The Case For Legalizing All Drugs

Ridding society of the immense harms caused by prohibition more than outweighs any negatives that could ever be attributed to legalization.

What if I told you that a substance, alcohol, is the direct cause of more human death and destruction than all other illicit substances combined and yet, remains readily available for legal purchase, including at drive-thru locations? What if I also told you that once upon a time the United States government, mostly for noble reasons, tried to ban alcohol, but that the promised cure of prohibition ended up being worse than the disease? This information alone should undermine every current argument justifying national prohibition policies of substances demonstrably less harmful to society than alcohol, right? Wrong.

Unfortunately, many in the United States refuse to learn the lessons of history and nevertheless insist that government authoritarian action in the form of a heavy handed and overtly discriminatory criminal system is the only solution to combatting drug use. However, although prohibition has largely remained a partisan issue (with conservatives generally supporting it, and liberals denouncing it), a growing chorus of right-wing figures such as Newt Gingrich are openly acknowledging the glaring faults of drug prohibition. As Newt correctly points out: “More than half of all people in federal prisons for drug offenses have no violent history, and more than one-quarter have no prior criminal history.” In other words, we have a system that locks up a lot of people, not because they have violated another, but simply “because we’re just mad at them” for selling products in high demand among the citizenry.

Moreover, conservative stalwarts such as Charles C.W. Cooke have taken note of the many terrible consequences of prohibition:

What are we to make of the fact that spending on prisons is second only to Medicaid as the fastest growing area of state budgets. What are we to make of the violence that has been done to privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment? What are we to make of the undermining of the important principles of federalism and of enumerated powers? Are we to assume that these are just minor downsides to a worthwhile program? Or are we perhaps to recognize that there is so much on the other side of the ledger already that we are getting almost nothing for our buck?

Most encouragingly, organizations made up of individuals who have worked in law enforcement are being created to inform the public that “drugs — even hard drugs — do much less harm to Americans than does the drug war.”

If so much consensus can be found acknowledging the problems with prohibition however, the question arises: Why do we as a society continue with such a failed/problematic policy? The answer, of course, includes many details. However, it is simply undeniable that, from the very beginning, the main force driving prohibition was/is racism. When studying the history of prohibition, author Johann Hari discovered that it came about in the middle of a race panic here in the United States:

After the Civil War, Reconstruction failed, and what you had were African Americans and Chinese Americans who—rightly—were pissed off. At various points they showed their anger—in fact, given how extreme their oppression was, it’s surprising they didn’t show a lot more anger. Many white Americans explained this growing rebelliousness at the start of the 20th century by saying that African Americans and Chinese Americans were forgetting their place, using drugs, and attacking white people. If this sounds bizarre, that’s because it was.

The official statements are extraordinary. A typical one said, “The cocaine n****r sure is hard to kill.” Sheriffs across certain parts of the United States increased the caliber of their bullets because they believed African American men were taking cocaine and ravaging and attacking white people. The main way I tell about that in the book is through the story of how the founder of the war on drugs, Harry Anslinger, played a crucial role in stalking and killing Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, which blew my mind when I first learned it.

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Using prohibition as a means to legally attack and harass minorities has proceeded into the modern era. As John Ehrlichman, the former domestic-policy advisor to former president Nixon would later admit:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Of course, not everyone who supports prohibition today is a racist. However, it has always been impossible to deny that the policy of prohibition results in a uniquely racist impact. For example, the war on drugs is being waged almost exclusively in communities of color despite the fact that studies consistently show that people of all races use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates.

Adding to the tragedy and horror of prohibition is that the continued fear mongering and lying about drugs and drug users by prohibitionists is preventing the implementation of other, better policies. Policies outside of prohibition have a proven record of accomplishment in driving down rates of drug use and societal harms associated with drugs. This is perhaps the most important point to make, which is that the alternatives to prohibition have been tried, spanning decades of time, and the results unambiguously demonstrate the superiority of these alternatives.

If you want to reduce heroin addiction for example, there is no greater model to follow than that of Portugal and Switzerland. Almost two decades ago, these countries took the exact opposite approach to prohibition here in the United States and instead focused on reconnecting heroin addicts with society and turning their lives around. The results were that unlike here, rates of broader addiction, overdoses, and property crimes all dropped dramatically. Put simply, there is no legitimate or moral claim for maintaining prohibition today that can be backed by evidence, while centuries of evidence can show that prohibition is not only a racist, costly failure, but a direct cause of more harm than drug use could ever create.

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Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.