Legalization Talk

Perhaps the last thing anyone would have expected to happen during the Reagan era was a renewal of interest in the idea of legalizing drugs. But there it is, right on the cover of the major news magazines and spattered throughout the discourse of political talk shows.

The legalization talk is not just about going easy on the kid with a half-ounce of marijuana. They ("they" being the usual assortment of pundits, pols, and experts) are talking about legalizing the whole dizzying, tranquilizing, and stimulating laundry list of contraband psychotropes--cocaine, heroin, maybe even PCP.

In marked contrast to the "legalize pot" days, none of the current legalization advocates actually condone the use of drugs, and especially not the aforementioned "hard" ones. Instead they are making the case that criminalization is doing nothing to curb drug use, abuse, and addiction. In fact, they say, criminalization of drugs is only serving to create a whole new set of costly, and often deadly, problems in the area of violent crime.

The argument goes something like this. Illegal drugs are very expensive and thus wildly profitable. Unfathomable truck-loads of drug-induced cash change hands daily, especially in the cocaine business. Drugs are so expensive, and thus so tantalizingly profitable, precisely because they are illegal.

Being banned by law makes cocaine a relatively scarce commodity. Large cash incentives are required to induce people to risk the long prison terms that can come with drug trafficking. Consequently, by the time the stuff reaches some poor sucker on the streets of my hometown, or yours, it's so expensive that the only way they can pay for it is by breaking a window and stealing your VCR, or my stereo.

Also, because the stakes are so high, drug-dealing organizations develop their own security forces, which in many cases amount to small, private armies. As a result some inner-city neighborhoods get turned into mini-Beiruts. Even more ominously, with so much free-lance cash and firepower running around loose, we could eventually see some of our big cities turned into mini-Colombias where drug-lords call the tune and public officials dance, or else.

Meanwhile more kids are drawn into the drug underworld by the glamour of an illicit activity and the promise of big, really big, money, while the war against the drug trade only drains our treasury and erodes our fundamental commitment to civil liberties. And since we treat drug use as a criminal concern more than a public health one, the people at the bottom of the totem pole, the street-level addicts, have virtually nowhere to turn for help when or if they may decide to get clean.

The legalizers' answer to all this is to make drug use cheap, bureaucratic, and boring. Have addicts come into a clinic and get a prescription for their daily dose. Maybe even sell drugs over the counter in government-run stores.

In theory anyhow, such a cheap and risk-free supply would take the profit out of drug-dealing and remove the incentive for crime on the part of addicts. Meanwhile, they say, we should multiply our expenditures on medical and psychological treatment for addicts and put on a full-court press against drug abuse in the media and the schools. They point to the success that public awareness, backed with only the mildest of legal restrictions, has begun to show in turning the tide against cigarette smoking.

THE PERSON WHO HAS done more than anyone to re-legitimize the legalization discussion is Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke. When Schmoke spoke for legalization, people listened because he is a former prosecutor, and he is black. In the past, advocates of legalization have mostly been white middle-class libertarian types, while blacks, whose communities are most victimized by the drug trade, have often favored tougher legal sanctions.

In the cold, rational terms of cost-benefit analysis, the case for legalization may be convincing. Not so long ago, I was more-or-less convinced by the legalization argument on more-or-less libertarian grounds. I still don't think anyone should go to jail for simple possession of small amounts of any drug.

But on second thought, and after living in a low-income, inner-city community for 11 years, legalization sounds like triage. It seems to say that the enormous human potential of the people we see nodding out in doorways can be written off like a bad debt. It smacks of moral surrender.

Kurt Schmoke probably would channel all the resources saved by legalization into treatment and prevention. But once the crime problems were lessened, there's no reason to suspect that the majority of white politicians would hold to a similar commitment to the well-being of black and Hispanic addicts.

The far better approach is the one taken by Jesse Jackson. That is to make drugs a progressive issue. On the supply side, this would mean stressing a full-scale commitment to breaking the international drug cartel, while rooting out the long-standing involvement of U.S. intelligence agencies in the hard-drug trade and the complicity of the big U.S. banks that benefit from the trade. It would also mean using our economic clout to help Third World countries like Colombia break the drug money habit. On the demand side, as Jackson points out, curbing drug abuse must be tackled as an issue of community empowerment and cultural reconstruction in which saying yes to self-worth and social justice is at least as important as saying no to drugs.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.