Length: 3,450 words (I know it's long, but please give it a try anyway.)
Let's start with the basics. I'm against illegal drugs. Individuals, and societies, are better off without them. I know a lot of legalization people say the same thing but I don't believe them. It is just something they have to say because they know they would sound like an idiot if they just came out and said "We like methamphetamine."
Have you noticed that the legalizers are kind of vague as to what, exactly, they mean by legalization? It seems like most of them can only bring themselves to say they favor a serious "study" of legalization. The "study" would work out the details. I think this is because once the details were articulated, they would sound like idiots again. How does one "study" the idea of legalization anyway? There are some blocks in the inner city where drugs are so plentiful that they might as well be legal. A "study" of those blocks should tell them all they need to know.
What they should study is history. This country has been through all this before. It was called prohibition. We made alcohol illegal. We had good reasons, too. There is no doubt that alcohol does far more harm than good. You can't fault the logic of prohibition. The logic was simple: alcohol is bad. The less alcohol the better. Therefore, make alcohol illegal. If you possess or use alcohol, go to jail. If you sell or distribute alcohol, go to prison. It makes perfect sense. Unless ... unless too many people break the law. If too many people break the law, you have unintended consequences and you've got real problems.
If too many people break the law, good logic turns into bad policy. The first unintended consequence was that the war on alcohol cost a whole lot more money than anticipated. Cops, jail space, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, crime labs, probation officers, prison space, prison guards, and parole officers all cost money. A lot of money.
The second unintended consequence was what happened to community/police relations. If everyone in the community knew people who used alcohol, alcohol users were not "bad guys," they were just people who needed help. To the police, they were people who needed to be arrested. The police were not wrong, but the community was not wrong either. When the police enforced laws that not everyone wanted enforced, you had problems. (These problems get a lot worse if a segment of the community thinks it is being singled out for law enforcement scrutiny for activity that other segments of the community seem to get away with.)
A third unintended consequence was that the more a particular law was broken, the more respect for the law generally was damaged, which meant that other laws were broken. The 20's were called the "roaring" 20's for a reason. Once it became fashionable to break prohibition, it became more fashionable to break other laws.
A fourth unintended consequence was the strengthening of organized crime. There was a ton of money to be made selling booze. Since legitimate businesses couldn't make all that profit, criminals got to make all the profit. What you got were rich crooks, and crooks that organized themselves into mobs as opposed to staying the individual punks they otherwise would have remained. You also got crooks flashing their money around town and flaunting it. You got crooks who became role models for kids.
The fifth unintended consequence was corruption. It is far easier to corrupt a cop when the crime you are asking him to look the other way for is a crime that is widespread anyway. It is too easy for cops to rationalize and say it doesn't really matter.
Prohibition had all five unintended consequences in a big way. Remember Al Capone? No prohibition, no Big Al. No prohibition, no Valentine's Day Massacre. Eventually all those unintended consequences, and the fact that an awful lot of people liked to drink, led to the end of prohibition and the legalization of booze. Organized crime didn't go away, but it sure as hell shrank in size and importance. Cops got more honest, too. All in all, ending prohibition was a good thing all around except that more people drank more liquor. And because more people drank more booze, more marriages were damaged, more jobs were lost, more lives ruined, and thousands and thousands of more people died from drinking drivers and cirrhosis of the liver.
The way I see it, all those bad unintended consequences we had during prohibition we now have from the war on drugs. We spend a ton of money on it, the police tick off a lot of communities because of it, we make violent street gangs rich from it, we have a higher overall crime rate because of it, and the next major police corruption scandal from it is just a question of when and where, not if.
So, the solution is to end drug prohibition, right? Wrong. Even though drugs are currently plentiful and cheap, that doesn't mean overall drug use would not go up if the current drug prohibition were ended. More drug use, more ruined lives, more deaths, etc. Even an ineffectual drug war lowers the amount of drug use. Funny thing, some citizens actually choose to obey the law. And even those that choose to break the law tend to break it slightly less often, particularly in places were they might get caught.
So, what to do? Make the U.S. Government the biggest, baddest, most successful drug pusher on the planet. That's right, have the government sell drugs. Elliot Ness did not run Al Capone out of the beer business; Budweiser ran Al Capone out of the beer business. Now, if all we wanted was to run street gangs and Colombian cartels out of the drug business, we could just let Budweiser sell cocaine and let Phillip Morris sell marijuana. But that is legalization, and that results in more people using drugs. If we let private enterprises sell drugs, then they will no doubt do a very good job of it.
Time for a tangent. We should not underestimate crooks. They also do a very good job of selling drugs. Think about it. They have no advertising on TV, radio, magazines, or billboards. They sponsor no sporting events or entertainment concerts. Millions and millions of dollars are spent on advertising against their product. And yet, they make lots of sales and make lots of money. This success is not based solely on the addictive nature of what they sell. It is not based solely on the undeniable fact that many users of drugs find the use pleasurable. At least partly, it is based on the fact that drugs dealers use an effective marketing system. There is a reason pushers are called pushers. For a system that sells to people who have very little money, there is a surprising amount of credit in the drug trade. This easy credit is one reason the trade is so violent. The good news for the young entrepreneur is that it is easy to get drugs to sell to others with little or no money down. The bad news is that if you don't pay up after selling the drugs, you are killed.
