[Stossel] Prohibition Spawns Drug Violence

Can you back up your claim or are we to believe the evidence I brought to the table regarding the incredibly small number of people addicted to cocaine in this country?

 

Exactly. People are smart enough to avoid using truly dangerous drugs. 88% of Americans have never used cocaine and most likely wouldn't, even if legal, and especially if in order to purchase it, they had to be educated as to the effects.

 

What is to stop people today from cooking up bathtub gin and selling it on the streets? If your argument held water, there would have been a massive epidemic of people continuing to sell rotgut whiskey and bathtub gin after prohibition ended.

To more directly address your argument, if cocaine was regulated and sold in limited quantities, people would not have an easy time acquiring enough to cook down into crack. For example, the recipe I found started with an ounce of cocaine. That is a huge amount of cocaine, worth about $600 if you buy it near the border.

If I were designing the regulatory scheme for cocaine, I would mandate a maximum dose of about an eighth of a gram mixed in a beverage, with a limit of about four doses per person per day. With this limit, a person would have to buy their limit for nearly two months to get enough to start cooking it into crack. Then, they and their potential consumers would risk going to jail for a drug that they can legally purchase and consume, though not in the smokable form. The risk/reward ratio would skew dramatically against it being worth cooking and selling crack.

Don't get me wrong, there are people out there who would band together to do just that, which is the reason that I would set up a tracking system that would be a combination of the process we have for dangerous prescription drugs and the process we have in Texas and many other states for methamphetamine precursors. We track the sales and if a person is exhibiting the signs of abuse, we can target treatment options and perhaps even start criminal investigations if it is suspected that they are cooking crack.

I don't know for sure, but it is even possible that there might be an additive that could nullify many of the effects of cocaine or make it impossible to extract usable cocaine from the beverage itself. This is how we reduced abuse of Percodan and Darvon, by adding a substance that nullified the effects when pills were cooked down so that abusers could inject it (what is available now is Percoset and Darvoset, nether of which have the same effect if injected).

The point is that there are a LOT of tactics we could employ to reduce drug abuse if responsible users could purchase what they wanted from a licensed, regulated distributor.

 

I base my estimates of the level of abuse we might have on a statistic that a speaker from LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) gave during a talk I attended. In the early 1900s, before drugs were banned, it was estimated that 1.3% of the population was addicted to drugs. In 1986, after Reagan ratcheted up the War on Drugs and started pouring tens of billions per year into the program, it was estimated that 1.3% of the population was addicted to drugs. Today, that percentage is unchanged and we have about 1.3% of the population addicted to drugs.

Some people (the one percenters) will become addicted to drugs and continue to use them no matter the drug policy. The vast majority of us will use our intoxicants responsibly, and a lot of this is because the VAST majority of us are smart enough to stay away from the truly dangerous drugs.

 

Bayer had a significant ability to produce and distribute their product even in the early 1900s. They were the company that originally synthesized heroin and made it available for a wide variety of different ailments. Even so, an incredibly small percentage of the population became addicted.

Coca-Cola had a pretty good distribution network back when they had cocaine as the stimulating ingredient instead of caffeine. Again, even though it was available in a very mainstream product, very few people got addicted to Coca Cola.

There is a small list of drugs (heroin and PCP are on that short list) that I would not propose selling for recreational use. I would make heroin available by prescription so that addicts could get their fix without having to commit crimes to get it. The program in Switzerland (going on for nearly two decades now) has been incredibly successful in reducing junkies' criminality and increasing their chances of recovering from their addiction. In addition, the people involved in the program go to work, pay their taxes, and are productive members of society.

Cocaine is a tougher one. In certain forms (crack and injection), it can create a debilitating addiction in some people. However, if you actually look at statistics rather than the anecdotes of addicts, you note that less than five percent of the people who have ever tried cocaine are "current month" users. In other words, two thirds of one percent of the population is addicted to cocaine (if you assume that every single one of the "past month" users is addicted), which just doesn't support the notion that cocaine will addict a significant portion of the people who use it.

Which is the reason to have an extensive education process tied to the ability to purchase cocaine infused beverages. We would educate the potential users to the dangers and signs of addiction and then track sales so that if they exhibit problem usage, we can point them to treatment options. Again, I will point you to the tiny percentage of people that gets addicted to cocaine once they try it and assert that an infused beverage would be even less likely to addict someone as absorption into the body is much slower through the stomach than with snorted or smoked cocaine.

There will definitely be an issue with abuse, but it couldn't possibly be as big an issue as we now have with prohibition.

 

Again, I wouldn't be a proponent of having cocaine infused Red Bull in Stop-N-Go. You would actually get licensed for it, would have to go to classes to get the license, and most people would never consider it because of the addiction factor. Most people are smart enough to responsibly use cocaine and the vast majority of people who do use today (they are using methods that are more prone to causing addiction, too) do not become addicted.

I think you are listening to all of the anecdotal evidence you have heard about cocaine and not looking at the hard numbers.

Actually, amphetamines are a much easier one for me to accept. "Meth," or the amphetamines created in home labs, can be very dangerous, where pharmaceutical grade amphetamines are extremely safe when used properly. The Air Force gives its pilots this grade of amphetamines on a regular basis with virtually no problems.

We will never be able to completely eliminate the problems inherent in drug use. The point is to reduce the harms to society as much as possible. I believe the harms inherent in drug use would be far easier to manage in a regulated system than they are in a prohibitionist system.

With heroin and PCP, you have a solid argument, but the numbers belie your claims on cocaine.

 

I have never understood how anyone can claim otherwise while remaining in the realm of facts and logic.

I completely disagree. Nobody starts using drugs of any kind thinking "I am going to abuse this substance." Besides, the statistics belie your belief. 35 million Americans have used cocaine at least once in their lives. Of those, only 2.1 million are "past month" users, meaning that a total of less than six percent of the people who have ever tried cocaine used it in the last month. Even if you assume that every single one of the "past month" users is addicted, you are talking about an addiction rate of about two thirds of one percent of the total population.

Again, I disagree. If you give adults a legally regulated product, they will purchase it. Since most people are able to use cocaine responsibly (given the evidence above), making it available in a form that will be less addictive will further give people the ability to use it responsibly.

For evidence, I point out that there is no thriving black market for bathtub gin or moonshine since prohibition ended.

Given our experience with prohibition over the last century, I really don't see how there is any other logical conclusion. We need to have control over these substances, but prohibition simply cedes control of them to criminal organizations and thugs. The only other option would be to ratchet up the WoD even more, spend tens of billions more, build more prisons, and incarcerate even more of our people.

We cannot continue to do what we are doing.
We cannot incarcerate our way out of this problem, as much as the for-profit prison industry would like us to.
We cannot afford to incarcerate even more people than we do now.
We need to reduce the harms inherent in drug use and abuse, and prohibition makes all of those harms worse.

 

I disagree. There were people proclaiming the righteousness of their prohibitionist cause right up to the repeal of the eighteenth amendment. There has already been a LOT of movement around drug policy since Obama took over and I suspect there will be plenty more to come. I really hope Obama doesn't burn all of his political capital before he gets reelected because it is in a second term that I could see him really pushing for more substantive change on the federal level.