essay on prohibition of drugs

Prohibition: War on Drugs Essay

When and why alcohol prohibition was passed in the united states.

Prohibition of alcohol in the United States took place between 1920 and 1933. The reasons for this move were to minimize crime and exploitation, provide remedies to social issues, reduce revenue burden enhanced by prisons and shanties, and make health and hygienic standards in America better (Thornton 1). In short, it was thought that less drinking would lead to better lives.

Some scholars have referred to the ban as a prohibition experiment, rather than a law enforcement action. This is because compared to all other reforms, it is the only one that was intentionally and decisively repealed (Burham 1). Whereas this perspective regards prohibition as a total failure, others regard it as a success. Nevertheless, the lessons learned from prohibition are relevant and applicable to the contemporary world debate over the war on drug and substance abuse, abortion, gambling, and other issues.

Alcohol prohibition was a failure

According to Thornton (1), alcoholism declined shortly after Prohibition began. On the other hand, the Schaffer Drug Library (1) states that most indicators show alcohol consumption declined just before national prohibition began. However, by 1926, it had increased over its previous rates, leading to a rise in both crime and corruption that really strained the courts and prison systems.

There were also various newer problems; for instance, a drinking epidemic among children. The Introduction of Prohibition also triggered many drinkers into the use of other dangerous drugs such as opium, marijuana, and cocaine. This could not have taken place in the absence of the alcoholic prohibition.

In the workplace, Prohibition did not have positive effect on levels of productivity and absenteeism. American Labor Leader Andrew Furuseth spoke before Congress in 1926 and noted that just after prohibition began, there was a large change in the working population, but he also added:

“Two years afterwards I came through the same identical place, staying in Portland for about three days, and went to the very same place for the purpose of looking at the situation, and the condition was worse than it had been prior to the passage of the law” (Schaffer 1).

Prohibition did not only lead to a large loss in business revenue, it also affected the government spending. Primarily, tax revenues declined as alcohol traders closed shop or switched to underground market where the taxman could not reach them, while at the same time, production and distribution of alcohol business declined resulting to lower taxes.

In addition, as noted above, productivity and absenteeism at workplaces led to reduced income thus lower taxes to the government. In relation to government’s spending, large sums of money were spent on policy implementation and enforcement. In the perspective of its supporters, Prohibition related advantages were dependent on reduced quantity of alcohol consumption. Shortly after the ban, there were indicators that the quantity of consumption had indeed been lowered.

The iron law of Prohibition

The Eighteenth Amendment was the culmination of a long campaign by church and women’s organizations; they wanted an iron law that would keep people away from alcohol and its immoral behaviors.

Four conditions that indicate a reduction of alcohol intake: first, there must be a decrease in alcohol usage after Prohibition began. Although it was discovered that the amount of alcohol bought had declined some years before the ban, Prohibition did not exactly eliminate alcohol consumption as speakeasies became an underground sensation and gangsters ran liquor everywhere.

Secondly, although the drinking of alcohol had initially dropped, this did not hold in subsequent years as consumption eventually soared beyond its previous numbers. The annual degree of consumption had been reducing from 1910; however, it reduced greatly during the 1921 recession and shot up again after the ban in 1922. Even investment in enforcement resources showed little results such that, despite the 1933 repeal of Prohibition, alcoholic consumption levels exceeded the pre-prohibition period.

Thirdly, increase in enforcement resources were directly proportional (rather than inversely proportional, as they should have been) to alcoholic consumption. Therefore, this did not discourage consumption either.

The fourth condition is the most imperative in that, a decrease in alcohol consumption does not actually equate to a success of Prohibition. In this vein, the overall social implications of Prohibition must be analyzed.

Prohibition did not only have degenerating effects on alcoholic consumption, but also on its production and distribution, leading to unprecedented repercussions in the whole system. The most notable of those repercussions is “the iron law of Prohibition” which states that the more harsh the enforcement law, the more potent the prohibited product becomes.

Statistics reveal that prior to Prohibition, most Americans spent equally on beer and spirits; however, during Prohibition, beer became a liability because of its expense and bulkiness leading to increased consumption of both homemade and near beer.

Hence, the alcohol dealers turned their attention to cheaper and stronger liquors (whiskey) instead of beer in order to meet the needs of the consumers. The usual beer, wine, or whiskey was more highly alcoholic by volume during Prohibition than was during either pre-Prohibition or post-Prohibition (Thornton 4).

The production standards were compromised during Prohibition, resulting in largely non-uniform quality. Moonshine production by amateurs during Prohibition resulted to products that were detrimental to human health and contained dangerous ingredients. It was also reported that during Prohibition, the death rates due to consumption of toxic illicit liquor rose (Thornton 6).

Primarily, prohibitionists looked at alcohol related deaths as those occurring from cirrhosis of the liver. However, they did not count deaths stemming from other elements of prohibition drinking such as blood poisoning, fighting, car crashes, and other seemingly unrelated issues. These resulted in public relations constraints since the deaths were not necessarily accidental, though they were considered accidental.

In the 20’s there were no restrictions on the portrayal of drinking and smoking in film. Among the youth, the product became attractive due to its associated glamour. Young people gained interest in these vices by watching their parents and seeing glamorous stars drinking in the movies.

Apart from selling to the youth, the sellers successfully built up their businesses during Prohibition by selling to people who would not otherwise drink. Moreover, most old-fashioned Americans and new immigrants were unwilling to be left out making the whole period a moment when people drank more dedicatedly than at any other time.

One large deficit to Prohibition was that it changed the distribution pattern of alcohol. It eliminated the government-overseen bars and restaurants, replacing them with many covert speakeasies. In this, Prohibition increased the availability of alcohol such that, there were many places where people could buy alcohol from during this period than there were during pre-Prohibition.

Prohibition led to the elimination of alcohol production, location, and distribution regulations. Before Prohibition, the government had rules that could help deter selling alcohol; for example, near churches and schools on weekends and holidays.

However, during Prohibition, the regulations and oversight were eliminated while speakeasies opened up and dominated various areas that were initially dry. Following Prohibition, more Americans turned to increased intake of other forms of ‘legally’ distributed alcohol such as sacramental alcohol and patent medicines.

This happened despite existence of new regulations. Although the prohibitionists’ intention was to help people change from using alcohol to using dairy products, what was witnessed was an increase in spending on both alcohol and its substitutes. Apart from alcoholic medicine, those who could not consume alcohol switched to the use of other more addictive and dangerous drugs such as marijuana, hashish, and tobacco, to mention but a few.

The harmful consequences of the iron law of Prohibition proved more hindrance than benefit, thereby resulting to greater consumption. By these standards, it was only a mirage that alcoholic consumption decreased.

Prohibition was not a healthy initiative

Both American health and hygiene did not improve during Prohibition. This is indicated by the continued stream of deaths due to cirrhosis arising from increased intake of alcohol and other dangerous alcoholic beverages during the prohibition (Thornton 8). Those deaths, however, should not stand alone as indicators, since alcohol consumption went underground.

As noted earlier, there are other important indicators of drinking as well as cirrhosis. Contrary to the expectations of the prohibitionists that drunkards should be forgotten to let the young benefit from Prohibition, the health of young people was only at its best before Prohibition. For instance, during Prohibition, most young people’s lives were swept away due to increased alcohol intake.

Whereas it is medically proven that moderate alcoholic consumption is not harmful to one’s health but rather improves it, excess drinking on the other hand has devastating consequences on one’s health (Thornton 8). What took place during Prohibition was excessive alcoholism that had no positive impact on the American people.

Therefore, if the prohibitionists were concerned about the health of the public, they could have championed for moderate alcohol intake that has more health benefits, rather than banning alcohol as a whole. As we know now, to change the behavior of the people, one must change the sensibility of the culture.

Prohibition increased crime rate

The proponents of prohibition expected it to be a solution to all social evils (Thornton 10). Early reformers were right to assert that alcoholism led to poverty, broken homes, tax burden, and suffering. In this vein, America had registered a decline in crime rate towards the end of the 19 th century and at the beginning of the 20 th century (Thornton 10). That trend was disrupted by launching the prohibition on alcohol. Increased cases of homicide were noted during this time.

Records show that during this period, more funds were spent on police and many people were arrested for flouting prohibition regulations. Furthermore, although drunkenness and disorderly arrests increased, the rate of drinking did not decline. This meant that instead of helping to decongest prisons prohibition and its enforcement seemed to fill prisons. This in turn increased spending on police and prisons. Along with expected crimes, there were also increased cases of burglary, robbery, and murder during the prohibition period.

Prohibition raised corruption levels

Thornton points out that there was increased bribery among politicians and the police, as they dealt with the cottage industry of moonshine, speakeasies, and organized crime bosses and their families. There was also corruption inside the bureau of Prohibition itself, leading to an influx of cases in the courts regarding corruption and lessening the efficiency of the judicial system.

Prohibition was a success

To begin with, contrary to the views of many, the enforcement law was not all-embracing (Moore 6). The amendment banned the commercial production and distribution of alcoholic products; however, it did not ban both use and production of alcoholic beverages for personal consumption.

In addition, the enforcement was to be effected after one year in order to give people sufficient time to amass supplies. Secondly, Prohibition led to a decline in alcohol intake, reduction in deaths due to cirrhosis, and a reduction in admission to state hospitals for drinking psychosis.

In addition, alcoholic consumption declined leading to a drop in arrests that resulted from drunkenness and disorder (Moore 7). Thirdly, Prohibition did not contribute to organized crime because this existed before and after it. Moreover, other forms of crime did not rise dramatically during Prohibition (Moore 8). Fourth, after the repeal, there was increased alcohol intake. However, in the recent past, both thousands of motor vehicle deaths and homicides have been attributed to the use of alcohol (Moore, 10).

The modern war on drugs

Modern prohibition on drugs began in the nineteenth century due to a rise in production of both potent and habituating drugs from the medicinal industry (DuPont and Voth 3). Initially, drugs like cocaine were used for medical purposes, but later on, their use by public increased to unprecedented levels, resulting to distasteful consequences.

However, this period of carefree sale and consumption of illicit drugs ceased after the first two decades of the 20 th century (DuPont and Voth 4), with several acts requiring not only labeling but also prohibition of some drugs. This led to sparing sale of habituating drugs mainly for medical rather than addictive reasons.

This move by the social contract to regulate drugs of abuse also led to great reduction of drug abuse epidemic. Moreover, the United States drug control laws were internationally recognized and their enforcement led to a decline in use of habituating drugs between 1920 and 1965 (DuPont and Voth 7).

The non-use of both dangerous and alcoholic drugs continued until the culture of the ascendant youth who incorporated drugs as part of their life style. However, the use of hard drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and the hallucinogens resumed with increased calls for their legalization under allegations that they were better in comparison to alcohol and tobacco. This led to negative effects, a situation that continued until recent calls for legalization.

Lessons in relation to the current war on drug abuse

Prohibition, which failed to reduce alcoholism in America, can be likened to the modern war against drug abuse. However, repeal of Prohibition led to a dramatic decline in many types of crime and corruption (Thornton 15). The result of this was that, not only were jobs created, but also new voluntary actions came in to help alcoholics.

In addition, the lessons on prohibition should be used to suppress the desire to prohibit. Current prohibition of alcohol and other drugs may lead to a rise in crime rate, corruption and increased use of other dangerous substances that may be a threat to people’s health. It may also lead to increased government regulation on its citizen’s lives (Thornton 15).

Prohibition was supposed to lead to reduced crimes, reduced alcohol consumption, cut in taxes and generally a boost in the moral and economic aspect. However, although some theorists claimed that alcohol consumption declined following prohibition, others claimed that the consumption was lower before prohibition, and further claiming that the actual result of prohibition was an increase in other social vices.

For instance, prohibition led to increased crime, corruption, and use of hard drugs. From another perspective, alcohol consumption per se did not decline, as people turned to underground market for cheap and illicit alcohol. Modern war on drugs has however had some impact mainly due to regulations that have set up to regulate sale of addictive drugs. In this case, due to the failure of prohibition, legalization has been incorporated in regulation to provide a viable solution to the problem of substance abuse and related vices.

Recommendations

America government has done a lot with regard to war against alcoholism drug use. This ranges from funding social initiatives that provide awareness on drugs to prohibition by establishment of laws through the office of National Drug Control. These efforts have not yet led to a drastic drop in the use of drugs as fighting drug use in most cases seems to attract violent war from dealers.

