With the cost of mass incarceration putting a heavy strain on state budgets, even conservatives are beginning to come around to the wisdom of ending the war on drugs. That does not include William Bennet and Joseph Califano Jr., who argue against any deescalation at all:
Legalization will only make harmful substances cheaper, easier to obtain, and more socially acceptable to use. The U.S. has some 60 million smokers, 20 million alcoholics and alcohol abusers, and 21.2 million illicit drug users (over seven million of whom are addicts). If illegal drugs were easier to obtain, this latter figure would rise sharply. Moreover, more readily available drugs will increase criminal activity. Most violent crimes, such as murder, assault and rape, occur when the perpetrator is either on drugs or drunk, and a high percentage of property crime involves people seeking money to buy drugs and alcohol.
The irony of them arguing that drugs should be illegal because most violent crimes are committed while high or drunk seems lost on them. We did after all, try to ban alcohol once by amending the Constitution, and the consequences were so dire that we had to amend it again. It never occurs to them that prohibition of drugs has similar consequences--fueling Mexico's massive, insurgent-like drug cartels and urban violence in the U.S. rather than Al Capone's bootleggers.
Absent from Bennett and Califano's case is any evidence at all that the War on Drugs has served to curb drug use, or that its consequences are worth the price of whatever reduction has occurred. Bennett and Califano rattle off a list of countries that have experimented with legalization, arguing that "legalization is no panacea," but never acknowledging the wide continuum that exists between full legalization and prohibition, and never once mentioning the costs of mass incarceration. Neither do they acknowledge a continuum between decriminalizing all drugs and pursuing alternative methods of sanction that would not involve long, inflexible, and draconian prison sentences. There are no "needle parks" in Massachusetts, where marijuana possession has been decriminalized. This is particularly odd since the inspiration for this op-ed is the bill from Reps. Ron Paul and Barney Frank, which wouldn't even legalize marijuana but rather would leave states to handle the issue by themselves.
Of all the European countries they mention struggling with drugs, not one can offer the dubious distinction of holding 25 percent of the entire world's prisoners, around 2 million people to the tune of $68 billion a year, as we can here in the Land of the Free. The consequences of this fall disproportionately on the poor and nonwhite, while wealthy or privileged users go on to live productive lives as say, I don't know, governor of Indiana. They also fail to mention Portugal on their European tour, where drug use has dropped following decriminalization, rather than leading to a nation of drug addicts.
About a quarter of U.S. prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders, another fact suspiciously absent from this column. Violent crimes and property crimes have dropped, even as the United States locks up more and more people--only 25 percent of which can be attributed to mass incarceration. The related social consequences of absent parents, neighborhoods that can't draw businesses, and entire populations of people who cannot secure employment because of criminal records--as well as those who go into prison as drug users and return as career criminals--are also absent from Bennett and Califano's argument. In making a case for continuing the War on Drugs, the two of them give the impression that there have been no negative consequences to it at all, which makes their case for it considerably weak.