It is not just dealers who are extended credit. Customers are given free samples. They are not called free samples, but that is what they are. If you are addicted to drugs, the easiest way for you to support your habit is to sell drugs to your friends. The easiest way to turn your friends into customers is to invite them to your place for a party and give them free drugs like a good host should.
The point of this tangent is to state an obvious fact that is little discussed. Drugs don't sell themselves. There is a hardworking, profit-motivated marketing system of thousands and thousands of little entrepreneurs and hundreds of disciplined organizations of ruthless entrepreneurs.
If the government sold drugs, you would replace these disciplined, motivated organizations (who happen to kill a lot of people) with a single organization that would be motivated to be a failure. That is, motivated to sell less drugs instead of more.
There are two overriding goals here: (a) the less drugs the better, and (b) getting rid of the unintended consequences mentioned earlier. Legalization solves (b), but makes (a) worse. Getting tougher in the war on drugs improves (a), but makes (b) worse.
By the way, while (b) can be completely solved by legalization or by having the government sell drugs, (a) can never be completely solved. Drug use will never be completely eliminated. To say that it can be is to ignore history.
The trick is to have the government sell drugs in a way that reduces the amount of drugs sold. The government can't lower sales by reducing supply. If the government did that, it could not command a monopoly on the market, and it could not drive the bad guys out of business. In an era of government drug sales, drugs will always be available. Lower sales must come from lower demand. One good way to lower demand is to have free drug treatment programs widely available. This would cost a lot of money. Since the government would now be selling drugs at a good healthy profit, let those profits fund treatment programs. Imagine what would happen if all of the profits of Phillip Morris went to fund anti-smoking clinics. The way I see it: that would mean that Phillip Morris, over time, would sell fewer cigarettes.
There is another key to lowering demand. Continue to make the use of drugs illegal. Walk into a government drug store and buy cocaine. No problem. Get caught using cocaine, go to jail. Sell cocaine in competition with the government, go to prison. I told you, the government would be the meanest and baddest drug seller on the planet. It would not kill its competitors, but it would arrest them. Is it inconsistent for a government to sell something to its citizens and then arrest them for using it? Sure it is. It is inconsistent, so what? Want to call it hypocritical? Go ahead. It is hypocritical. Call it whatever you want. But, when all the name-calling is over, ask the two questions that count. One, does it solve the problems of the unintended consequences? The answer is yes. Two, will it, in the long run, reduce the amount of drugs sold and used in this country? The answer is yes.
One key, of course, is obtaining monopoly control. Unless the Al Capones of the drug world can be driven completely out of business then the benefits of this idea won't occur. This should not be that difficult. The government will sell drugs in sealed little tin foil packets. If I walk around town with little sealed tin foil packets in my pocket, I am breaking no law, the police cannot arrest me, and hopefully they will not harass me. If walk around town with drugs that are not in a nice little sealed tin foil packet, I could be arrested. Assuming the drugs in the packet give just as good a high as street-gang drugs (they will, and without the danger of contaminates and irregular potency), and assuming the price is the same (it would be, although the government packet drugs might be a little bit cheaper in order to speed the monopoly process) then why on earth would customers remain loyal to drug dealers? There is no reason, and they won't continue to buy Cartel drugs anymore than they continued to drink Capone beer.
About price: The price should be as low as it takes to insure that the cartel has no customers, but not a penny lower. One way to sell less of something is to raise the price. Once monopoly control is established, and once the infrastructure of the cartels has eroded away, then prices should slowly, but steadily, be raised as high as possible. How high is possible? As high as the government can get away with and still keep the bad guys out of the market.
There is one more feature that will insure monopoly control. These clean little sealed tin foil packets could be legally resold (except to kids). If you want to stand on a street corner and sell packets, go right ahead. The key is the seal. As long as that packet is sealed, then the packet is a legal commodity. After all, as long as the packet is sealed, a packet of cocaine and a packet of sugar are equals. But once the seal is broken - boom, you're busted. The drugs inside the packet remain fully illegal. The sealed packet around the drug, however, gives the possessor immunity from prosecution as long as the seal is unbroken.
Because the packets can be resold, the cartels would be toast. Not only will their customers desert them, their foot soldiers will desert them. Retail sellers will switch to the government as their supplier. One, their customers will require it; and two, they won't have to share their profit with the cartel. There would be no cartels. There would still be street gangs, but they will have to find other ways to make money. There will be no organized groups selling drugs. There will just be the government and free-lance resellers who will get their supply directly from the government. These resellers will not have "turf" because they will not have organizations. The government store price will be printed on every packet. These resellers will charge whatever the market will bear, but because supply is plentiful, all these resellers can offer their customers is convenience. That tells me that the markups on these packets will not be that high. If the markups are not that high, then the resell profits will not be that high. If the profits are not that high, then the profits cannot support a hierarchy of organization. Because any adult can walk into the government store and buy packets, there is no function left for an organization to serve.
