David Borden [14], Executive Director
It's a core prohibitionist assumption that they do. Pass "tough" drug laws -- harsher penalties, drug testing, more arrests -- and use will decline. Liberalize drug laws -- decrim, medical marijuana, harm reduction -- and drug use will undoubtedly skyrocket, society will implode, etc. It'll be the '70s all over again -- maybe even the '60s.
As it turns out, however, that's simply not true. Study after study [15] has failed to find any increase in marijuana use following the passage of decriminalization laws in many US states, for example. People are more complex than the simplistic boxes that drug warriors try to put them in.
Add one more study to the pile [16] -- an important one. This study, carried out in conjunction with the most recent World Health Organization "Mental Health Surveys," boasts nineteen authors -- yes, nineteen -- from eighteen different countries on every continent. They examined data on drug use from seventeen countries.
This diverse, respectable group of academics from around the world determined that "[d]rug use does not appear to be related to drug policy, as countries with more stringent policies (e.g., the US) did not have lower levels of illegal drug use than countries with more liberal policies (e.g., The Netherlands)."
In other words, the drug war is all for nothing. So what's the point of it? We've proven that we can invent more and more ways of ruining or interfering with people's lives. But ruining lives isn't a policy goal worth our dollars, or that our consciences should tolerate. If harsh policies don't stop sellers, as we discussed last week [17] -- and if they don't deter users, as this week's major report has shown -- then what's left? Nothing worthwhile.
Sticklers will say that liberalizing drug laws under prohibition, as the WHO group studied, is not the same as actual legalization, in which drug sales will be conducted openly, prices will drop, ads may even run. And on that level they are right -- drug decriminalization is not the same thing as drug legalization, to be sure.
But they're also wrong. It's true that no country today provides a demonstration of outright legalization, not even the Netherlands. But the experience of users of marijuana in the Netherlands is one that approximates legalization, because the consequences of keeping the trade illegal are only felt at multiple stages back in the supply chain. The experience of entering an Amsterdam or Maastricht "coffee shop" is not a criminal underground experience, even though they have to go to the underground to get the stuff to sell, and that is what is relevant to marijuana use and the impact that the policy has on users.
Yet as the WHO data shows, marijuana use in the Netherlands does not stand out from other countries in the neighborhood, and is a fraction of the amount of it we have here in the United states despite more than 700,000 arrests for the substance each year and a wide range of collateral sanctions [18] that can dog people for life. But we know the [19] harm [20] that [21] prohibition [22] does [23].
So how about we just stop the whole thing, end the drug war and legalize drugs? Who else thinks we should do that?