Neither prohibition nor legalization can end drug use as it will only aggravate drug usage, crime, death and other drug – use related consequences. The government reserves the right to protect its citizens from the adverse effects of drugs and alcoholism use. However, in regulating this, force should not be used as in prohibition.

In an attempt to regulate, two approaches are recommended. First, the government should devise policies that focused on drug harm reduction and in this way concentrate on dealers rather than users. This will allow production of drugs with reduced potency and toxic composition. Secondly, a policy permitting only doctors to prescribe drugs to addicts can be put in place.

Works Cited

Burham, John C. “ New Perspectives on the Prohibition Experiment of the 1920s .” Journal of Social History. 1968. Web.

DuPont, Robert and Voth, Eric. “ Drug legalization, Harm reduction, and Drug policy .” Annals of Internal Medicine . 1995. Web.

Moore, Mark. “Institute for Behavior and Health: Actually Prohibition was a success.” The New York Times . 2009. Web.

Schaffer Library of Drug Policy “ Did Alcohol Prohibition Reduce Alcohol Consumption and Crime? ” Staff Writer. Web.

Thornton, Mark. “ Policy Analysis: Alcohol prohibition was a failure .” Policy Analysis , No. 157. 1991. Web.

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• Prohibition and the Rise of Organized Crime
• Prohibition and the Prohibition Movement
• Evidence of the Success of Alcohol Prohibition in the United States in 1920
• The Eighteenth Amendment
• Prohibition Benefits and Detriments
• National Prohibition Paradox in the United States
• Drug Use and Abuse in America: Historical Analysis
• Prohibition Period in the USA History: Why the Government Was Trying to Ban Alcohol
• The Effect of Prohibition on Organized Crime
• Prohibition & War on Drugs and Negative Effects
• History of Manhattan Project in US
• The Evolution of American Slavery
• History of the American Independence
• Why the Great Depression Occurred - a Public Budgeting Stand Point
• Mysteries of the Salem Witch Trials

Prohibition In America: A Brief History

For thousands of years, humans have smoked marijuana, used opium to treat pain, chewed coca (cocaine) leaves for energy, and ingested substances like the peyote cactus and psychoactive mushrooms to commune with the gods. And for thousands of years, communities took care of the problem of drug abuse through social and cultural pressures. The system was arguably working; these openly drug using societies did not collapse, or even particularly suffer for having no legal barriers to drug use. Yet, largely within the past century, America has pursued a relatively radical model of how to deal with intoxicating substances: The iron fist of Prohibition. Instead of just drug abuse (excessive, unhealthy patterns of use) being the problem, the Americans declared that all non-medically necessary drug use, no matter how responsible or careful, was evil and had to be opposed by any means available. The usual assumption is that the Prohibitionist answer to how a society should deal with drug use was born purely of a noble desire to protect users from harming themselves. The real story…is far less virtuous.

The Yellow Menace

In the 1870s in America, large numbers of Chinese immigrants were arriving in search of better lives. Facing severe racism , these early Chinese-Americans were often forced to take the most brutal and low-paying jobs, such as building the network of railroad tracks that was becoming the backbone of American industry and expansion. Beyond their strong work ethic, many Chinese brought something else to America: a habit of smoking opium. (An activity introduced to the Chinese by the British, who ran a massive and lucrative smuggling trade bringing opium from India into China after it was outlawed in the late 1700s. When the Chinese cracked down on the illegal trade, the British began what would become known as the Opium Wars, eventually forcing China to re-legalize the opium trade.)

At first, the Americans had little interest in this use of opium (which was legal regardless), and the Chinese tended to form insular communities which limited their interactions with the then deeply racist white American majority. Still, as is always the case, not everybody was content to ignore these new Americans. Some were curious, others simply became familiar with them by working with Chinese laborers on jobs. Eventually, the idea of smoking opium grew within the consciousness of white America, with the more daring visiting Chinese opium smoking parlors to indulge in this new fad in intoxicants. At first this mixing of racial groups primarily involved adventurous young men, and raised little objection from the general public. Shortly, however, white women as well began to frequent the opium parlors.

In 1890, the infamous tabloid newspaper publisher W. R. Hearst (who would later become a staunch supporter of the Nazis) began a series of articles about the ‘Yellow Menace’, luridly describing Chinese men as seducing white women with opium. Already harboring a deep dislike of the Chinese, who many feared would overrun America, the public attitude towards opium continued to harden. Early local laws in response to the ‘opium menace’ varied: Sometimes opium was made illegal for Chinese while remaining legal for white people, in other cases opium was made illegal for whites to use while allowing Chinese to continue to use. Either way, the important thing was to keep Asians and whites from socializing.

This association with immigrants wasn’t the only thing that frightened the federal government into creating tighter controls on opium. Beyond the Chinese, opium-containing products sold as cure-alls and elixirs had created an opium addict population that would look rather alien to modern eyes, consisting predominantly of middle and upper class white middle-aged women. These ‘accidental addicts’ had mostly become addicted through the use of popular ‘patent medicines’, which did not normally have labels identifying their contents. (Another concept that may seem odd to us today, when even a candy bar comes with exhaustive labeling.)

Part of the response to this epidemic was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which required labels on products identifying the presence and quantity of various drugs such as opium and cocaine. However, it became clear that not all users had accidentally stumbled into the habit; a significant minority genuinely wanted to get high. Between 1905-1919 several additional federal laws were passed restricting opium, including banning imports.

In the meanwhile, other forces were gathering. The Chinese government remained deeply opposed to the opium trade, which had addicted millions of their people and destroyed what had been a positive trade balance. The Americans, coming around to the prohibitionist position themselves, also saw ending the opium trade to China as a business opportunity: If China stopped buying opium (at great expense) they would have far more money to spend on other imports, such as American goods. In a series of international conventions in 1909 and 1911, China, the US, UK, and other nations agreed to restrict the opium trade.

In 1914, a watershed event in America’s race towards Prohibition occurs: The Harrison Narcotics Act is passed, which severely restricted the sale of opiates and cocaine. As interesting as what was restricted was how it was done. Recognizing that it was unconstitutional for the US government to simply outlaw drug sales/use, they employed a tactic that had been growing in popularity: They called it a tax. Instead of outlawing the drug trade, they required that anybody involved in it had to be registered and pay a tax. However, the tax was not equally applied; doctors and pharmacists were required to pay only a registration fee, while other people were required to pay a prohibitive tax on every sale. As a result, the sale of opiates and cocaine was effectively restricted to medical professionals “in the course of [their] professional practice only.” Others, unwilling or unable to pay the tax, would be charged with tax evasion and fined/imprisoned if they sold the restricted drugs. Thus, the federal government was able to tell itself that it was acting within the constitution because it was ‘just using its power to tax’, which of course they did have a right to do. (The argument against the constitutionality of federal prohibition at the time was primarily one of state’s rights and limited federal power; the states could outlaw drugs, the federal government could not.)

The Black Menace

Running in parallel to the saga of opium was the emergence of cocaine, the active component of coca leaves, which had been extracted by the Merck pharmaceutical company (which would later patent MDMA.) Initially hailed by Sigmund Freud as a “non-addictive” cure-all, cocaine saw use as a supplement in wines and was even the ‘special ingredient’ that Coca-Cola draws its name from. (‘Cola’ refers to the cola nut, which gave the drink its distinctive flavor.) Freud’s use of cocaine in his psychiatric practice did have a certain logic; a patient that is depressed or fatigued will almost certainly feel better with a liberal supply of cocaine, although that brings its own problems.

Helped along by this apparent medical value (medicine has traditionally focused on making people feel better instead of cures, which early medicine could rarely provide) cocaine also found its way into a myriad of elixirs and potions, sold door-to-door, from catalogues, traveling medicine shows, and even grocery stores. Movie stars and public figures used and endorsed the magical new drug, and use grew rapidly. Like opium, cocaine became regulated on the national level by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, requiring content labels for products containing cocaine. Also like opium, it was included in the Harrison Tax Act, which effectively created outright prohibition of the drug.

In the US, cocaine abuse was associated with black men, first in the form of laborers using the drug to increase endurance while working long, grueling hours, then in the form of widespread use by Jazz musicians at scandalously racially integrated nightclubs. In yet another echo of opium’s history, the press began to spread lurid stories of “cocaine crazed Negroes” attacking white women in the southern states. In response to this fear of drug-fueled blacks, some police departments switched to more powerful handguns out of concern that their current pistols were not powerful enough to bring down such rampaging monsters. Later, Harry Anslinger (head of what would eventually become the DEA) called for harsher penalties for cocaine by describing scenes of racially mixed groups dancing together at clubs under the presumptive influence of cocaine.

The One That Got Away

There seems to be a popular idea in America that cigarettes were only relatively recently identified as unhealthy. There were, in fact, powerful movements at least a century ago to ban cigarettes. Claims of smoking’s dangers sound eerily familiar today: Smoking causes (it was said) immorality, violence, insanity and so forth. Henry Ford, the auto manufacturing tycoon, was so concerned about its health risks that he banned smoking by his employees. Ironically, the drug with perhaps the highest rate of death and addiction known was also the one drug that has never been prohibited in the US, in spite of the anti-smoking movement reaching a fevered pitch during the same period as the enactment of alcohol and other prohibitions. In spite of its legality and high potential for addiction, tobacco is also one of the few drugs the US has had long-term success in reducing the use of. Currently, smoking kills over 400,000 Americans a year, far in excess of all other drugs combined.

Tossing The Bottle

The national stirrings against ‘chemical’ drugs like opium and cocaine were to some extent merely the latest incarnation of an old and growing trend towards prohibition of all recreational substances. Alcohol in particular had long been recognized as a cause of violence and death, and the anti-alcohol Temperance movement achieved its ultimate victory in 1919 with the enactment of the Volstead Act, which amended the US constitution to allow the national prohibition of alcohol. (Again it’s telling that they didn’t believe anything short of a constitutional amendment could give the federal government the power to regulate people’s drug use.)

The results of alcohol prohibition have become the stuff of legend and popular films: Powerful criminal organizations sprang up, arrested offenders clogged the system and corruption of the police and courts became rampant as a large portion of the population simply ignored the laws. There is some evidence that during prohibition, the average age of onset of alcohol use went down significantly, possibly because since alcohol sale was illegal in the first place, age restrictions on sales no longer applied. (A curious parallel can be seen today; young people take up using marijuana in greater percentages and at a younger age in the US than they do in the Netherlands, where marijuana is effectively legal but regulated.)

Alcohol prohibition was largely the work of religious conservatives who saw it as a way to combat the growing hedonism of urban dwellers; a return to old-time values and morality by attacking immoral lifestyles. The Protestant majority included in this category of ‘social undesirables’ the Catholics, whom they associated with alcohol use. Ironically, the passage of national prohibition marked the start of the Roaring Twenties, a period of drunken excess and sexual promiscuity that would not be equaled again until the Hippies.

Although alcohol use sharply declined immediately after the passage of prohibition, it immediately began an inexorable climb back up towards pre-ban usage levels. As public sentiment turned against prohibition, it became harder and harder to get juries to convict offenders. Finally admitting defeat, alcohol prohibition, America’s “noble experiment”, was repealed on December 5, 1933, and an unlucky thirteen years of government intrusion into people’s lives ended in wild drunken celebrations.

All Mexicans Are Crazy….

In the early 1900s, Mexican and Mexican-American families began an exodus out of their traditional homes in the far southern states, spreading out into the US in search of work and opportunity; the pursuit of the American Dream. The white majority was less than happy with this development, both out of simple bigotry and fear of competition for jobs (a concern that would only become greater when the prosperity of the “roaring twenties” gave way to the misery of the Great Depression .) As the Chinese had, the Hispanic population brought its own traditions, including different preferences in drugs: The conservative Midwest was about to be introduced to marijuana.

As had occurred with other drugs, the first prohibition laws were created on the state and local level. Some of these legislative sessions produced true gems of enlightenment, such as when a legislator in Texas expressed his support of marijuana prohibition by declaring that “All Mexicans are crazy and marijuana is what makes them crazy.” (Although “cannabis” was more traditional, legislators uniformly chose to call the plant “marihuana”, after the Mexican word for it.)

One of the more humorous results of the government taking the position that smoking marijuana caused homicidal insanity was that several murderers claimed their use of the drug as a defense, arguing that they could not be held responsible for what had clearly been an act committed under the insidious control of Reefer Madness. Several offenders were actually acquitted; after all, the government was backing their argument!

