June 5, 2000 (9:47AM) The Drug War

The reasons to legalize marijuana fall under one general heading: The harm to society caused by prohibition far outweighs the harm to society caused by marijuana use. This is not merely an opinion. This is the conclusion of the 1972 Nixon/Shafer commission and numerous other in- depth, government-sponsored studies of the problem over the last 100 years. Between 1969 and 1977, government-appointed commissions in Canada, England, Australia, and the Netherlands issued reports agreeing with the 1972 Nixon/ Shafer Commission. All found that marijuana’s dangers had been greatly exaggerated. All urged lawmakers to drastically reduce penalties for marijuana possession or eliminate them altogether.

This is also the conclusion of the Michigan Supreme Court. Anyone who considers marijuana to be a danger to the public should review their findings in the case of People v Sinclair , 387 Mich 91 (1972) Here are a few typical excerpts:

“…there is not even a rational basis for treating marijuana as a more dangerous drug than alcohol.”

“…the ‘stepping stone argument’ that marijuana use leads to use of ‘hard narcotics’ has no scientific basis.”

“We can no longer allow the residuals of … early misinformation to continue choking off rational evaluation of marijuana dangers. That a large and increasing number of Americans recognize the truth about marijuana’s relative harmlessness can scarcely be doubted.”

All the usual canards that are rolled out by prohibitionists are also updated and dealt with in the book Marijuana Myth / Marijuana Fact by Zimmer and Morgan, 1997 Lindesmith Center. This resource offers a compendium of cites organized to address all of the thoroughly debunked bromides: “Marijuana is a gateway drug; Marijuana is addictive; marijuana rots your brain; marijuana is now more potent than it was 20 years ago, ad nauseum”. I’m not going to refute those tired arguments here. The scientific evidence is overwhelming and readily available.

Let’s turn to the more interesting question of how is society harmed by prohibition.

First, the taxpayer must support the incarceration bureaucracy that has mushroomed into the most bloated in the western world almost entirely due to the “war on drugs”. For example, in Michigan the prison population has tripled since the “war” began, and we are incarcerating (and paying for) a record number of prison inmates, a significant percentage of whom have been convicted of relatively minor drug crimes.

The cost to the taxpayers? In Michigan the prison population has risen from 18,000 to over 43,000 in the last 10 years. Somewhere between $22,000 – 35,000 a year is spent to house and feed each inmate – almost what it would cost to send them to Harvard. Further, resources devoted to housing them are resources that can’t be devoted to addressing real crime, violent and otherwise.

Nationally the story is just as expensive. The Los Angeles Times reports that “in the first months of the new millenium, the U.S. prison and jail population will surpass 2 million men and women. We are No. 1 in the world for mass incarceration. No democracy has ever allowed anything like this to happen.” “The financial costs are staggering. Operating prisons this year will cost about $40 billion. States now spend more on prisons than on universities.”

And there is an additional lamentable twist. Michael Tonry documents in his book MALIGN NEGLECT that “The War on Drugs foreseeably and unnecessarily blighted the lives of hundreds of thousands of young disadvantaged black Americans and undermined decades of effort to improve the life chances of the urban black underclass.” He documents the disproportionate effect drug laws have on minorities and the poor, who have been incarcerated at a disgraceful rate as part of the campaign. A democracy with a gulag. What a novel idea.

Another significant harm to individuals in a democratic society is the loss of freedoms and personal liberties that have been diminished if not wiped out by the War on Drugs. A host of rights formerly guaranteed by the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments – our Bill of Rights – have been adjudicated or legislated out of existence because of zealous prosecutorial strategies and a sympathetic, politicized judiciary. For one small example, it is now legally possible for the government to put a tracking device on your car by which they can monitor your movements – and possibly your conversations – by satellite and cell phone – without a search warrant. Hard to believe? Come to court with me next week.

The government rationale uses the logic of the Inquisition; they can’t investigate and prosecute the war on drugs like conventional crime because there are no victims. The “victim/user” is also the criminal and unlikely to report the crime.  Therefore the only way to effectively pursue drug lawbreakers is through a web of informants and secret police euphemistically described and acronymically titled as drug squads. For example, in E. Lansing we have the PACT. (Pro Active Crime Team) One of their standard policies when nabbing someone violating a drug law is to offer the accused a chance to make his legal problem go away by ratting out his supplier or anyone else he knows doing or dealing drugs. The standard offer is three for one – you can work off each offense you are accused of by creating three more drug transactions that the PACT team can prosecute. And so it goes, giving new meaning to the term Pro Active Crime Team!