Rethinking the War on Drugs

Posted October 5, 2007

Few people realize that the United States imprisons more of our own people than any other country. We have more than two million citizens behind bars, the highest
absolute and per capita rate of incarceration in the world.

In 2005, we put 737 people in
jail for every 100,000 residents. In Russia the number was 611, Cuba
487, China 118, and Canada 107. We imprison more of our people than Russia or Cuba and almost 7 times more than Canada.

Black
men, who are 6-7% percent of our citizens, constitute half of our prisoners.

Why are so many people in prison? In almost every state and federal penitentiary, 50-60% of all inmates are serving time due to drug-related convictions.

The war on drugs began in 1972. That year, a man who was already emerging as one of America’s most astute social commentators wrote in Newsweek Magazine:

Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime
and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other
measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?

But, you may say, must we accept defeat? Why not simply end the
drug traffic? That is where our experience under Prohibition is most
relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic. We may be able to cut off
opium from Turkey but there are innumerable other places where the
opium poppy grows. With French cooperation, we may be able to make
Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin but there are
innumerable other places where the simple manufacturing operations
involved can be carried out.

So long as large sums of money are
involved — and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal — it is
literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce
seriously its scope. In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion and
example are likely to be far more effective than the use of force to
shape others in our image.

Almost twenty years later, this commentator was world famous. He looked back on his interview and
wrote:

Very few words in that column would have to be changed for it to
be publishable today. The problem then was primarily heroin and the
chief source of the heroin was Marseilles. Today, the problem is
cocaine from Latin America. Aside from that, nothing would have to be
changed.

Here it is almost twenty years later. What were then predictions
are now observable results. As I predicted in that column, on the basis
primarily of our experience with Prohibition, drug prohibition has not
reduced the number of addicts appreciably if at all and has promoted
crime and corruption.

Another fifteen years have now passed. How are we doing? To quote from Orlando Patterson’s must read piece in last Sunday’s Times

A tenth of all black men between ages 20 and 35
are in jail or prison; blacks are incarcerated at over eight times the
white rate.The effect on black communities is catastrophic: one in three male
African-Americans in their 30s now has a prison record, as do nearly
two-thirds of all black male high school dropouts.

These numbers and
rates are incomparably greater than anything achieved at the height of
the Jim Crow era. What’s odd is how long it has taken the
African-American community to address in a forceful and thoughtful way
this racially biased and utterly counterproductive situation.

The
commentator in 1972 and 1991 was the late Milton Friedman – the
twentieth century’s preeminent public intellectual (I
disagree with him a lot but, as George Schultz used to say, "everyone disagrees
with Milton when he’s not in the room"). Friedman approached social
problems as a recovering liberal fully enamored with the power of
markets. Orlando Patterson approaches them as a brilliant black
Harvard sociologist and former adviser to the Jamaican socialist government of Michael Manley (no
known relation). The two men are in emphatic
agreement about one thing: the war on drugs has not only
failed, it has jailed our people at unprecedented levels. We have created an American gulag.

The numbers tell an extraordinary story.

Drug users are white. Drug prisoners are black.
According to the federal Household Survey, "most current illicit drug users are white. There
were an estimated 9.9 million whites (72 percent of all users), 2.0 million blacks (15 percent), and 1.4 million Hispanics (10 percent) who were current illicit drug users in 1998." And yet, blacks constitute 36.8% of those arrested for drug violations, over 42% of those in federal prisons for drug violations. African- Americans comprise almost 58% of those in state prisons for drug felonies; Hispanics account for 20.7%.

Changes in drug policy, not increases in crime, are driving incarceration rates.
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 created mandatory minimum sentences for possession of specific amounts of cocaine. The Act instituted a 100-to-1 differential in the treatment of powder and crack cocaine, treating possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine the same as possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine. Crack cocaine is typically consumed by the poor, while powder cocaine, a significantly more expensive drug, is consumed by wealthier users. Mandatory minimum sentences for low-level crack-cocaine users are comparable (and harsher in certain cases) to sentences for major drug dealers.

One in six U.S. prisoners is mentally ill. Many suffer from serious illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression.
There are three times as many men and women with mental illness in U.S. prisons as in mental health hospitals.

The rate of mental illness in the prison population is three times higher than in the general population.

According to the 215-page report, Ill-Equipped: U.S. Prisons and Offenders with Mental Illness, prisons are dangerous and damaging places for mentally ill people. Other prisoners victimize and exploit them. Prison staff often punish mentally ill offenders for symptoms of their illness – such as being noisy or refusing orders, or even self-mutilation and attempted suicide. Mentally ill prisoners are more likely than others to end up housed in especially harsh conditions, such as isolation, that can push them over the edge into acute psychosis.