Federal marijuana prohibition was first enacted through various versions of the Uniform Narcotic Drug Acts (1927-1937.) In 1937, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 clarified and strengthened marijuana prohibition with what had by then become a rather shameless bit of unconstitutional fraud: They required that all marijuana be taxed and carry a tax stamp, establishing draconian punishments for ‘tax cheats’…and then refused to sell the tax stamps!

Marijuana prohibition, beyond being remarkable for the innocuousness of the drug in question, has been equally remarkable for the sheer extent of scientific fraud committed in order to justify its prohibition. Eager to rationalize this latest violation of the constitution as a necessary evil, Dr. James C. Munch, the US “Official Expert on Marihuana” testified that, upon testing the effects of marijuana on himself as part of his study into its dangers, he had experienced being transformed into a bat and flying about his office. Such a claim would be laughed at today, but this early-day Ricaurtism was eagerly believed by naive legislators.

• For more information, visit the excellent “An Inquiry into the Legal History of American Marijuana Prohibition.”

Damned Hippies! (World War II and the Rise of Psychedelic Culture.)

WW2 was more than just a memorable bit of ugliness; it also brought a social revolution to America. Before the war, the US was still largely rural. Boys grew up to be farmers, miners, and factory workers, colleges were for rich people’s kids, and women stayed home, cooking, cleaning, and raising their 2.5 children. God, country, and Mom’s apple pie: That was what we knew, and that was just fine by us. By the end of the war, however, a large percentage of our young men (over 16 million served in the armed forces) had seen a bit more of the world than they ever expected to (or perhaps wanted to.) They had swam in the waters of tropical paradises like Hawaii and the Philippine Islands, marched through bombed-out wastelands in Europe and the Japanese islands, bedded prostitutes of every conceivable national background, partied hard, fought hard, watched friends die by their sides, recovered from wounds in Australia and visited the architectural masterpieces of the Old World, all powered by morphine for their injuries, alcohol for their spirits, amphetamines and a daily ration of cigarettes for alertness. The innocent farm boys gathered up by the draft came back to the US far more worldly than any previous generation.

While many men fought abroad, other forces were at work at home. Women, who had long simply assumed that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’, had been called into service as a labor force, doing everything from packing rations to building the airplanes that would duel with German Messerschmitts and Japanese Zeros. “Free up a man to fight!” declared propaganda posters of the day. And so they did. Women became a vital part of American industry and commerce, realizing (often to their own surprise) that they really could do almost anything a man could do. Likewise, in the absence of their husbands who had volunteered or been drafted, they were forced to run all of the household affairs from home repairs to banking decisions to major purchases. They were working full time, earning their own paychecks, and spending them as they saw fit; what the early feminist thinkers had begun to accomplish through philosophy, the war had achieved through hardship.

Industry as well was transformed. During the war, the slumbering, mostly agricultural US became an industrial superpower, supplying American and allied forces with ships, tanks, aircraft, ammunition and almost everything else history’s largest military mobilization required. Huge factories sprang up almost overnight, mining and manufacturing technologies were pushed to the limits, chemistry, plastics and electronics underwent a huge surge in development. (The Teflon coating on your frying pan was actually developed for the WW2 US nuclear weapons program.)

Even when the war ended, the transformation of America was not complete. As part of the compensation package offered to military recruits, the US had created ‘ the GI College Bill ‘.  This program promised to help pay for college for any veteran who wanted to go. Traditionally, colleges were reserved for the elite; ‘normal folk’ had little use for them, and usually couldn’t afford them anyway. The GI Bill transformed that; college was now a very real possibility for millions of young men, and many of them took the government up on that offer. The factories and new technologies developed for the war were also suddenly ‘orphaned’, the crisis that had prompted their creation having passed. Transitioning from a wartime economy, they went looking for new markets and began churning out cars, household appliances, electronics, and anything else they could sell.

The net result of the war was thus not simply a new sense of national pride from our victory: It left the US with a lot of remarkably worldly, college educated young men, women with a new sense of their own strength and ability, and a massive industrial complex just begging to mass-produce anything the public wanted to buy. Modern America had taken root.

Reuniting young couples and invigorating the nation with a sense of its own limitless possibilities, WW2’s end also marked the start of the Baby Boom: A new, larger than ever generation of young Americans, being raised by parents that were more independent, prosperous, educated, and experienced in all manner of high culture and common debauchery than any generation before.

Whatever the reason, children who were raised during and after the war proved to be relatively liberal. Perhaps inspired by tales from their parents, many wanted to see the world, explore new ideas, experience new things and establish their own identities free from any cultural expectation. They gave birth to the modern civil rights and feminist movements, experimented with niche religions, openly expressed sexuality, and tried just about any drug they could get their hands on. It was the age of Yogis and birth control pills and marijuana…. “Turn on, tune in, drop out!” exhorted Timothy Leary, prophet of LSD. And many did.

This new movement of social openness and experimentation was not well received by the older generations. Instead of a new age of enlightenment (as the ‘Hippies’ saw themselves) the conservatives saw debauchery, sin, godlessness, communism, excess and indolence of the worst sorts. America, they were sure, was under attack by these terrible young people, who seemed more interested in pie-in-the-sky idealism than being productive solid citizens. Clearly, something was causing young people to run amuck…something was clouding their judgment, making them believe in awful things like racial equality, the legitimacy of sexual pleasure, and finding your own spiritual path. What could be responsible? Perhaps…the drugs they so openly used?

If the intent was to look non-threatening, the Hippies weren’t helping their cause. Calls to discover a new path to God through LSD and other psychedelic (‘mind opening’) drugs terrified conservative churches, convincing them that such things must be the work of Satan. As the Hippie movement grew, the combined desire to crush a perceived danger to the social order and the desire to make a statement of moral condemnation against ‘those druggies’ led to our current model of prohibition: The Controlled Substances Act of 1970, passed at the height of Hippie power.

The CSA banned virtually everything the government could think of: LSD, peyote, DMT, psilocybin mushrooms…all the popular psychedelics as well as the long-illegal drugs like marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. For this new system of prohibition, categories called Schedules were created. Schedule 1 contained drugs that were, according to the government, the most dangerous and addictive drugs known, drugs with no legitimate uses. It included heroin, marijuana…and all of the psychedelics.

Schedule 2 was to contain less addictive and dangerous drugs that had some medical use. Thus, morphine, cocaine, amphetamine, and methamphetamine (among others) were placed in S2, having been decreed by the government to be safer, less addictive, and of more legitimate value than things like marijuana and LSD. The lower Schedules (III-V) contained more benign materials with relatively modest addiction potential and recognized medical use.

The Analog Act and ‘Emergency Scheduling’

Lawmakers soon found themselves facing an unexpected problem: The emergence of new drugs that weren’t specifically Scheduled, and were thus legal. Ban one, and it seemed as though a new one popped right up in its place. To counter this phenomenon, they created the Analog Act , which allowed drugs that were only slightly different from outlawed drugs to be prosecuted as though they were the same as the illegal drug if the substance was sold for human consumption. This proved to be a fairly effective solution, and many people trying to skirt the law by selling close relatives of banned drugs on the streets have been successfully prosecuted under the Analog Act.

The real problem, however, turned out to be the Emergency Scheduling power that was granted to the Drug Enforcement Agency . Under this power, the DEA could declare virtually anything illegal with a 30-day notice. In theory they then have one year to decide what Schedule (if any) the newly banned drug belongs in; a decision that is supposedly based on careful consideration of all available evidence regarding the substance’s medical dangers, addiction potential, and medical uses. In practice, however, the process is quite simple: If a drug is being used recreationally and isn’t being sold by a major pharmaceutical company that will cut the DEA’s balls off for trying to take away a source of profit, then the drug in question will be placed in Schedule 1. Always.

Among the victims of this mechanism was this site’s main drug of interest: MDMA (Molly, ecstasy). The struggle to save MDMA from Schedule 1 proved to be unsuccessful, but is a source of insight into the process.

First, in order to be placed in Schedule 1, a drug must have no legitimate medical use. The DEA claimed that the only standard of whether or not a drug had medical value was decided solely by whether or not the FDA had approved it to be marketed for a specific illness. The medical community was probably rather surprised by this claim, as no doubt were the thousands of mental health professionals using MDMA in their practices. Indeed, even the FDA had rejected that idea in the past. Every court that heard the case agreed: A drug had medical use if any credible group of doctors believed it did, and MDMA met that standard.

The next requirement for placement in Schedule 1 was that a drug had to be highly addictive. This too proved to be a bit of a challenge, as not a single case of MDMA addiction was known at the time. As before, the courts agreed: MDMA was not highly addictive.

The final requirement for Schedule 1 was that a drug was so dangerous that it couldn’t be used safely under any circumstances. Beyond making the S1 status of marijuana all the more preposterous, this requirement for S1 proved to be a bit of a hurdle as well, since there wasn’t a single known case of death or injury from MDMA at the time. As before, the courts agreed the MDMA was reasonably safe, but this point of contention inspired the prohibitionists to create and champion the theory of MDMA neurotoxicity.)

In the end, it was the opinion of the court that MDMA could not be legally placed higher than Schedule 3, and declared that MDMA was still legal while ordering the DEA to reconsider their placement of MDMA in S1. The DEA essentially ignored the court’s order and placed it in Schedule 1 again. Ground down by years of expensive litigation, the private backers of the lawsuit against the DEA gave up, although the Scheduling could have been appealed again.

This case rather set the tone for all future ’emergency’ Schedulings: The Drug Enforcement Agency has reinvented and ignored the law as they see fit, and nobody has had the will or resources to fight them. Today, the same legally, constitutionally, and morally bankrupt standard of Scheduling is used: A drug is placed in Schedule 1 if it is used recreationally and they won’t have to fight a big corporation over it. All manner of drugs have fallen to the ’emergency’ Scheduling scythe, many of them with no history of causing addiction or even injury. Today, the DEA has its eye on Salvia divinorum, a rather unremarkable hallucinogen traditionally used by Mexican Indians. The official explanation given if and when they try to Schedule it should be a barrel of laughs…but laughs won’t stop these enemies of the Constitution.

Yet, all the news is not bad. Ultimately, the question of Prohibition as a social policy comes down to some rather basic questions of how dangerous drugs really are, and how we can most effectively protect people from those dangers. These are questions that science can answer, and indeed, is answering. On almost a weekly basis, some new study comes out finding that prohibition has failed, or that the drugs they have demonized aren’t nearly as sinister as we’ve been told. In the end, the drug war is winnable, and is being won…just not by the Prohibitionists.

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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• The Legalization of Drugs: For & Against

The Legalization of Drugs: For & Against

Douglas Husak and Peter de Marneffe, The Legalization of Drugs: For & Against , Cambridge University Press, 2005, 204pp., $18.99 (pbk), ISBN 0521546869.

Reviewed by William Hawk, James Madison University

In the United States the production, distribution and use of marijuana, heroin, and cocaine are crimes subjecting the offender to imprisonment. The Legalization of Drugs , appearing in the series "For and Against" edited by R. G. Frey for Cambridge University Press, raises the seldom-asked philosophical question of the justification, if any, of imprisoning persons for drug offenses.

Douglas Husak questions the justification for punishing persons who use drugs such as marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. He develops a convincing argument that imprisonment is never morally justified for drug use. Put simply, incarceration is such a harsh penalty that drug use, generally harmless to others and less harmful to the user than commonly supposed, fails to justify it. Any legal scheme that punishes drug users to achieve another worthy goal, such as creating a disincentive to future drug users, violates principles of justice.

Peter de Marneffe contends that under some circumstances society is morally justified in punishing persons who produce and distribute heroin. He argues a theoretical point that anticipated rises in drug abuse and consequent effects on young people may justify keeping heroin production and distribution illegal. According to de Marneffe's analysis, however, harsh prison penalties currently imposed on drug offenders are unjustified.

The points of discord between Husak's and de Marneffe's positions are serious but not as telling as is their implicit agreement. Current legal practices and policies which lead to lengthy incarceration of those who produce, distribute and use drugs such as marijuana, heroin, and cocaine are not, and cannot be, morally justified. Both arguments, against imprisoning drug users and for keeping heroin production illegal, merit a broad and careful reading.

The United States has erected an enormous legal structure involving prosecution and incarceration designed to prohibit a highly pleasurable, sometimes medically indicated and personally satisfying activity, namely using marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. At the same time, other pleasure-producing drugs, such as tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine, though legally regulated for the purposes of consumer safety and under-age consumption, can be purchased over the counter. As a result, while the health and safety risks of cigarettes may be greater than those proven to accompany marijuana, one can buy cigarettes from a vending machine and but go to prison for smoking marijuana. A rational legal system, according to Husak, demands a convincing, but as yet not forthcoming, explanation of why one pleasurable drug subjects users to the risk of imprisonment while the other is accommodated in restaurants.

