk to transport it—so dealers will always choose the drug that packs the strongest possible kick into the smallest possible space. That means that under prohibition you can only get the most hard-core form of a drug. Beer disappeared during alcohol prohibition, and moonshine shone; as soon as alcohol prohibition ended, moonshine vanished.

After drug prohibition, it’s reasonable to expect that the milder forms of drugs that were popular before prohibition will come back, just as beer did. So the rise in drug use will most likely consist not of an army of crack addicts, but of an increase in people drinking stronger tea and smoking weaker spliffs. Nobody has ever overdosed on coca tea.

I can feel, as I write this, that I am persuading myself that the full legal regulation of all drugs is a good idea—but then a set of prickly questions comes into my mind, and they won’t go away.

What about the most powerfully intoxicating drugs? Would you let people buy meth? Would you let people buy crack?

When it comes to a drug like crack or meth, what does legalization even mean? Are we suggesting openly selling it? If not, would doctors even be willing to prescribe it?

I keep putting this question to legalizers across the world. Their first response is usually to sigh and point out that those drugs make up 5 percent or less of the market for illegal drugs. So let’s start, they say, with the other 95 percent. Take the politically possible steps today. We’ll get to this conversation years from now, when it is no longer totally hypothetical.

But this, it seems to me, is to dodge the question. So when you push further and ask the question again, you find that legalizers fall into three broad camps on these drugs.

Some would leave a few drugs banned, as tiny islands of prohibition in a sea of regulation. They are aware that this would mean that small networks of drug gangs would persist, but there would be far fewer of them, because now they’d be meeting only a really small niche market for the most hard-core users.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you find some pure libertarians. They say: You have a right to damage your own body. It’s your choice. If you are allowed to ski, or box, or race at 300 mph on a private track, you should be allowed to ingest whatever chemicals you want. The job of government is not to protect you from yourself. If people want to buy crack, let them buy crack. Sell it along with the other drugs, in regulated stores.

In between these two positions, there is a middle way: Build a third tier of regulation, beyond open sale or prescription. You’d establish safe designated rooms in our big cities, where people would be allowed to buy and use these more hard-core drugs, with doctors on hand, provided they didn’t leave until the drugs had worn off. It’d be like the safe injection rooms I saw in Vancouver and Switzerland, but with a broader range of drugs on offer, and tighter rules. The argument for this is that the hard-core users are going to take their drugs anyway: at least this way they do it in a place where they can be kept away from everyone else, and where there are people to care for them, and patiently point the way toward getting help.