Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs From: [g--l--y] at [cheech.network.com] (Jerry Gally) Subject: Commentary on the Drug War by William J. Bennett Date: Sun, 27 Feb 94 17:56:12 GMT Reposted from alt.politics.usa.constitution: From: <[J N LONG] at [auvm.american.edu]> Subject: Commentary on the Drug War by William J. Bennett I would ask [my audiences],"If you saw a drug dealer selling drugs to your children what would your impulse be?" Most audiences responded that their impulse would be to do violence to the drug dealer. And that impulse is right; it is simply a matter of channeling that impulse into law, of civilizing our retribution into a proper sense of justice. "This war [on drugs] is not for delicate sensibilities," I said in a speech at the National Press Club. "This is tough stuff. We need to get tough, we need to get tough as hell, we need to do it right now." But many of the critics didn't agree, and they couldn't quite figure out why I wasn't brought down, or even harmed, by my "intemperate" comments to Larry King. What they didn't recognize is that the moral sense of the American people is sound. They had had it with drugs. They had seen the devastation. And they wanted us to fight. In Alaska -- where personal possession of marijuana was legal -- Senator Murkowski and others implored me to weigh in on behalf of a new initiative seeking to recriminalize possession of marijuana. Not surprisingly, the percentage of high school students using dope in Alaska was much higher than in the rest of the nation. When I accepted the invitation, the prolegalization forces went into action. The "pothead lobby," as I called it, distributed fliers in Anchorage and Fairbanks saying "Confront the Drug Bizarre." But when I arrived, there was very little opposition. A few bedraggled sixties types (including one woman who introduced herself as "the Dragon Lady") asked me mostly incomprehensible questions at an assembly in Anchorage. But there was no major confrontation. It later became apparent why. When the "pothead lobby" passed out fliers announcing my visit, they had put the wrong date on them. I had been saying for a long time that marijuana makes people inattentive and stupid. I rested my case. The legalization debate is for all intent and purposes over, But even to call it a "debate" suggests that the arguments in favor of drug legalization are rigorous, substantial and serious. At first glace some of the arguments sound appealing. But on further inspection, one finds that at bottom they are nothing more than a series of unpersuasive and even disingenuous ideas that more sober minds recognize as a recipe for a public policy disaster. Legalization removes the incentive to stay away from a life of drugs. Some people are going to smoke crack whether it's legal or illegal. But by keeping it illegal, we maintain the criminal sanctions that persuade most people that the good life cannot be reached by dealing drugs. And that's exactly why we have drug laws -- to make drug use a wholly unattractive choice. One of the clear lessons of Prohibition is that when we had laws against alcohol, there WAS less consumption of alcohol, less alcohol-related disease, fewer drunken brawls, and a lot less public drunkenness. And contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused big increases in crime. I am not suggesting that we go back to Prohibition. Alcohol has a long, complicated history in this country, and unlike drugs, the American people accept alcohol. They have no interest in going back to Prohibition. But at least the advocates of legalization should admit that legalized alcohol, which is responsible for some 100,000 deaths a year, is hardly a model for drug policy. As the columnist Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, the question is not which is worse, alcohol or drugs. The question is, should we accept both legalized alcohol AND legalized drugs? The answer is no. If drugs were legalized, use would surely soar. In fact, we have just undergone a kind of cruel national experiment in which drugs became cheap and widely available: the experiment is called the crack epidemic. It was only when cocaine was dumped into the country, and a three-dollar vial of crack could be bought on street corners, that we saw cocaine use skyrocket -- mostly among the poor and disadvantaged. The price that American society would have to pay for legalized drugs would be intolerably high: more drug-related accidents at work, on the highway, and in the airways; bigger losses in worker productivity; hospitals filled with drug emergencies; more students on drugs, meaning more dropouts; more pregnant women buying legal cocaine, meaning more abused babies IN UTERO. Add to this the added cost of treatment, social welfare, and insurance, and welcome to the Brave New World of drug legalization. If we did legalize drugs, we would no doubt have to reverse the policy, like those countries that had experimented with broad legalization and decided it was a failure. In 1975 Italy liberalized its drug law and now has one of the highest heroin- related death rates in Western Europe. One Italian government official told me that the citizens of Italy are eager to recriminalize the use of drugs. They had seen enough casualties. And what about our children? If we make drugs more accessible, there will be more harm to children, direct and indirect. There will be more cocaine babies and more child abuse. Children after all are among the most frequent victims of violent, drug-related crimes -- crimes that have nothing to do with the cost of acquiring the drugs. In Philadelphia in 1987 more than half the child-abuse fatalities involved at least one parent who was a heavy drug user. Seventy-three percent of the child abuse cases in New York City in 1987 involved parental drug use. And it would be disastrous to suddenly switch signals on our children in school, whom we have been teaching, with great effect, that drug use is wrong. Why, they will ask, have we changed our minds? The whole legalization argument is based on the premise that progress is impossible. But there is not incontrovertible, unmis- takable evidence of progress in the war on drugs. Now would be exactly the wrong time to surrender and legalize. In the end drug use is wrong because of what it does to human character. It degrades. It makes people less than they should be by burning away a sense of responsibility, subverting productivity, and making a mockery of virtue Using drugs is wrong not simply because drugs create medical problems; it is wrong because drugs destroy one's moral sense. People addicted to drugs neglect their duties. The lure can become so strong that soon people will do nothing but take drugs. They will neglect God, family, children, friends, and jobs -- everything in life that is important, noble, and worthwhile -- for the sake of drugs. This is why from the very beginning we posed the drug problem as a moral issue. And it was the failure to recognize the moral consequences of drug use that led us into the drug epidemic in the first place. In the late 1960s, many people rejected the language of morality, of right and wrong. Since then we have paid dearly for the belief that drug use was harmless and even an enlightening, positive thing. Drugs undermine the necessary virtues of a free society -- autonomy, self-reliance, and individual responsibility. The inherent purpose of using drugs is secession from reality, from society, and from the moral obligations individuals owe their family, their friends, and their fellow citizens. Drugs destroy the natural sentiments and duties that constitute our human nature and make our social life possible. As our founders would surely recognize, for a citizenry to be perpetually in a drug-induced haze doesn't bode well for the future of self-government. When all is said and done, the most compelling case that can be made against drug use rests on moral grounds. No civilized society -- especially a self-governing one -- can be neutral regarding human character and personal responsibility.^Z I hope you people find this enlightening. J. Long, Esq.