Drug prohibitionists must face the problem that any "health risk" argument used to distinguish illicit drugs and subject offenders to prison sentences runs up against the known, yet tolerated, health risks of tobacco, as well as the additional health risks associated with incarceration. "Social costs" arguments targeting heroin or cocaine runs up against the known, yet tolerated, social costs of alcohol, as well as the additional social costs of incarceration. Even if one were to accept that illicit drugs were more harmful or exacted greater social costs than tobacco and alcohol (and the empirical studies referred to in the text do not generally support this thesis), that difference proves insufficient to justify imprisoning producers, distributors or especially users of illicit drugs.

Decriminalizing Drug Use. Douglas Husak presents a very carefully argued case for decriminalizing drug use. He begins his philosophical argument by clarifying the concepts and issues involved. To advocate the legalization of drugs calls for a legal system in which the production and sale of drugs are not criminal offenses. (p. 3) Criminalization of drugs makes the use of certain drugs a criminal offense, i.e. one deserving punishment. To argue for drug decriminalization, as Husak does, is not necessarily to argue for legalization of drugs . Husak entertains, but cautiously rejects the notion of a system where production and sale of drugs is illegal while use is not a crime. De Marneffe advocates such a system.

Punishing persons by incarceration demands justification. Since the state's use of punishment is a severe tool and incarceration is by its nature "degrading, demoralizing and dangerous" (p. 29) we must be able to provide "a compelling reason … to justify the infliction of punishment… ." (p. 34) Husak finds no compelling reason for imprisoning drug users. After considering four standard justifications for punishing drug users Husak concludes that "the arguments for criminalization are not sufficiently persuasive to justify the infliction of punishment."

Reasons to Criminalize Drug Use . 1) Drug users, it is claimed, should be punished in order to protect the health and well being of citizens . No doubt states are justified in protecting the health and well being of citizens. But does putting drug users in prison contribute to this worthy goal? Certainly not for those imprisoned. For those who might be deterred from using drugs the question is whether the drugs from which they are deterred by the threat of imprisonment actually pose a health risk. For one, Husak quotes research showing that currently illicit drugs do not obviously pose a greater health threat than alcohol or tobacco. For another, he quotes a statistic showing that approximately four times as many persons die annually from using prescribed medicines than die from using illegal drugs. In addition, one-fourth of all pack-a-day smokers lose ten to fifteen years of their lives but no one would entertain the idea of incarcerating smokers to further their health interests or in order to prevent non-smokers from beginning. In sum, Husak accepts that drug use poses health risks but contends that the risks are not greater than others that are socially accepted. Even if they were greater, imprisonment does not reduce, but compounds the health risks for prisoners.

2) Punishing drug users protects children . Husak here responds to de Marneffe's essay which focuses on potential drug abuse and promotes the welfare of children as a justification for keeping drug production and sale illegal. Husak finds punishing adolescent users a peculiar way to protect them. To punish one drug-using adolescent in order to prevent a non-using adolescent from using drugs is ineffective and also violates justice. Punishing adult users so that youth do not begin using drugs and do not suffer from neglect -- which is de Marneffe's position -- is not likely to prevent adolescents from becoming drug users, and even if it did, one would have to show that the harm prevented to the youth justifies imprisoning adults. Husak contends that punishing adults or youth, far from protecting youth, puts them at greater risk.

3) Some, e.g. former New York City mayor Guiliani, argue that punishing drug use prevents crime . Husak, conceding a connection between drug use and crime, turns the argument upside-down, showing how punishment increases rather than decreases crime. For one, criminalization of drugs forces the drug industry to settle disputes extra-legally. Secondly, drug decriminalization would likely lower drug costs thereby reducing economic crimes. Thirdly, to those who contend that illicit drugs may increase violence and aggression Husak responds that: a) empirical evidence does not support marijuana or heroin as causes of violence and b) empirical evidence does support alcohol, which is decriminalized, as leading to violence. Husak concludes "if we propose to ban those drugs that are implicated in criminal behavior, no drug would be a better candidate for criminalization than alcohol." (p. 70) Finally, punishing drug users likely increases crime rates since those imprisoned for drug use are released with greater tendencies and skills for future criminal activity.

4) Drug use ought to be punished because using drugs is immoral . In addition to standard philosophical objections to legal moralism, Husak contends that there is no good reason to think that recreational drug use is immoral. Drug use violates no rights. Other recreationally used drugs such as alcohol, tobacco or caffeine are not immoral. The only accounts according to which drug use is immoral are religiously based and generally not shared in the citizenry. Husak argues that legal moralism fails, and with it the attempts to justify imprisoning drug users because of health and well-being, protecting children, or reducing crime. Husak concludes, "If I am correct, prohibitionists are more clearly guilty of immorality than their opponents. The wrongfulness of recreational drug use, if it exists at all, pales against the immorality of punishing drug users." (p. 82)

Reasons to Decriminalize Drug Use. Husak's positive case for decriminalizing drug use begins with acknowledgement that drug use is or may be highly pleasurable. In addition, some drugs aid relaxation, others increase energy and some promote spiritual enlightenment or literary and artistic creativity. The simple fun and euphoria attendant to drug use should count for permitting it.

The fact that criminalization of drug use proves to be counter-productive provides Husak a set of final substantial reasons for decriminalizing use. Criminalizing drugs proves counter-productive along several different lines: 1) criminalization is aimed and selectively enforced against minorities, 2) public health risks increase because drugs are dealt on the street, 3) foreign policy is negatively affected by corrupt governments being supported solely because they support anti-drug policies, 4) a frank and open discussion about drug policy is impossible in the United States, 5) civil liberties are eroded by drug enforcement, 6) some government corruption stems from drug payoffs and 7) criminalization costs tens of billions of dollars per year.

Douglas Husak provides the conceptual clarity needed to work one's way through the various debates surrounding drug use and the law. He establishes a high threshold that must be met in order to justify the state's incarcerating someone. Having laid this groundwork Husak demonstrates that purported justifications for drug criminalization fail and that good reasons for decriminalizing drug use prevail. For persons who worry about what drug decriminalization means for children, Husak counsels that there is more to fear from prosecution and conviction of youth for using drugs than there is to fear from the drugs themselves.

Against Legalizing Drug Production and Distribution. Peter de Marneffe offers an argument against drug legalization . The argument itself is simple. If drugs are legalized, there will be more drug abuse. If there is more drug abuse that is bad. Drug abuse is sufficiently bad to justify making drug production and distribution illegal. Therefore, drugs should not be legalized. The weight of this argument is carried by the claim that the badness of drug abuse is sufficient to justify making drug production and sale illegal.

De Marneffe centers his argument on heroin. Heroin, he contends, is highly pleasurable but sharply depresses motivation to achieve worthwhile goals and meet responsibilities. Accordingly, children in an environment where heroin is legal will be subjected to neglect by heroin using parents and, if they themselves use heroin, they will be harmed by diminished motivation for achievement for the remainder of their lives. It is this later harm to the ambition and motivation of young people that, according to de Marneffe, justifies criminalizing heroin production and sale. As he puts it:

… the risk of lost opportunities that some individuals would bear as the result of heroin legalization justifies the risks of criminal liability and other burdens that heroin prohibition imposes on other individuals. The legalization of heroin would create a social environment -- call it the legalization environment -- in which some children would be at a substantially higher risk of irresponsible heroin abuse by their parents and in which some adolescents would be at a substantially higher risk of self-destructive heroin abuse. (p. 124)

Are the liberties of individual adult drug producers, distributors and users sacrificed? Yes, but this may be justified by de Marneffe's "burdens principle." According to the burdens principle, "the government violates a person's moral rights in adopting a policy that limits her liberty if and only if in adopting this policy the government imposes a burden on her that is substantially worse than the worst burden anyone would bear in the absence of this policy." (p. 159) According to this, de Marneffe claims that burdens on drug vendors or users may be justified by the prevention of harms to a particular individual or individuals. As he puts it:

What I claim in favor of heroin prohibition is that the reasons of at least one person to prefer her situation in a prohibition environment outweigh everyone else's reasons to prefer his or her situation in a legalization environment, assuming that the penalties are gradual and proportionate and other relevant conditions are met. (p. 161)

According to this view, the objective interest of a single adolescent in not losing ambition, motivation and drive justifies the imposition of burdens on other youth and adults who would prefer using drugs. Although Johnny might choose heroin use, his objective interest is for future motivation and ambition that is not harmed by heroin use.

De Marneffe's "burdens principle" seems to hold the whole society hostage to the objective liberty interests of one individual. Were this principle applied to drug producers or distributors who faced imprisonment it seems that imprisonment could not be justified. I suspect a concern for consistency here gives de Marneffe reason to make drug production and distribution illegal but without attaching harsh prison sentences for offenders. He advocates an environment where drugs are not legal, in order to protect youth against both abuse and their own choices that may cause them to become unmotivated, but recognizes that prison sentences are unjustified as a way to support such a system.

In The Legalization of Drugs the reader gets two interesting arguments. Douglas Husak makes a compelling case against punishing drug users. His position amounts to drug decriminalization with skepticism toward making drug production and sale illegal. On the other side, Peter de Marneffe justifies making drug production and sale illegal based upon the diminishment of future interests of young people. De Marneffe introduces a "burdens principle" which is likely much too strong a commitment to individual interests than could ever be realized in a civil society. In both instances, the reader is treated to arguments that effectively undermine current drug policy. The book provides philosophical argumentation that should stimulate a societal conversation about the justifiability of current drug laws.

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Decriminalizing Drugs: The Social and Cultural Implications

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Published: Jan 25, 2024

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Introduction, history of drug criminalization, social implications of decriminalizing drugs, cultural implications of decriminalizing drugs, shifting the conversation around addiction and substance abuse.

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The monthly magazine of opinion.

Against the Legalization of Drugs

That same year, the eminent economist Milton Friedman published an essay in Newsweek in which he called for legalizing heroin. His argument was on two grounds: as a matter of ethics, the government has no right to tell people not to use heroin (or to drink or to commit suicide); as a matter of economics, the prohibition of drug use imposes costs on society that far exceed the benefits. Others, such as the psychoanalyst Thomas Szasz, made the same argument.

We did not take Friedman’s advice. (Government commissions rarely do.) I do not recall that we even discussed legalizing heroin, though we did discuss (but did not take action on) legalizing a drug, cocaine, that many people then argued was benign. Our marching orders were to figure out how to win the war on heroin, not to run up the white flag of surrender.

That was 1972. Today, we have the same number of heroin addicts that we had then—half a million, give or take a few thousand. Having that many heroin addicts is no trivial matter; these people deserve our attention. But not having had an increase in that number for over fifteen years is also something that deserves our attention. What happened to the “heroin epidemic” that many people once thought would overwhelm us?

The facts are clear: a more or less stable pool of heroin addicts has been getting older, with relatively few new recruits. In 1976 the average age of heroin users who appeared in hospital emergency rooms was about twenty-seven; ten years later it was thirty-two. More than two-thirds of all heroin users appearing in emergency rooms are now over the age of thirty. Back in the early 1970’s, when heroin got onto the national political agenda, the typical heroin addict was much younger, often a teenager. Household surveys show the same thing—the rate of opiate use (which includes heroin) has been flat for the better part of two decades. More fine-grained studies of inner-city neighborhoods confirm this. John Boyle and Ann Brunswick found that the percentage of young blacks in Harlem who used heroin fell from 8 percent in 1970-71 to about 3 percent in 1975-76.

Why did heroin lose its appeal for young people? When the young blacks in Harlem were asked why they stopped, more than half mentioned “trouble with the law” or “high cost” (and high cost is, of course, directly the result of law enforcement). Two-thirds said that heroin hurt their health; nearly all said they had had a bad experience with it. We need not rely, however, simply on what they said. In New York City in 1973-75, the street price of heroin rose dramatically and its purity sharply declined, probably as a result of the heroin shortage caused by the success of the Turkish government in reducing the supply of opium base and of the French government in closing down heroin-processing laboratories located in and around Marseilles. These were short-lived gains for, just as Friedman predicted, alternative sources of supply—mostly in Mexico—quickly emerged. But the three-year heroin shortage interrupted the easy recruitment of new users.