Finally, our drug penalties bear no relationship to the harm of the underlying drugs.
Together, tobacco and alcohol kill about 500,000 people every year, with tobacco doing 80% of the damage. Cocaine kills about 2,200 people and heroin another 2,000 (about the same number as die of aspirin overdose each year, to put the problem in perspective). Marijuana kills zero, unless you count people who die in prison for using or selling it. In short, illegal drugs kill 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.

Our war on drugs is truly a new prohibition, except that the victims are poor men of color, not affluent Irish lawyers getting busted at the local speakeasy. Filling our prisons to overflowing this way solves nothing. It destroys families that are already precarious and is really expensive. Busting and convicting a single drug dealer costs about $150,000. Housing and feeding the prisoner for five years is is another $200,000. Plus you have to build the prisons and pay higher welfare benefits to the women and children left behind — typically a multiple of the cost of incarceration. Then you pay again when kids without strong families find what they need in gangs.

Truly Yale is cheaper than jail. You can provide treatment and education for 100-200 people for the cost of imprisoning just one.

Not only are the economics upside down — the politics are as well. In California for example, the prison guard union is now a political powerhouse. The union has more than 100 employees and 30,000-members. It retains a team of savvy lawyers and first-rate lobbyists and is known state-wide for its political
war chest and willingness to use it (often by financing victims rights groups to make the case for more prisons).

The union is one of the largest donors to state lawmakers and spent $3 million backing Gray Davis (who obliged them by giving guards a 7% pay increase, despite the state deficit, and by closing three privately contracted prisons that were highly efficient but nonunion). Arnold Schwarzenegger can afford to refuse their money, but most prisoners, needless to say, cannot vote and their families cannot begin to achieve this kind of political clout.

So federal policy has created the war-on-drugs complex: a multi-billion industry that is, like any multi-billion dollar industry, passionately defended by those it benefits. If Columbian drug lords donated money directly to our politicians, the public would revolt. Thanks to policies that create the black market for drugs and harsh minimum sentencing guidelines — the drug lords have prison guards unions to do their work for them. If we destroyed black markets, drug lords and the political power of prison guards would both quickly evaporate — something neither lords nor guards are terribly interested in doing.

In this environment, Jim Webb gets a lot of credit for holding hearings on mass incarceration of Americans. Tellingly, these hearings got no media coverage and can barely be found on Google (tip to Classical Values, with a nice post on this).

Our policy should destroy the market for drugs. To do this, we need to give addicts safe, cheap, and medically supervised access to narcotics. Register at the clinic and get your fix at very low cost. At least we know every addict in town. We would destroy the cocaine cartels — it is hard to sell street drugs when safe drugs are available at low cost.

We need to regulate and tax recreational drugs. As obnoxious as it seems, we are far better off regulating recreational drugs the way we do alcohol and tobacco than we are criminalizing them. We can ensure purity, control toxicity, and tax sales heavily. It will wreck the economics of small time illegal producers (how many people grow their own tobacco to avoid paying taxes? Roughly none). We can and should spend the revenue that results on drug education, treatment, and prevention but we should not criminalize drug use. As public policy, prohibition is an illusion — it prohibits nothing.

The reason is that prohibition creates profits and thus a market. Like it or not, people respond to economic incentives, so we end up fighting both sides of the war on drugs. By criminalizing and prosecute drug users and sellers, we create a highly profitable business. By making drugs illegal, we make the market for them highly lucrative. Literally the more successful we are, the richer we make our enemies. As prohibition demonstrated, this is not a "war" that we can win.

Publicly subsidizing drug addicts is not a glorious policy — but neither is holding the world record for tossing poor people in jail while we effectively finance global narco-terrorism. Delivering cheap, safe, and legal drugs to addicts reduces AIDS transmission and destroys the market for street heroin and cocaine/crack. Taxed and regulated recreational drugs open the possibility of education and treatment. It saves people and saves government a boatload of money.

I recognize that legal drugs can be extraordinarily damaging. My father was drunk on cheap scotch and smoked four packs of cigarettes almost every day of his short life. But we would not have been better off as a country, nor he better off as a person, if we had thrown him in jail for being addicted to alcoholic and tobacco.

Dozens of studies over the past century have with no exception, recommend against criminalizing drugs (you can read all of the major studies here and get a decent if aging summary perspective here). Being addicted to opiates or cocaine is a bad idea — but getting tossed in jail for drug use and property crimes related to drug use penalizes the families who are left behind, drains our public purse, and undermines our democracy. Winston Churchill was right when he noted that "The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country." By that standard, the US less civilized than at any time in our history.

Conservatives, parents, and plenty of others worry that making drugs available will increase drug use. It doesn’t usually work that way. Three centuries ago, no less a free market conservative than Adam Smith pointed out that:

"It is not the multitude of ale-houses . . . that
occasions a general disposition to drunkenness among the common people;
but that disposition, arising from other causes, necessarily gives
employment to a multitude of ale-houses."

Drug addiction is ugly. Taking the profits out of the drug trade by making drugs available to addicts and decriminalizing drugs isn’t pretty — it’s just smart.