There is one more reason I am confident these resellers will remain sole entrepreneurs and not organize into large profit-making groups: civil liability. The government, of course, will have immunity. The sealed packets will give the resellers criminal immunity, but not civil immunity. In fact, there should be a statute that gives every person harmed by someone under the influence of a drug the right to sue the person that sold him the drug. Should any group of resellers organize into a highly profitable entity, the trial lawyers would have them for lunch.
Two good things would happen if all drug sellers were sole operators. First, there would be no appreciable advertising of drugs (assuming the Supreme Court would not permit banning such advertisements of a legal product) since there would be no one to pay for such ads. (The government won't pay because the government wants to sell as little of its product as possible.) Second, there would be no special interest lobbying on behalf of drugs because there would be no one to pay for it. Think of these resellers as hot dog street vendors - plentiful, but not rich, and not powerful.
Look again at the unintended consequences. If the bad guys are run out of business by competition, we save a ton of money on anti-smuggling and anti-sales police activities. We can also spend a lot less on jails and prisons etc. if all the illegal drug dealers find new employment. Since drug use will remain illegal, police will still arrest people for being under the influence, but those cases are much cheaper to process. The courts will have little trouble with such cases since they are easy to prove once a blood or urine sample is obtained. The jail population of users would go down because, one, hopefully there will be less users, and two, free drug treatment programs (funded by sale profits) would be available as a jail alternative.
Community/police relations should improve tremendously. Police won't kick in doors behind search warrants just to catch people intoxicated. Driving-while-Black traffic stops should plummet since it is drugs that are the object of such stops. The rationale for the stops disappear since driving around with sealed packets would not be illegal. The community will have minimal complaints about arrests made of intoxicated people. The community knows these people need help, and the community would know that such arrests would result in the arrested person being placed in a treatment program. I predict the community will see the police as a partner in treating the problem of drug use, and not view the police as a separate problem.
Respect for the law should increase. One, the police cease to be the enemy. Two, the number of rich crooks draped in gold chains is decreased. Three, the atmosphere of chronic law violation in some neighborhoods will decrease.
Organized drug crime disappears. Totally. 100% reduction. No more murders related to drug marketing. (And that is a lot of murders.) Street gangs will still exist, but they will be poorer. As they get poorer, they will get weaker. As they get poorer, their ability to be role models diminishes.
As for corruption, there is no one left to do the corrupting. Again, a 100% solution. It doesn't get any better. If this idea did nothing else but eliminate corruption, it would be worth it. There is nothing magic about the Rio Grande. Narco millions are corrupting the core of government down south. Our institutional strengths are not infinite. We had institutional strengths before prohibition and ultimately corruption was winning.
It is not just local corruption that is ended. When the Cartels go out of business, the Mexican Police can regain their dignity; Columbian rebels lose their primary funding source; and the new Afghan government can sign a trade deal with the U.S. government that instantly turns their poppy farmers into productive, legal, citizens. This idea would bring more benefits to Afghanistan than it would to Chicago.
As for the amount of drug use, I say it goes down. Once the cries of inconsistency, hypocrisy, and mixed messages die down, the youth of America (and everyone else) will understand that just because adults can legally buy, possess and sell these sealed packets, does not mean drug use is cool, condoned, or legal. Come to school or work stoned, you still get arrested. The message will not be mixed. Remember, the government will be making tremendous profits from these sales. Free treatment programs won't soak them all up. There will be plenty left over for school programs, public service advertising, and any other anti-drug idea that shows promise. Also, pushers that push should disappear. With so many free-lancers out there, I don't think anyone will invest in a client base as they do now. This is one area where no one should make bold predictions, but other than the mixed message argument, all the factors argue that overall use should go down.
There is one final reason to adopt this idea. If the government had monopoly control of the drug trade, it would be a fairly static business. There would be no incentive for anyone to introduce new products to the business. If this idea was adopted in the 70's, or even the early or mid-80's, we would have been spared the plague of rock cocaine. If we adopt it now, we would protect ourselves against an epidemic of an unknown future curse. We could also help alleviate the rock cocaine curse. There is nothing that says all drug prices should be the same. If there was a public health reason to steer people away from rock cocaine more than powdered cocaine, or methamphetamine, the government could simply raise the relative price of rock cocaine.
A last word about kids: Of course it would remain illegal for kids to possess the sealed packets. Of course it would remain a prison offense to sell a sealed packet to a minor. Will kids still get their hands on drugs? Some will. Will this idea make drugs more available to kids than the present situation? Not really. It is so easy for kids to buy drugs now that it is hard to imagine it getting easier. Due to its small size and concealable nature, it is now easier for a child to obtain a rock of cocaine than a six-pack of beer. Scary, isn't it?
C E Sutton