Health and related problems were no doubt part of the reason for the reduced flow of recruits. Over the preceding years, Harlem youth had watched as more and more heroin users died of overdoses, were poisoned by adulterated doses, or acquired hepatitis from dirty needles. The word got around: heroin can kill you. By 1974 new hepatitis cases and drug-overdose deaths had dropped to a fraction of what they had been in 1970.

Alas, treatment did not seem to explain much of the cessation in drug use. Treatment programs can and do help heroin addicts, but treatment did not explain the drop in the number of new users (who by definition had never been in treatment) nor even much of the reduction in the number of experienced users.

No one knows how much of the decline to attribute to personal observation as opposed to high prices or reduced supply. But other evidence suggests strongly that price and supply played a large role. In 1972 the National Advisory Council was especially worried by the prospect that U.S. servicemen returning to this country from Vietnam would bring their heroin habits with them. Fortunately, a brilliant study by Lee Robins of Washington University in St. Louis put that fear to rest. She measured drug use of Vietnam veterans shortly after they had returned home. Though many had used heroin regularly while in Southeast Asia, most gave up the habit when back in the United States. The reason: here, heroin was less available and sanctions on its use were more pronounced. Of course, if a veteran had been willing to pay enough—which might have meant traveling to another city and would certainly have meant making an illegal contact with a disreputable dealer in a threatening neighborhood in order to acquire a (possibly) dangerous dose—he could have sustained his drug habit. Most veterans were unwilling to pay this price, and so their drug use declined or disappeared.

_____________

Reliving the Past

Suppose we had taken Friedman’s advice in 1972. What would have happened? We cannot be entirely certain, but at a minimum we would have placed the young heroin addicts (and, above all, the prospective addicts) in a very different position from the one in which they actually found themselves. Heroin would have been legal. Its price would have been reduced by 95 percent (minus whatever we chose to recover in taxes.) Now that it could be sold by the same people who make aspirin, its quality would have been assured—no poisons, no adulterants. Sterile hypodermic needles would have been readily available at the neighborhood drugstore, probably at the same counter where the heroin was sold. No need to travel to big cities or unfamiliar neighborhoods—heroin could have been purchased anywhere, perhaps by mail order.

There would no longer have been any financial or medical reason to avoid heroin use. Anybody could have afforded it. We might have tried to prevent children from buying it, but as we have learned from our efforts to prevent minors from buying alcohol and tobacco, young people have a way of penetrating markets theoretically reserved for adults. Returning Vietnam veterans would have discovered that Omaha and Raleigh had been converted into the pharmaceutical equivalent of Saigon.

Under these circumstances, can we doubt for a moment that heroin use would have grown exponentially? Or that a vastly larger supply of new users would have been recruited? Professor Friedman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose understanding of market forces is profound. What did he think would happen to consumption under his legalized regime? Here are his words: “Legalizing drugs might increase the number of addicts, but it is not clear that it would. Forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the young.”

Really? I suppose that we should expect no increase in Porsche sales if we cut the price by 95 percent, no increase in whiskey sales if we cut the price by a comparable amount—because young people only want fast cars and strong liquor when they are “forbidden.” Perhaps Friedman’s uncharacteristic lapse from the obvious implications of price theory can be explained by a misunderstanding of how drug users are recruited. In his 1972 essay he said that “drug addicts are deliberately made by pushers, who give likely prospects their first few doses free.” If drugs were legal it would not pay anybody to produce addicts, because everybody would buy from the cheapest source. But as every drug expert knows, pushers do not produce addicts. Friends or acquaintances do. In fact, pushers are usually reluctant to deal with non-users because a non-user could be an undercover cop. Drug use spreads in the same way any fad or fashion spreads: somebody who is already a user urges his friends to try, or simply shows already-eager friends how to do it.

But we need not rely on speculation, however plausible, that lowered prices and more abundant supplies would have increased heroin usage. Great Britain once followed such a policy and with almost exactly those results. Until the mid-1960’s, British physicians were allowed to prescribe heroin to certain classes of addicts. (Possessing these drugs without a doctor’s prescription remained a criminal offense.) For many years this policy worked well enough because the addict patients were typically middle-class people who had become dependent on opiate painkillers while undergoing hospital treatment. There was no drug culture. The British system worked for many years, not because it prevented drug abuse, but because there was no problem of drug abuse that would test the system.

All that changed in the 1960’s. A few unscrupulous doctors began passing out heroin in wholesale amounts. One doctor prescribed almost 600,000 heroin tablets—that is, over thirteen pounds—in just one year. A youthful drug culture emerged with a demand for drugs far different from that of the older addicts. As a result, the British government required doctors to refer users to government-run clinics to receive their heroin.

But the shift to clinics did not curtail the growth in heroin use. Throughout the 1960’s the number of addicts increased—the late John Kaplan of Stanford estimated by fivefold—in part as a result of the diversion of heroin from clinic patients to new users on the streets. An addict would bargain with the clinic doctor over how big a dose he would receive. The patient wanted as much as he could get, the doctor wanted to give as little as was needed. The patient had an advantage in this conflict because the doctor could not be certain how much was really needed. Many patients would use some of their “maintenance” dose and sell the remaining part to friends, thereby recruiting new addicts. As the clinics learned of this, they began to shift their treatment away from heroin and toward methadone, an addictive drug that, when taken orally, does not produce a “high” but will block the withdrawal pains associated with heroin abstinence.

Whether what happened in England in the 1960’s was a mini-epidemic or an epidemic depends on whether one looks at numbers or at rates of change. Compared to the United States, the numbers were small. In 1960 there were 68 heroin addicts known to the British government; by 1968 there were 2,000 in treatment and many more who refused treatment. (They would refuse in part because they did not want to get methadone at a clinic if they could get heroin on the street.) Richard Hartnoll estimates that the actual number of addicts in England is five times the number officially registered. At a minimum, the number of British addicts increased by thirtyfold in ten years; the actual increase may have been much larger.

In the early 1980’s the numbers began to rise again, and this time nobody doubted that a real epidemic was at hand. The increase was estimated to be 40 percent a year. By 1982 there were thought to be 20,000 heroin users in London alone. Geoffrey Pearson reports that many cities—Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, and Sheffield among them—were now experiencing a drug problem that once had been largely confined to London. The problem, again, was supply. The country was being flooded with cheap, high-quality heroin, first from Iran and then from Southeast Asia.

The United States began the 1960’s with a much larger number of heroin addicts and probably a bigger at-risk population than was the case in Great Britain. Even though it would be foolhardy to suppose that the British system, if installed here, would have worked the same way or with the same results, it would be equally foolhardy to suppose that a combination of heroin available from leaky clinics and from street dealers who faced only minimal law-enforcement risks would not have produced a much greater increase in heroin use than we actually experienced. My guess is that if we had allowed either doctors or clinics to prescribe heroin, we would have had far worse results than were produced in Britain, if for no other reason than the vastly larger number of addicts with which we began. We would have had to find some way to police thousands (not scores) of physicians and hundreds (not dozens) of clinics. If the British civil service found it difficult to keep heroin in the hands of addicts and out of the hands of recruits when it was dealing with a few hundred people, how well would the American civil service have accomplished the same tasks when dealing with tens of thousands of people?

Back to the Future

Now cocaine, especially in its potent form, crack, is the focus of attention. Now as in 1972 the government is trying to reduce its use. Now as then some people are advocating legalization. Is there any more reason to yield to those arguments today than there was almost two decades ago? 1

I think not. If we had yielded in 1972 we almost certainly would have had today a permanent population of several million, not several hundred thousand, heroin addicts. If we yield now we will have a far more serious problem with cocaine.

Crack is worse than heroin by almost any measure. Heroin produces a pleasant drowsiness and, if hygienically administered, has only the physical side effects of constipation and sexual impotence. Regular heroin use incapacitates many users, especially poor ones, for any productive work or social responsibility. They will sit nodding on a street corner, helpless but at least harmless. By contrast, regular cocaine use leaves the user neither helpless nor harmless. When smoked (as with crack) or injected, cocaine produces instant, intense, and short-lived euphoria. The experience generates a powerful desire to repeat it. If the drug is readily available, repeat use will occur. Those people who progress to “bingeing” on cocaine become devoted to the drug and its effects to the exclusion of almost all other considerations—job, family, children, sleep, food, even sex. Dr. Frank Gawin at Yale and Dr. Everett Ellinwood at Duke report that a substantial percentage of all high-dose, binge users become uninhibited, impulsive, hypersexual, compulsive, irritable, and hyperactive. Their moods vacillate dramatically, leading at times to violence and homicide.

Women are much more likely to use crack than heroin, and if they are pregnant, the effects on their babies are tragic. Douglas Besharov, who has been following the effects of drugs on infants for twenty years, writes that nothing he learned about heroin prepared him for the devastation of cocaine. Cocaine harms the fetus and can lead to physical deformities or neurological damage. Some crack babies have for all practical purposes suffered a disabling stroke while still in the womb. The long-term consequences of this brain damage are lowered cognitive ability and the onset of mood disorders. Besharov estimates that about 30,000 to 50,000 such babies are born every year, about 7,000 in New York City alone. There may be ways to treat such infants, but from everything we now know the treatment will be long, difficult, and expensive. Worse, the mothers who are most likely to produce crack babies are precisely the ones who, because of poverty or temperament, are least able and willing to obtain such treatment. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that crack mothers are likely to abuse their infants.

The notion that abusing drugs such as cocaine is a “victimless crime” is not only absurd but dangerous. Even ignoring the fetal drug syndrome, crack-dependent people are, like heroin addicts, individuals who regularly victimize their children by neglect, their spouses by improvidence, their employers by lethargy, and their coworkers by carelessness. Society is not and could never be a collection of autonomous individuals. We all have a stake in ensuring that each of us displays a minimal level of dignity, responsibility, and empathy. We cannot, of course, coerce people into goodness, but we can and should insist that some standards must be met if society itself—on which the very existence of the human personality depends—is to persist. Drawing the line that defines those standards is difficult and contentious, but if crack and heroin use do not fall below it, what does?

The advocates of legalization will respond by suggesting that my picture is overdrawn. Ethan Nadelmann of Princeton argues that the risk of legalization is less than most people suppose. Over 20 million Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five have tried cocaine (according to a government survey), but only a quarter million use it daily. From this Nadelmann concludes that mat most 3 percent of all young people who try cocaine develop a problem with it. The implication is clear: make the drug legal and we only have to worry about 3 percent of our youth.

The implication rests on a logical fallacy and a factual error. The fallacy is this: the percentage of occasional cocaine users who become binge users when the drug is illegal (and thus expensive and hard to find) tells us nothing about the percentage who will become dependent when the drug is legal (and thus cheap and abundant). Drs. Gawin and Ellinwood report, in common with several other researchers, that controlled or occasional use of cocaine changes to compulsive and frequent use “when access to the drug increases” or when the user switches from snorting to smoking. More cocaine more potently administered alters, perhaps sharply, the proportion of “controlled” users who become heavy users.

The factual error is this: the federal survey Nadelmann quotes was done in 1985, before crack had become common. Thus the probability of becoming dependent on cocaine was derived from the responses of users who snorted the drug. The speed and potency of cocaine’s action increases dramatically when it is smoked. We do not yet know how greatly the advent of crack increases the risk of dependency, but all the clinical evidence suggests that the increase is likely to be large.

It is possible that some people will not become heavy users even when the drug is readily available in its most potent form. So far there are no scientific grounds for predicting who will and who will not become dependent. Neither socioeconomic background nor personality traits differentiate between casual and intensive users. Thus, the only way to settle the question of who is correct about the effect of easy availability on drug use, Nadelmann or Gawin and Ellinwood, is to try it and see. But that social experiment is so risky as to be no experiment at all, for if cocaine is legalized and if the rate of its abusive use increases dramatically, there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle, and it is not a kindly genie.

Have we Lost?

Many people who agree that there are risks in legalizing cocaine or heroin still favor it because, they think, we have lost the war on drugs. “Nothing we have done has worked” and the current federal policy is just “more of the same.” Whatever the costs of greater drug use, surely they would be less than the costs of our present, failed efforts.

That is exactly what I was told in 1972—and heroin is not quite as bad a drug as cocaine. We did not surrender and we did not lose. We did not win, either. What the nation accomplished then was what most efforts to save people from themselves accomplish: the problem was contained and the number of victims minimized, all at a considerable cost in law enforcement and increased crime. Was the cost worth it? I think so, but others may disagree. What are the lives of would-be addicts worth? I recall some people saying to me then, “Let them kill themselves.” I was appalled. Happily, such views did not prevail.

