Ending Drug Prohibition

Just Me
#1. July 22nd, 2008, at 11:26 AM.

great modern take on prohibition:
http://www.amazon.com/Devils-Picnic-Around-Pursuit-Forbidden/dp/1582344299

ccurrie
#2. July 22nd, 2008, at 11:30 AM.

I can’t agree with you on this one, Jay.

Canada’s criminal justice system doesn’t have the teeth to deal with dealers and addicts and the medical system is no less useless. The armies of Social(ist) Workers who follow the junkies around town seem more interested in creating more addicts (and jobs for themselves) than in solving the problem.

I like the Singaporean way:

Selling the stuff incurs the same penalty as first degree murder. If you’ve ever had a crackhead in the family (my uncle Bill died at 36, but not before robbing Grandma of everything she had) then you’ll understand why it is considered equivalent to first degree murder.

Addiction is a form of insanity. Addicts can be sent away for as much as four years mandatory rehab, and rarely get less than two years. The recidivism rate is less than one in a thousand.

Singapore has the lowest rate of drug use in the world, despite being a major port city in a drug producing part of the world. Low rates of drug related crime and disease go hand in hand with that. It is true harm reduction, unlike the free drugs and needles schemes favoured by the communists.

Chris

Peter
#3. July 22nd, 2008, at 3:55 PM.

Those were a fascinating series of articles you and Dawg linked to. What a mess! But even among those who concede that criminalization and the American “war on drugs” are wasteful, corrupting disasters that don’t appear to reduce consumption and may actually encourage it, many folks still have a lot of trouble with the “addiction is a disease” trope, and there should be a better understanding of why. Dan Gardner’s excellent first article points out that criminalization was not a traditional “since time immemorial” response to drugs. It comes to us from the Victorians, who criminalized a lot of vice and also things like homosexual behaviour, porn, etc. It looks oppressive from here and much of it was, but it is important to understand what the Victorians were reacting to, which was the artistocratic moral dissolution and corruption of the Regency combined with truly awful, dangerous gin-soaked urban slums and a lot of public lawlessness, not to mention the spectre of revolution. Alcohol and drug addiction weren’t seen as just individual crises like today, but plagues that infected whole communities (”the Army disease”, etc. We still tend to think that way about aboriginal communities, as do lots of aboriginals, which is why many are the last supporters of prohibition.) Inspired by middle-class evangelical Protestantism, which was far less tolerant of vice than the Catholics, they resolved to pull society up by its bootstraps through individual accountability and they largely succeeded, creating prosperity, mass education and vastly increased political and religious freedom at the same time. They made connections between addictions and other public disorders and dysfunctions we are reluctant to make because their truths are experiential rather than rational and scientific. By the 1920’s substance abuse, public alcoholism, unwanted pregnancies, family break-up, crime, street violence and harsh, aggressive policing were all at an all time nadir in Britain. (c.f. Himmelfarb)

That spirit is still very much with us in the Anglosphere in a secular form on both the left and right (although in respect of different issues), which means what is claimed to work in Sweden or wherever has limited authority here. The fact is that most Canadians believe or intuit there is a connection between drug use and crime, prostitution,violence, etc., whether the drug use itself is legal or not. They intuit that drugs, like all vice, can be attractive to youth and that dissuasion should be practiced. And they intuit that somewhere, somehow, individual accountability plays a big role in both avoidance and recovery, whatever the sociologists say. Many conservatives and members of the decent middle understand the cruelty and futility of jail, and would prefer a more tolerant, compassionate approach, especially if it led to inspiring Horatio Alger recovery stories like in Wente’s article, but whenever they come across calls for the medical/harm reduction approach from the medical profession or social activists, they are soon made to feel they are boarding a runaway train heading for a place where their forebodings are defined as prejudice and everybody is responsible for the plight of the drug user except the drug user. I think they are searching for a way to make drugs legal while keeping them illicit. They don’t want drug users incarcerated or beaten up on the streets, but they don’t want then coddeld like sick children either. And they aren’t finding the solutions they seek because the beautiful people keep analogizing heroin addiction to measles. This, I believe, is also why efforts to legalize marijuana are always nipped at the post.

So yes, addiction is an individual medical issue. Except when it is a collective moral issue.