In his opinion column last week, Andy Granias (“Which right is right on drugs?,” April 25) is correct in one sense when he says the concept of a right is inherently constructed, but his examples (intramarital rape, slavery) are faulty. We have rejected such activities as “rights” by extending rights to former slaves and women, not by narrowing our conception of personal liberties. So while we shouldn’t accept simplistic ideas of personal freedom, we should expect consistency in how those freedoms are applied. We, as a society, accept the right to privacy, and that right has guaranteed control over one’s own body, first by establishing a woman’s control over her reproductive choices and more recently by placing consenting adults’ sexual choices outside the purview of the law. A citizen is the master of her body and her bedroom; what that citizen does in the privacy of her home with consenting adults is nobody else’s business. What sense does it make that a woman decides what goes on in her uterus but a drug user shouldn’t choose what goes on in her nasal cavities? What sense does it make to allow citizens to have any sort of kinky sex they wish but to bust them for smoking pot in their bedroom?
Perhaps prohibition would be acceptable if it produced tangible benefits, but it has not. Mr. Granias correctly points out that the drug business supports violence and organized crime, but takes that as evidence of prohibition’s necessity and not of its futility. People often hear of drug violence, but why haven’t Absolut and Smirnoff killed for control over State Street? The reason is simple — by prohibiting drugs, we have surrendered control over how drugs are produced, sold and consumed. We gave a lucrative market directly to the black market and the unscrupulous thugs therein. As a result, drugs are easier for children to get than alcohol, their safety and potency is suspect and the money produced is hidden and untaxed.
Due to our punitive approach to drugs, drug addiction is more deadly and crippling than it would be otherwise. Drug prices are artificially inflated, forcing many addicts into debt and even prostitution or theft. Drug potency is not standardized, which leads to overdoses, the threat of legal consequences and societal stigma that makes the user vulnerable by pushing her away from seeking medical or legal help. Worse, prohibition does little to minimize drug use; studies find only weak links between the punishment attached to a drug and that drug’s usage rate. In Holland, legally sanctioned coffee shops sell marijuana to people over 18, yet the Netherlands has a low rate of marijuana usage and experienced only a temporary bump in usage following de facto legalization. Likewise, several U.S. states decriminalized marijuana without seeing any jump in usage rates, while states that passed stricter laws saw no decrease in drug use.
The problem is that our drug policies aren’t guided by pragmatism or compassion. Drug use is part of the culture war. Middle America associates drug use with segments of society it doesn’t like: stoners, leftists and minorities. We regard drug use as a question of personal sin, not public health. In order to stop this war against the drug-involved poor, we need to escape this paradigm. Addiction causes problems in communities, but we should react by offering help and compassion, not punishment and scorn. We need fewer prisons and more needle exchanges, better social programs and more treatment; less prohibition and more regulation; less black market control and more transparency. Drug addiction is a disease, not a sin, and you can’t wage a war on a disease unless you wage it on those who are afflicted.
Andrew Miller