Have we lost today? Not at all. High-rate cocaine use is not commonplace. The National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) reports that less than 5 percent of high-school seniors used cocaine within the last thirty days. Of course this survey misses young people who have dropped out of school and miscounts those who lie on the questionnaire, but even if we inflate the NIDA estimate by some plausible percentage, it is still not much above 5 percent. Medical examiners reported in 1987 that about 1,500 died from cocaine use; hospital emergency rooms reported about 30,000 admissions related to cocaine abuse.

These are not small numbers, but neither are they evidence of a nationwide plague that threatens to engulf us all. Moreover, cities vary greatly in the proportion of people who are involved with cocaine. To get city-level data we need to turn to drug tests carried out on arrested persons, who obviously are more likely to be drug users than the average citizen. The National Institute of Justice, through its Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) project, collects urinalysis data on arrestees in 22 cities. As we have already seen, opiate (chiefly heroin) use has been flat or declining in most of these cities over the last decade. Cocaine use has gone up sharply, but with great variation among cities. New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., all report that two-thirds or more of their arrestees tested positive for cocaine, but in Portland, San Antonio, and Indianapolis the percentage was one-third or less.

In some neighborhoods, of course, matters have reached crisis proportions. Gangs control the streets, shootings terrorize residents, and drug-dealing occurs in plain view. The police seem barely able to contain matters. But in these neighborhoods—unlike at Palo Alto cocktail parties—the people are not calling for legalization, they are calling for help. And often not much help has come. Many cities are willing to do almost anything about the drug problem except spend more money on it. The federal government cannot change that; only local voters and politicians can. It is not clear that they will.

It took about ten years to contain heroin. We have had experience with crack for only about three or four years. Each year we spend perhaps $11 billion on law enforcement (and some of that goes to deal with marijuana) and perhaps $2 billion on treatment. Large sums, but not sums that should lead anyone to say, “We just can’t afford this any more.”

The illegality of drugs increases crime, partly because some users turn to crime to pay for their habits, partly because some users are stimulated by certain drugs (such as crack or PCP) to act more violently or ruthlessly than they otherwise would, and partly because criminal organizations seeking to control drug supplies use force to manage their markets. These also are serious costs, but no one knows how much they would be reduced if drugs were legalized. Addicts would no longer steal to pay black-market prices for drugs, a real gain. But some, perhaps a great deal, of that gain would be offset by the great increase in the number of addicts. These people, nodding on heroin or living in the delusion-ridden high of cocaine, would hardly be ideal employees. Many would steal simply to support themselves, since snatch-and grab, opportunistic crime can be manged even by people unable to hold a regular job or plan an elaborate crime. Those British addicts who get their supplies from government clinics are not models of law-abiding decency. Most are in crime, and though their per-capita rate of criminality may be lower thanks to the cheapness of their drugs, the total volume of crime they produce may be quite large. Of course, society could decide to support all unemployable addicts on welfare, but that would mean that gains from lowered rates of crime would have to be offset by large increases in welfare budgets.

Proponents of legalization claim that the costs of having more addicts around would be largely if not entirely offset by having more money available with which to treat and care for them. The money would come from taxes levied on the sale of heroin and cocaine.

To obtain this fiscal dividend, however, legalization’s supporters must first solve an economic dilemma. If they want to raise a lot of money to pay for welfare and treatment, the tax rate on the drugs will have to be quite high. Even if they themselves do not want a high rate, the politicians’ love of “sin taxes” would probably guarantee that it would be high anyway. But the higher the tax, the higher the price of the drug, and the higher the price the greater the likelihood that addicts will turn to crime to find the money for it and that criminal organizations will be formed to sell tax-free drugs at below-market rates. If we managed to keep taxes (and thus prices) low, we would get that much less money to pay for welfare and treatment and more people could afford to become addicts. There may be an optimal tax rate for drugs that maximizes revenue while minimizing crime, bootlegging, and the recruitment of new addicts, but our experience with alcohol does not suggest that we know how to find it.

The Benefits of Illegality

The advocates of legalization find nothing to be said in favor of the current system except, possibly, that it keeps the number of addicts smaller than it would otherwise be. In fact, the benefits are more substantial than that.

First, treatment. All the talk about providing “treatment on demand” implies that there is a demand for treatment. That is not quite right. There are some drug-dependent people who genuinely want treatment and will remain in it if offered; they should receive it. But there are far more who want only short-term help after a bad crash; once stabilized and bathed, they are back on the street again, hustling. And even many of the addicts who enroll in a program honestly wanting help drop out after a short while when they discover that help takes time and commitment. Drug-dependent people have very short time horizons and a weak capacity for commitment. These two groups—those looking for a quick fix and those unable to stick with a long-term fix—are not easily helped. Even if we increase the number of treatment slots—as we should—we would have to do something to make treatment more effective.

One thing that can often make it more effective is compulsion. Douglas Anglin of UCLA, in common with many other researchers, has found that the longer one stays in a treatment program, the better the chances of a reduction in drug dependency. But he, again like most other researchers, has found that drop-out rates are high. He has also found, however, that patients who enter treatment under legal compulsion stay in the program longer than those not subject to such pressure. His research on the California civil commitment program, for example, found that heroin users involved with its required drug-testing program had over the long term a lower rate of heroin use than similar addicts who were free of such constraints. If for many addicts compulsion is a useful component of treatment, it is not clear how compulsion could be achieved in a society in which purchasing, possessing, and using the drug were legal. It could be managed, I suppose, but I would not want to have to answer the challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union that it is wrong to compel a person to undergo treatment for consuming a legal commodity.

Next, education. We are now investing substantially in drug-education programs in the schools. Though we do not yet know for certain what will work, there are some promising leads. But I wonder how credible such programs would be if they were aimed at dissuading children from doing something perfectly legal. We could, of course, treat drug education like smoking education: inhaling crack and inhaling tobacco are both legal, but you should not do it because it is bad for you. That tobacco is bad for you is easily shown; the Surgeon General has seen to that. But what do we say about crack? It is pleasurable, but devoting yourself to so much pleasure is not, a good idea (though perfectly legal)? Unlike tobacco, cocaine will not give you cancer or emphysema, but it will lead you to neglect your duties to family, job, and neighborhood? Everybody is doing cocaine, but you should not?

Again, it might be possible under a legalized regime to have effective drug-prevention programs, but their effectiveness would depend heavily, I think, on first having decided that cocaine use, like tobacco use, is purely a matter of practical consequences; no fundamental moral significance attaches to either. But if we believe—as I do—that dependency on certain mind-altering drugs is a moral issue and that their illegality rests in part on their immorality, then legalizing them undercuts, if it does not eliminate altogether, the moral message.

That message is at the root of the distinction we now make between nicotine and cocaine. Both are highly addictive; both have harmful physical effects. But we treat the two drugs differently, not simply because nicotine is so widely used as to be beyond the reach of effective prohibition, but because its use does not destroy the user’s essential humanity. Tobacco shortens one’s life, cocaine debases it. Nicotine alters one’s habits, cocaine alters one’s soul. The heavy use of crack, unlike the heavy use of tobacco, corrodes those natural sentiments of sympathy and duty that constitute our human nature and make possible our social life. To say, as does Nadelmann, that distinguishing morally between tobacco and cocaine is “little more than a transient prejudice” is close to saying that morality itself is but a prejudice.

The Alcohol Problem

Now we have arrived where many arguments about legalizing drugs begin: is there any reason to treat heroin and cocaine differently from the way we treat alcohol?

There is no easy answer to that question because, as with so many human problems, one cannot decide simply on the basis either of moral principles or of individual consequences; one has to temper any policy by a common-sense judgment of what is possible. Alcohol, like heroin, cocaine, PCP, and marijuana, is a drug—that is, a mood-altering substance—and consumed to excess it certainly has harmful consequences: auto accidents, barroom fights, bedroom shootings. It is also, for some people, addictive. We cannot confidently compare the addictive powers of these drugs, but the best evidence suggests that crack and heroin are much more addictive than alcohol.

Many people, Nadelmann included, argue that since the health and financial costs of alcohol abuse are so much higher than those of cocaine or heroin abuse, it is hypocritical folly to devote our efforts to preventing cocaine or drug use. But as Mark Kleiman of Harvard has pointed out, this comparison is quite misleading. What Nadelmann is doing is showing that a legalized drug (alcohol) produces greater social harm than illegal ones (cocaine and heroin). But of course. Suppose that in the 1920’s we had made heroin and cocaine legal and alcohol illegal. Can anyone doubt that Nadelmann would now be writing that it is folly to continue our ban on alcohol because cocaine and heroin are so much more harmful?

And let there be no doubt about it—widespread heroin and cocaine use are associated with all manner of ills. Thomas Bewley found that the mortality rate of British heroin addicts in 1968 was 28 times as high as the death rate of the same age group of non-addicts, even though in England at the time an addict could obtain free or low-cost heroin and clean needles from British clinics. Perform the following mental experiment: suppose we legalized heroin and cocaine in this country. In what proportion of auto fatalities would the state police report that the driver was nodding off on heroin or recklessly driving on a coke high? In what proportion of spouse-assault and child-abuse cases would the local police report that crack was involved? In what proportion of industrial accidents would safety investigators report that the forklift or drill-press operator was in a drug-induced stupor or frenzy? We do not know exactly what the proportion would be, but anyone who asserts that it would not be much higher than it is now would have to believe that these drugs have little appeal except when they are illegal. And that is nonsense.

An advocate of legalization might concede that social harm—perhaps harm equivalent to that already produced by alcohol—would follow from making cocaine and heroin generally available. But at least, he might add, we would have the problem “out in the open” where it could be treated as a matter of “public health.” That is well and good, if we knew how to treat—that is, cure—heroin and cocaine abuse. But we do not know how to do it for all the people who would need such help. We are having only limited success in coping with chronic alcoholics. Addictive behavior is immensely difficult to change, and the best methods for changing it—living in drug-free therapeutic communities, becoming faithful members of Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous—require great personal commitment, a quality that is, alas, in short supply among the very persons—young people, disadvantaged people—who are often most at risk for addiction.

Suppose that today we had, not 15 million alcohol abusers, but half a million. Suppose that we already knew what we have learned from our long experience with the widespread use of alcohol. Would we make whiskey legal? I do not know, but I suspect there would be a lively debate. The Surgeon General would remind us of the risks alcohol poses to pregnant women. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would point to the likelihood of more highway fatalities caused by drunk drivers. The Food and Drug Administration might find that there is a nontrivial increase in cancer associated with alcohol consumption. At the same time the police would report great difficulty in keeping illegal whiskey out of our cities, officers being corrupted by bootleggers, and alcohol addicts often resorting to crime to feed their habit. Libertarians, for their part, would argue that every citizen has a right to drink anything he wishes and that drinking is, in any event, a “victimless crime.”

However the debate might turn out, the central fact would be that the problem was still, at that point, a small one. The government cannot legislate away the addictive tendencies in all of us, nor can it remove completely even the most dangerous addictive substances. But it can cope with harms when the harms are still manageable.

Science and Addiction

One advantage of containing a problem while it is still containable is that it buys time for science to learn more about it and perhaps to discover a cure. Almost unnoticed in the current debate over legalizing drugs is that basic science has made rapid strides in identifying the underlying neurological processes involved in some forms of addiction. Stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines alter the way certain brain cells communicate with one another. That alteration is complex and not entirely understood, but in simplified form it involves modifying the way in which a neurotransmitter called dopamine sends signals from one cell to another.

When dopamine crosses the synapse between two cells, it is in effect carrying a message from the first cell to activate the second one. In certain parts of the brain that message is experienced as pleasure. After the message is delivered, the dopamine returns to the first cell. Cocaine apparently blocks this return, or “reuptake,” so that the excited cell and others nearby continue to send pleasure messages. When the exaggerated high produced by cocaine-influenced dopamine finally ends, the brain cells may (in ways that are still a matter of dispute) suffer from an extreme lack of dopamine, thereby making the individual unable to experience any pleasure at all. This would explain why cocaine users often feel so depressed after enjoying the drug. Stimulants may also affect the way in which other neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and noradrenaline, operate.

Whatever the exact mechanism may be, once it is identified it becomes possible to use drugs to block either the effect of cocaine or its tendency to produce dependency. There have already been experiments using desipramine, imipramine, bromocriptine, carbamazepine, and other chemicals. There are some promising results.

Tragically, we spend very little on such research, and the agencies funding it have not in the past occupied very influential or visible posts in the federal bureaucracy. If there is one aspect of the “war on drugs” metaphor that I dislike, it is its tendency to focus attention almost exclusively on the troops in the trenches, whether engaged in enforcement or treatment, and away from the research-and-development efforts back on the home front where the war may ultimately be decided.

