{"id":405,"date":"2017-02-03T00:03:04","date_gmt":"2017-02-03T00:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hippy.com\/hip\/uncategorized\/were-losing-the-drug-war-because-prohibition-never-works\/"},"modified":"2017-02-03T00:03:04","modified_gmt":"2017-02-03T00:03:04","slug":"were-losing-the-drug-war-because-prohibition-never-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/activism\/were-losing-the-drug-war-because-prohibition-never-works\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re Losing the Drug War Because Prohibition Never Works"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tWe’re Losing the Drug War Because Prohibition Never Works<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Hodding Carter III<\/u><\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is clearly no point in beating a dead horse, whether you are a
\npolitician or a columnist, but sometimes you have to do it just the
\nsame, if only for the record. So, for the record, here’s another
\nattempt to argue that a majority of the American people and their
\nelected representatives can be and are wrong about the way they have
\nchosen to wage the war against drugs. Prohibition can’t
\nwork, won’t work and has never worked, but it can and does have
\nmonumentally costly effects on the criminal justice system and on the
\nintegrity of government at every level.<\/p>\n

Experience should be the best teacher, and my experience with prohibition is a
\nlittle more recent than most Americans for whom the noble
\nexperiment ended with repeal in 1933. In my home state of
\nMississippi, it lasted for an additional 33 years, and for all those
\nyears it was a truism that the drinkers had their liquor, the
\npreachers had their prohibition and the sheriffs made the money. Al
\nCapone would have been proud of the latitude that bootleggers were
\nable to buy with their payoffs of constables, deputies, police chiefs
\nand sheriffs across the state.<\/p>\n

But as a first-rate series in the New York Times made clear early last
\nyear, Mississippi’s prohibition-era corruption (and Chicago’s before
\nthat) was penny ante stuff compared with what is happening in the
\nU.S. today. From Brooklyn police precincts to Miami’s police stations
\nto rural Georgia courthouses, big drug money is purchasing major
\nbreakdowns in law enforcement. Sheriffs, other policemen and now
\njudges are being bought up by the gross. But that money, with the net
\nprofits for the drug traffickers estimated at anywhere from $40
\nbillion to $100 billion a year, is also buying up banks, legitimate
\nbusinesses and, to the south of us, entire governments. The latter
\nbecomes an increasingly likely outcome in a number of cities and
\nstates in this country as well. Cicero, Ill., during Prohibition is
\nan instructive case in point.<\/p>\n

The money to be made from an illegal product that has about 23 million
\ncurrent users in this country also explains why its sale is so
\nattractive on the mean streets of America’s big cities. A street
\nsalesman can gross about $2,500 a day in Washington, which puts him
\nin the pay category of a local television anchor, and this in a
\nneighborhood of dead-end job chances.<\/p>\n

Since the courts and jails are already swamped beyond capacity by the
\narrests that are routinely made (44,000 drug dealers and users over a
\ntwo-year period in Washington alone, for instance) and since those
\narrests barely skim the top of the pond, arguing that stricter
\nenforcement is the answer begs a larger question: Who is going to pay
\nthe billions of dollars required to build the prisons, hire the
\njudges, train the policemen and employ the prosecutors needed for the
\nload already on hand, let alone the huge one yet to come if we ever
\nget serious about arresting dealers and users?<\/p>\n

Much is made of the cost of drug addiction, and it should be, but the
\ncurrent breakdown in the criminal justice system is not one of them.
\nThat breakdown is the result of prohibition, not addiction. Drug
\naddiction, after all, does not come close to the far vaster problems
\nof alcohol and tobacco addiction (as former Surgeon General Koop
\ncorrectly noted, tobacco is at least as addictive as heroin). Hard
\ndrugs are estimated to kill 4,000 people a year directly and several
\ntens of thousands a year indirectly. Alcohol kills at least 100,000 a
\nyear, addicts millions more and costs the marketplace billions of
\ndollars. Tobacco kills over 300,000 a year, addicts tens of millions
\nand fouls the atmosphere as well. But neither alcohol nor tobacco
\nthreaten to subvert our system of law and order, because they are
\ntreated as personal and societal problems rather than as criminal
\nones.<\/p>\n

Indeed, every argument that is made for prohibiting the use of currently
\nillegal drugs can be made even more convincingly about tobacco and
\nalcohol. The effects on the unborn? Staggeringly direct. The effects
\non adolescents? Alcoholism is the addiction of choice for young
\nAmericans on a ratio of about 100 to one. Lethal effect? Tobacco’s
\nmurderous results are not a matter of debate anywhere outside the
\nTobacco Institute.<\/p>\n

Which leaves the lingering and legitimate fear that legalization might
\nproduce a surge in use. It probably would, although not nearly as
\ndramatic a one as opponents usually estimate. The fact is that
\npersonal use of marijuana, whatever the local laws may say, has been
\nvirtually decriminalized for some time now, but there has been a
\nstabilization or slight decline in use, rather than an increase, for
\nseveral years. Heroin addiction has held steady at about 500,000
\npeople for some time, though the street price of heroin is far lower
\nnow than it used to be. Use of cocaine in its old form also seems to
\nhave stopped climbing and begun to drop off among young and old
\nalike, though there is an abundantly available supply.<\/p>\n

That leaves crack cocaine, stalker of the inner city and terror of the
\nsuburbs. Instant and addictive in effect, easy to use and relatively
\ncheap to buy, it is a personality-destroying substance that is a
\nclear menace to its users. But it is hard to imagine it being any
\nmore accessible under legalization than it is in most cities today
\nunder prohibition, while the financial incentives for promoting its
\nuse would virtually disappear with legalization.<\/p>\n

Proponents of legalization should not try to fuzz the issue, nonetheless.
\nAddiction levels might increase, at least temporarily, if legal
\nsanctions were removed. That happened after the repeal of
\nProhibition, or so at least some studies have suggested. But while
\nthat would be a personal disaster for the addicts and their families,
\nand would involve larger costs to society as a whole, those costs
\nwould be minuscule compared with the costs of continued prohibition.<\/p>\n

The young Capones of today own the inner cities and the wholesalers
\nbehind these young retailers are rapidly buying up the larger system
\nwhich is supposed to control them. Prohibition gave us the Mafia and
\norganized crime on a scale that has been with us ever since. The new
\nprohibition is writing a new chapter on that old text. Hell-bent on
\nlearning nothing from history, we are witnessing its repetition,
\npredictably enough, as tragedy.<\/p>\n

Appeared in the Wall Street Journal Jul 13, 1989. <\/strong>Reprinted
\nwith permission. Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc.<\/p>\n

Posted by: Harrell Graham
\nViews: 9540
\nTopic:10\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re Losing the Drug War Because Prohibition Never Works By Hodding Carter III. There is clearly no point in beating a dead horse, whether you are a politician or a columnist, but sometimes you have to do it just the same, if only for the record. So, for the record, here’s another attempt to argue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-drugs","category-guest-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}