Help, not jail, key to US war on drugs
- March 13, 2009
WASHINGTON: The White House will push for treatment, rather than jail, for people arrested for drug-related crimes as it announced the nomination of Seattle's police chief, R. Gil Kerlikowske, to oversee efforts to control illegal drugs.
The choice, announced by the Vice-President, Joe Biden, signal a sharp departure from Bush administration policies, away from cutting the supply of illicit drugs from foreign countries and toward curbing drug use across the United States.
Mr Biden, who helped shape the Office of National Drug Control Policy as a US senator in the 1980s, said the Obama Administration would continue to focus on the south-west border, where Mexican authorities are facing thousands of drug-related murders and unchecked violence from drug cartels moving cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine into US markets. But it remained unclear how the new administration would engineer its budget to tackle the problem.
Since president Richard Nixon first declared a war on drugs nearly four decades ago, governments have spent billions of dollars with mixed results, according to independent studies and drug policy scholars. In recent years, the number of high-school-age children abusing illegal substances has fallen, but marijuana use has inched upward, and drug offenders continue to flood the nation's courts.
"The success of our efforts to reduce the flow of drugs is largely dependent on our ability to reduce demand for them," Mr Kerlikowske said. "Our nation's drug problem is one of human suffering, and as a police officer but also in my own family, I have experienced the effects that drugs can have." Mr Kerlikowske's stepson, Jeffrey, was arrested on drug charges.
Mr Kerlikowske's deputy is expected to be A. Thomas McLellan, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania medical college and the chief executive of the Treatment Research Institute in Philadelphia.
During the presidential election campaign, Mr Obama promised to offer first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentences in a rehabilitation centre rather than jail.
This is actually interesting. Cutting the demand would sharply reduce the incentive to supply. I just do not know how it would work. How much would it cost to deter using treatment and what arbitrary standard would we use to adjudicate drug offenses? Who gets jail time and who gets treatment? This is probably going to end up being a class and race issue.
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2 comments:
I say legalize it all! If we work to curb demand then, as you said, there would be less need for supply. However, by legalizing it, we would be bringing all of the business over to the States instead of having it come in from Latin America and Asia, thus giving financial and political power to drug cartels.
The fact that Obama just laughed off the question of legalizing marijuana (as well as his 'audience') is proof of how politically dangerous it can be to even think about legalization. But this is not a small issue. Forty percent of Americans favor marijuana legalization at the federal level. I have a feeling we'll see it very soon. Perhaps they will even legalize all drugs at some point in our lifetime.
I say legalize it all! It's time to end this war on drugs, which has obviously failed. Drug use has increased since the 1960s, and the only real result of going after the supply is simply empowering drug cartels and undermining rule of law both in the States and abroad.
If we legalize, all the production will be here. Plus it would be a new source of revenue and taxes. Sure, there is always the argument that drug use will rise, but we will have greater resources to put into treatment and rehab, two things that I think would work better at reducing drug abuse.
Prohibition of alcohol didn't work, and it took a financial crisis to realize it wasn't economically feasible. Now, with 40% of Americans in favor of marijuana legalization, it's time to reconsider our stance on the war on drugs and on drug prohibition in general. We can't keep treating it as a joke (like Obama did this past week, when he laughed at the question).
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