I believe that the prospects of scientists in controlling addiction will be strongly influenced by the size and character of the problem they face. If the problem is a few hundred thousand chronic, high-dose users of an illegal product, the chances of making a difference at a reasonable cost will be much greater than if the problem is a few million chronic users of legal substances. Once a drug is legal, not only will its use increase but many of those who then use it will prefer the drug to the treatment: they will want the pleasure, whatever the cost to themselves or their families, and they will resist—probably successfully—any effort to wean them away from experiencing the high that comes from inhaling a legal substance.

If I am Wrong . . .

No one can know what our society would be like if we changed the law to make access to cocaine, heroin, and PCP easier. I believe, for reasons given, that the result would be a sharp increase in use, a more widespread degradation of the human personality, and a greater rate of accidents and violence.

I may be wrong. If I am, then we will needlessly have incurred heavy costs in law enforcement and some forms of criminality. But if I am right, and the legalizers prevail anyway, then we will have consigned millions of people, hundreds of thousands of infants, and hundreds of neighborhoods to a life of oblivion and disease. To the lives and families destroyed by alcohol we will have added countless more destroyed by cocaine, heroin, PCP, and whatever else a basement scientist can invent.

Human character is formed by society; indeed, human character is inconceivable without society, and good character is less likely in a bad society. Will we, in the name of an abstract doctrine of radical individualism, and with the false comfort of suspect predictions, decide to take the chance that somehow individual decency can survive amid a more general level of degradation?

I think not. The American people are too wise for that, whatever the academic essayists and cocktail-party pundits may say. But if Americans today are less wise than I suppose, then Americans at some future time will look back on us now and wonder, what kind of people were they that they could have done such a thing?

1 I do not here take up the question of marijuana. For a variety of reasons—its widespread use and its lesser tendency to addict—it presents a different problem from cocaine or heroin. For a penetrating analysis, see Mark Kleiman, Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood Press, 217 pp., $37.95).

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Violence and the U.S. Prohibition of Drugs and Alcohol

Among the many unresolved questions regarding the determinants of violence is the role of prohibitions against drugs and alcohol. Conventional wisdom holds that consumption of these goods encourages violence and that prohibitions discourage such consumption; thus, prohibitions reduce violence. An alternative view, however, is that prohibitions create black markets, and in black markets participants use violence to resolve commercial disputes. Thus, prohibitions potentially increase violence. This paper examines the relation between prohibitions and violence using the historical behavior of the homicide rate in the United States. The results document that increases in enforcement of drug and alcohol prohibition have been associated with increases in the homicide rate, and auxiliary evidence suggests this positive correlation reflects a causal effect of prohibition enforcement on homicide. Controlling for other potential determinants of the homicide rate -- the age composition of the population, the incarceration rate, economic conditions, gun availability, and the death penalty -- does not alter the conclusion that drug and alcohol prohibition have substantially raised the homicide rate in the United States over much of the past 100 years.

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Organized Crime in the 1920s

This essay about 1920s organized crime examines the rise and impact of criminal enterprises during the Prohibition era in the United States. It highlights how the prohibition of alcohol created a lucrative underground economy, leading to the emergence of structured crime syndicates. Key figures such as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano are discussed, illustrating how they capitalized on the era’s legal constraints to build expansive illegal operations. The essay also explores the relationship between organized crime and advancements in law enforcement, including the establishment of the FBI and the adoption of forensic science techniques. It concludes by reflecting on the lasting effects of the 1920s organized crime wave, noting how these organizations adapted and persisted even after Prohibition was repealed in 1933, shaping future American criminal and legal landscapes.

How it works

The era of the 1920s, often hailed as the Roaring Twenties, epitomized a period of profound social and economic metamorphosis. Following the culmination of World War I, the United States experienced a surge in economic prosperity and cultural efflorescence. Nevertheless, concomitant with this epoch of prosperity emerged the specter of organized crime, a phenomenon predominantly fueled by the enactment of Prohibition and the subsequent emergence of illicit opportunities. This dissertation delves into the panorama of organized crime during the 1920s, delving into its genesis, notable personages, and substantive influence on American society.

The advent of Prohibition, precipitated by the 18th Amendment in 1920, sought to stem the tide of alcohol consumption throughout the United States. Instead, it engendered a vast subterranean economy revolving around the production, transit, and vendition of contraband alcohol. Speakeasies—covert watering holes where libations were clandestinely dispensed and imbibed—sprouted by the multitude in urban centers nationwide, often shielded by bribes extended to corrupt law enforcement officials and politicians.

The prohibition of alcohol engendered a lucrative market commandeered by organized crime syndicates transcending mere local gangs, evolving into entities of greater structure and stratification to effectively administer the intricacy and magnitude of their endeavors. Infamous luminaries such as Al Capone in Chicago and Lucky Luciano in New York ascended, transforming their unlawful enterprises into multimillion-dollar juggernauts. Capone, arguably the most notorious mobster of the era, purportedly amassed an annual income exceeding $100 million at the zenith of his hegemony. These crime czars ingrained themselves within the social fabric of their locales by manipulating public functionaries, monopolizing labor organizations, and resorting to violence to eliminate competitors and safeguard their dominions.

The machinations of these organized crime cohorts transcended the confines of bootlegging, extending into diverse domains of illicit commerce, including gambling, prostitution, and narcotics. The intricacy and expanse of their operations galvanized substantial advancements in law enforcement methodologies and apparatus. The epoch bore witness to the genesis of forensic science, with techniques such as dactylography and ballistics permeating the mainstream of policing. Furthermore, the surge in criminality spurred the inception of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a formidable force capable of combatting transgressions that traversed state borders.

The public sentiment toward Prohibition and the concomitant surge in organized crime underwent a paradigm shift toward the denouement of the 1920s. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, a ghastly incident wherein seven members of Chicago’s North Side Gang were ruthlessly felled by adversaries masquerading as law enforcement officers, marked an inflection point in public sentiment. Such brazen violence, coupled with the economic boons promised by a legalized alcohol industry, commenced swaying many individuals toward advocating the repeal of Prohibition.

In 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment, Prohibition was rescinded, severing a substantial revenue conduit for organized crime. Nevertheless, the frameworks and affiliations forged during the 1920s endured, enabling organized crime to persevere in disparate guises. The epoch laid the groundwork for the subsequent trajectory of organized criminal activities in America, underscoring the unforeseen repercussions of legislative measures and the adaptability of criminal enterprises.

In summation, the 1920s epitomized not solely an era of jazz and exuberance but also heralded the ascendance of organized crime in America. The era delineated the trajectory of American law enforcement and exerted a protracted influence on the nation’s modus operandi regarding criminality and retribution. The legacies of luminaries such as Capone and Luciano persist in captivating the collective imagination and serve as a poignant reminder of the intricate interplay between society, economics, and legality.

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Spooks, Sleuths and the Nazi Origins of the War on Drugs

Three books describe the work of government investigators who want to uncover or bury the truth.

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By John Knight

John Knight has written for The Paris Review, New York magazine and Nautilus. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature.

• April 19, 2024

In the years after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought an end to decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, it gradually became clear that intelligence work — not military units or heavy policing — had been the key to the peace. But cloak-and-dagger tactics have their price, especially for those seeking truth in the wake of terrible violence. In FOUR SHOTS IN THE NIGHT: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland (PublicAffairs, 338 pp., $32), the journalist Henry Hemming tells the story of a murdered British spy and considers the sometimes tragic choices made by people in the employ of government agencies like MI5.

The facts make for an exciting, at times astonishing read. By the mid-1990s, there were hundreds of intelligence officers in Northern Ireland trying to infiltrate the Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary organization that had fought British rule since World War I. Eventually, one in three senior I.R.A. operatives was compromised in some way.

The ethical demands on British handlers were never straightforward: “They had to ask themselves repeatedly the same question,” Hemming explains. “Will I save more lives if I act on this intelligence, or if I don’t?”

Perhaps the most fraught response to that question came in the form of Freddie Scappaticci , one of the book’s antiheroes. In the 1980s, Scappaticci reportedly served as a leader of the Nutting Squad, an I.R.A. group responsible for rooting out and, often, killing suspected informers. Scappaticci was also alleged to have been a British mole and double agent, code name Stakeknife, who oversaw the torture and murder of dozens of I.R.A. informers, including a fellow British agent named Frank Hegarty, all of which, Hemming suggests, he may have done with the British government’s blessing in the name of protecting other sources.

Scappaticci, who denied everything, died in 2023, before his crimes could be fully investigated. That same year, the British Parliament passed a bill granting amnesty to militants accused of killings during the Troubles on the condition that they cooperate with an investigatory commission. Hemming’s book is an evenhanded account of the clandestine murders that still haunt so many. “The truth will not always lead to peace or reconciliation,” he writes, “but it is hard to heal without it.”

When U.S. forces entered Germany after World War II, reports circulated of a Nazi “truth drug” called LSD. In the following years, fear rippled through the C.I.A. that the Soviets would weaponize the substance and the U.S. government rushed to unlock its secrets. Paranoia has haunted psychedelics ever since. In TRIPPED: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age (Mariner Books, 226 pp., $29.99) , the journalist and novelist Norman Ohler shows how pernicious these early associations have become.

Ohler’s earlier book “Blitzed” persuasively detailed the contradictions in the Nazi regime’s war against — and heavy abuse of — narcotics. In “Tripped,” the evidence that the Third Reich used LSD for any serious purpose is slim: Germany’s leading biochemist, Richard Kuhn, had ties to the Swiss lab that first synthesized LSD and he received a shipment of ingredients that could have been used to make it. In 1945, the drug might also have been tried as an interrogation tool at Dachau.

What is clear, however, is that after the war Berlin was awash in narcotics. Arthur Giuliani, an agent with the recently formed U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was dispatched to clean things up. He adopted the Nazi regime’s “strict policy of prohibition,” Ohler writes, accepted advice from an ex-Gestapo agent and eventually recommended “Nazi drug laws wholesale.”

When Giuliani returned to the United States in the ’50s, he was tasked by the C.I.A. with dosing unsuspecting Americans with LSD, supposedly in an effort to prove the drug’s investigatory powers. In the same decade, Giuliani’s boss, Harry J. Anslinger , took inspiration from the Nazi narcotics strategy Giuliani had embraced to help push draconian sentencing minimums into U.S. laws and seed what would become the war on drugs.

Ohler’s book is at once a jaunty history of psychedelics, and a fascinating lament that the double-pronged legacy of Nazi drug policy — zero tolerance and weaponization — so severely limited research into their medicinal properties. “Let the scientific findings guide us in how we move forward,” he argues, “not the ideologies of yesterday.”

For all the resources devoted toward subterfuge and manipulation, sometimes intelligence agencies are simply beholden to the integrity of private individuals. Such is the case in Earl Swift’s HELL PUT TO SHAME: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery (Mariner Books, 419 pp., $32.50), in which a federal investigation of peonage rests on the testimony, and courage, of a Black field boss.

Decades after abolition, white farmers short on workers routinely paid the fines of Black men in local jails and illegally forced them into a brutal system of labor that could last for years. In 1921, acting on a tip, two agents from the Bureau of Investigations (the precursor to the F.B.I.) visited a farm in Georgia and started asking questions. Weeks later the bodies of Black men chained to bags of rocks began turning up in local rivers.

With the sensational trial that followed as a centerpiece, Swift assembles a blunt portrait of the racial injustice coursing through America and of the organizations that rose to fight it. He incorporates the stories of people like James Weldon Johnson, the first Black leader of the N.A.A.C.P., and the Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey, both of whom were galvanized by these events to pursue change.

The narrative is sometimes obscured by the intricacies of courtroom proceedings, but Swift shines a powerful light on the practice of debt slavery, and notes that it persists to this day as human traffickers continue to coerce immigrants to work on farms across the United States.

Swift also compellingly elevates the voice of one man who told the truth. Stymied at first, federal agents were astonished when Clyde Manning described being forced to help his employer murder 11 men, all of them peons on the farm. Though he stood to be held responsible for the deaths as well, Manning was nonetheless unflinching in his testimony. The result, in that time and place, was nearly unthinkable: A few weeks after the first bodies of the workers were found, Swift writes, “an all-white jury convicted the white man who killed them, principally on the testimony of a Black man.”

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The drug war devastated Black and other minority communities. Is marijuana legalization helping?

