“Economically, there is no argument or solution other than legalization, at least of marijuana,” an unidentified “senior Mexican official” tells the Wall Street Journal, in a report that comes in the aftermath of the death of drug trafficker Arturo Beltrán Leyva and the subsequent retaliatory killings of family members of a Mexican naval officer who took part in the raid against the drug kingpin.
There’s been a considerable polemic against the “failed drug war,” and the drumbeat of bad news from Ciudad Juarez suggests that it’s not for no reason. Nevertheless, George Will is unconvinced that much of anything good will com from the recent efforts to legalize marijuana for medical purposes. “Legalization, by drastically lowering price, will increase marijuana’s public health costs, including mental and respiratory problems, and motor vehicle accidents.” Reporting from Denver, where decriminalization measures are in place and medical-marijuana boutiques have sprung up, he cites the views of the Colorado attorney general: “We underestimate the number of people who care that something is illegal.”
Will: “Marijuana has medical uses — e.g., to control nausea caused by chemotherapy — but the helpful ingredients can be conveyed with other medicines.” We’re sure to hear any number of claims and counterclaims about this….
Related story about medical marijuana in Michigan, from the New York Times, here.
I remain skeptical of drug legalization, because it most assuredly would prompt parents to feel undermined — and they feel plenty undermined to start with, for other reasons. This week, the London Economist takes a comparative look at drug policies in Western Europe and North America. The report describes a slow drift toward decriminalization.
I suppose that, at some point, the people of this country my be convinced that the cost-benefit calculus has shifted in favor of legalization. “Decriminalising personal possession, though helpful in other ways, won’t do much to tackle organised crime, which retains its grip on the market. But America’s tentative moves in the direction of legalising the supply of drugs, rather than just going easy on users, could start to change things. Sanho Tree, of the Institute for Policy Studies, an American think-tank, notes that Mexico’s cartels are thought to get about 70% of their income from sending marijuana north. The higher the legal production, the harder that will be.”
Conclusion: “If California’s hippies long for legalisation, the bullet-weary citizens of Mexico’s poorest barrios are even keener.”
“The problem with the Obama administration’s new directive limiting federal prosecution of medical marijuana is that it encourages those who would legalize the drug,” argues the Christian Science Monitor editorial board.
Legalization of street drugs is a proposal that raises interesting questions, both theoretical and practical.
The Christian Science Monitor brings news of a new initiative by an organization called LEAP — Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Membership consists of law enforcement officers who see the justice system being swamped by thousands upon thousands of arrests for simple drug possession. A spokesman says: “Not only do these officers see the terrible results that their work has had on individuals’ lives, but a lot of what I hear from beat officers and undercover narcotics agents is they’ve seen colleagues die in the line of fire trying to enforce laws that have no positive impacts…. For a lot of them, this is about trying to keep good cops alive by repealing stupid prohibition laws.” The Monitor report mentions that Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) is drafting legislation to establish a blue-ribbon commission to look into legalization. The Obama administration, for its part, is not on board. “Legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary and it’s not in mine,” states “drug czar” Gil Kerlikowske.
John Gray, a thinker for whom I harbor considerable admiration (click here and scroll down), offered a commentary over the weekend in the London Observer entitled “The case for legalising all drugs is unanswerable.” The bill of particulars he puts together is a harrowing one. “It is in the world’s poorer societies that drug prohibition is having its most catastrophic effects. Mexico is only one of several Latin American countries where the anti-drug crusade has escalated into something like low-intensity warfare, while elsewhere in the world some states have been more or less wholly captured by drug money. Narco-states are one of the drug war’s worst side-effects, with small countries like Guinea-Bissau in West Africa being hijacked…. Not only in Afghanistan but throughout the world, the extreme profits of the drug trade have a well-documented role in funding terrorist networks and so threaten advanced countries.” Furthermore, he holds that it will not do simply to legalize simple possession — the whole production chain will have to be decriminalized, regulated and taxed. “What is required is not a libertarian utopia in which the state retreats from any concern about personal conduct, but a coolly utilitarian assessment of the costs and benefits of different methods of intervention.”
I would conjecture that you will not see legalization in the foreseeable future, despite the considerable upside it might carry. The problem is that criminal prohibition is a major disincentive preventing any number of people from coming users. The way the politics of the matter would work out within this country is that such a measure would be perceived as just one more development on top of many others that have caused parents to feel undermined.