More than 10 years after legal marijuana sales launched in Washington state, the first store under a social equity program has opened. The state’s program aims to remedy the effect that the war on drugs had on black and brown communities.

Cloud 9 Cannabis CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr., left, and co-owner Dennis Turner pose at their shop, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. Cloud 9 is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

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Cloud 9 Cannabis co-owner Dennis Turner, left, and CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr., pose at their shop, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. Cloud 9 is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Operational lead Willie Morrow stocks shelves at Cloud 9 Cannabis as the store prepares to open, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. Cloud 9 is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr. poses at his shop, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. Cloud 9 is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis co-owner Dennis Turner, left, poses for a portrait with CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr., at their shop, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. Cloud 9 is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

An employee puts away product at Cloud 9 Cannabis, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. Cloud 9 is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis co-owner and CEO Sam Ward Jr., left, and co-owner Dennis Turner, right, pose at their shop, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. Cloud 9 is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Operational lead Willie Morrow stocks shelves at Cloud 9 Cannabis as the store prepares to open for the first time, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. Cloud 9 is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr. shows a scar on his hand where he was shot during a drug deal gone wrong in 2006, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. Cloud 9 is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr. adjusts his chains, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. Cloud 9 is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr. wears chains among over a custom hoodie, Saturday, April 13, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. The shop is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr. poses in a throne photo-op for customers, Saturday, April 13, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. The shop is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr. smiles while posing for a photo in a throne photo-op for customers, Saturday, April 13, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. The shop is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr. poses outside his store, Saturday, April 13, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. The shop is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis employee Kyler Hollingsworth grabs a product for customers, Saturday, April 13, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. The shop is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis employee Kyler Hollingsworth checks out customers, Saturday, April 13, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. The shop is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

A 420 plate is displayed behind a glass bong on the shelves at Cloud 9 Cannabis, Saturday, April 13, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. The shop is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Cloud 9 Cannabis employee Beau McQueen, right, helps a customer, Saturday, April 13, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. The shop is one of the first dispensaries to open under the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board’s social equity program, established in efforts to remedy some of the disproportionate effects marijuana prohibition had on communities of color. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

ARLINGTON, Wash. (AP) — When Washington state opened some of the nation’s first legal marijuana stores in 2014, Sam Ward Jr. was on electronic home detention in Spokane, where he had been indicted on federal drug charges. He would soon be off to prison to serve the lion’s share of a four-year sentence.

A decade later, Ward, who is Black, recently posed in a blue-and-gold throne used for photo ops at his new cannabis store, Cloud 9 Cannabis. He greeted customers walking in for early 4/20 deals . And he reflected on being one of the first beneficiaries of a Washington program to make the overwhelmingly white industry more accessible to people harmed by the war on drugs.

“It feels great to know that I’m the CEO of a store, with employees, people depending on me,” Ward said. “Just being a part of something makes you feel good.”

A major argument for legalizing the adult use of cannabis was to stop the harm caused by disproportionate enforcement of drug laws that sent millions of Black, Latino and other minority Americans to prison and perpetuated cycles of violence and poverty. Studies have shown that minorities were incarcerated at a higher rate than white people, despite similar rates of cannabis use.

But efforts to help those most affected participate in — and profit from — the legal marijuana sector have been halting.

Since 2012, when voters in Washington and Colorado approved the first ballot measures to legalize recreational marijuana, legal adult use has spread to 24 states and the District of Columbia. Nearly all have “social equity” provisions designed to redress drug war damages.

Those provisions include erasing criminal records for certain pot convictions, granting cannabis business licenses and financial help to people convicted of cannabis crimes, and directing marijuana tax revenues to communities that suffered.

“Social equity programs are an attempt to reverse the damage that was done to Black and brown communities who are over-policed and disproportionately impacted,” said Kaliko Castille, former president of the Minority Cannabis Business Association.

States have varying ways of defining who can apply for social equity marijuana licenses, and they’re not necessarily based on race.

Cloud 9 Cannabis CEO and co-owner Sam Ward Jr. smiles while posing for a photo in a throne photo-op for customers, Saturday, April 13, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

In Washington, an applicant must own more than half the business and meet other criteria, such as having lived for at least five years between 1980 and 2010 in an area with high poverty, unemployment or cannabis arrest rates; having been arrested for a cannabis-related crime; or having a below-median household income.

Legal challenges over the permitting process in states like New York have slowed implementation.

After settling other cases , New York — which has issued 60% of all cannabis licenses to social equity applicants, according to regulators — is facing another lawsuit. Last month, the libertarian-leaning Pacific Legal Foundation alleged it favors women- and minority-owned applicants in addition to those who can demonstrate harm from the drug war.

“It’s that type of blanket racial and gender preference that the Constitution prohibits,” said Pacific Legal attorney David Hoffa.

An employee puts away product at Cloud 9 Cannabis, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Elsewhere, deep-pocketed corporations that operate in multiple states have acquired social equity licenses, possibly frustrating the intent of the laws. Arizona lawmakers this year expressed concern that licensees had been pressured by predatory businesses into ceding control.

Difficulty in finding locations due to local cannabis business bans or in obtaining bank loans due to continued federal prohibition has also prevented candidates from opening stores. In some cases, the very things that qualified them for licenses — living in poor neighborhoods, criminal records and lack of assets — have made it hard to secure the money needed to open cannabis businesses.

The drafters of Washington’s pioneering law were preoccupied with keeping the U.S. Justice Department from shutting down the market. They required background checks designed to keep criminals out.

“A lot of the early states, they simply didn’t have social equity on their radar,” said Jana Hrdinova, administrative director of the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

Many states that legalized more recently — including Arizona, Connecticut, Ohio, Maryland and Missouri — have had social equity initiatives from the start.

Washington established its program in 2020. But only in the past several months has it issued the first social equity retail licenses. Just two — including Ward’s — have opened.

Cloud 9 Cannabis employee Kyler Hollingsworth grabs a product for customers, Saturday, April 13, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board Member Ollie Garrett called the progress so far disappointing, but said officials are working with applicants and urging some cities to rescind zoning bans so social equity cannabis businesses can open.

The state, which collects roughly half a billion dollars a year in marijuana tax revenue, is making $8 million available in grants to social equity licensees to help with expenses, such as security systems and renovations, as well as business coaching.

It also is directing $250 million to communities harmed by the drug war — including housing assistance, small-business loans, job training and violence prevention programs.

Ward’s turnaround is one officials hope to see repeated.

He started dealing marijuana in his teens, he said. In 2006, a customer pulled a gun on him, and Ward was shot in the hand.

A single father of seven children, he continued dealing drugs to support them, he said, until he was indicted in 2014 — along with 30 other people — in an oxycodone distribution conspiracy. He served nearly three years in prison.

Ward, now 39, spent that time taking classes, working out and training other inmates. He started a personal training business after he was released, got a restaurant job and joined a semipro football team, the Spokane Wolfpack.

That’s where he met Dennis Turner, a Black entrepreneur who briefly owned the team. Turner had worked as a restaurant manager on cruise ships, for the postal service and as a corrections officer before investing his savings — $6,000 — in a friend’s medical marijuana growing operation. They used the proceeds to help open a medical dispensary in Cheney, a small college town southwest of Spokane, that eventually became an adult-use marijuana retailer.

In Washington’s social equity program, Turner saw an opportunity to make Ward a business executive. The two joined Rashel Palmer, whose husband co-owns the football team, in launching Cloud 9 at a cost of around $400,000. They picked Arlington, Washington — 320 miles (515 kilometers) away — because it’s a quickly growing city with limited cannabis competition, they said.

Ward “saw me as a guy that he looked up to, that did good business, was self-made and came out the trenches, and he just wanted to pick my brain,” Turner said.

Operational lead Willie Morrow stocks shelves at Cloud 9 Cannabis as the store prepares to open, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Arlington, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Turner is working to open cannabis stores in New Mexico and Ohio through social equity programs in those states. He hopes one day to sell them for tens of millions of dollars. In the meantime, he intends to use his businesses to support local charities, such as the Boys and Girls Club in Arlington and the Carl Maxey Center, which provides services to the Black community in Spokane.

Another new social equity licensee is David Penn Jr., 47, who helped persuade Pasco, in south-central Washington, to rescind its ban. Penn, who is Black, was arrested on a crack cocaine charge as a teenager. In 2011, he was kicked out of his apartment after a marijuana bust.

A friend with two other cannabis outlets is financing Penn’s store. His location, a dirt-floored building next to a gas station, still needs to be built out. State grants will help, but won’t be enough.

“It’s like they’re giving you the carriage, but you need the horses to get this thing going,” Penn said.

Opinion The homeless right-to-camp issue comes to the Supreme Court

The phrase “often in error but never in doubt” could have been coined for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit . The appellate court most frequently reversed by the Supreme Court in recent years should brace itself for another reprimand during Monday’s oral arguments before that court.

The town of Grants Pass, Ore. , and many other cities in the nine Western states within the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction are seeking relief from one of its decisions. The consequences of it include ( Grants Pass said in asking the Supreme Court to hear the case) “the reemergence of medieval diseases” such as typhus and tuberculosis.

In 2020, a court in nearby Medford struck down a Grants Pass ordinance imposing fines, as well as a possible 30-day sentence for repeat offenders, on homeless people camping on public property, when there are sufficient shelter beds available in the city. The court said this violated the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments, and excessive fines. In 2022, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit affirmed this decision, having ruled similarly in a previous case, requiring sufficient “ secular shelter space .” (Otherwise, the First Amendment guarantee against “establishment of religion” would be violated. Really.) Grants Pass’s only shelter has a religious affiliation.

The full 9th Circuit refused to reconsider this. Dissenting from this refusal, one judge (joined by 14 others) said that the majority had created a constitutional right “to camp or to sleep on sidewalks and in parks, playgrounds, and other public places in defiance of traditional health, safety, and welfare laws.”

Enforcement of camping ordinances is impermissible if even one homeless person is without a bed. This paralyzes cities’ attempts to cope with the disease, disorder and crime associated with homeless encampments. And many homeless people — sometimes a majority — reject shelters, fearing violence and inhibitions on drug use.

Progressives say the 9th Circuit’s decision regarding “our unhoused neighbors” simply prevents criminalizing the “underlying status” of being homeless. This, they say, results from racism, low wages and insufficient affordable housing. Disregard the verbal tic about racism. Rhetoric about “ living wages ” and “affordable” this or that ignores a fact: Most of those who are homeless are unemployable casualties of mental illness (schizophrenias, depression, bipolar disorder, etc.) and drug abuse.

Furthermore, the court-concocted constitutional right to unrestricted camping misconstrues the Eighth Amendment, which concerns modes of punishment (e.g., burning at the stake, branding, flogging), not activities that might be punished. The 9th Circuit thinks the Eighth Amendment prohibits punishing conduct (e.g., drug abuse) that is supposedly involuntary because it is unavoidable: It is inseparable from a status (homelessness).

But by erasing the distinction between an activity and a status, such reasoning erases individual agency, a foundational concept of law. And it potentially places sweeping limits on what conduct can be criminalized. The 9th Circuit transforms the Eighth Amendment from a restriction on kinds of punishment into a doctrine that radically dilutes the idea of criminal responsibility.

An amicus brief from the Pacific Research Institute notes that, in all eras, vagrants have experienced pressures from circumstances. (As have most criminals.) So, is any punishment disproportional for behavior an individual cannot control? What about a “compulsive” desire for child pornography? Beware, the PRI brief says, of “simplistic dichotomies between voluntary and involuntary conduct or avoidable and unavoidable choices.”

The 9th Circuit has, in effect, created a subsidy for being homeless, which often is the outcome of multiple choices. And if homeless people lack, as some of their advocates seem to say, volition in controlling their behavior, they lack the capacity to care for themselves, and could be involuntarily committed to institutions.

Homelessness involves political choices that courts are ill-suited to make. And it is a subject concerning which public health institutions can further ruin the reputations they damaged during the pandemic.

The meddlesome Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends social distancing in homeless shelters, warns that clearing encampments of the homeless will “break connections with service providers” and should not occur unless “ individual housing units ” are provided. The CDC is the 9th Circuit of public health institutions. But, then, the 9th Circuit seems to fancy itself a public health policymaker, sweepingly removing choices from local governments.

Since 2007, the Supreme Court has reversed 80 percent of the rulings it has considered from the 9th Circuit. In the term that began in October 2020, the court reversed 94 percent; in the October 2021 term, 100 percent. Grants Pass should have an agreeable Monday in court.

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