Ethics Articles
Articles: Drugs
>> = Important Articles; ** = Major Articles
Weed Whackers: The anti-marijuana forces, and why they’re wrong (National Review Online, 010820)
Legalize With Caution Don’t ignore the real effects of marijuana (National Review Online, 010807)
Legalize with Confidence Don’t ignore the real effects of prohibition (MarijuanaNews.com, 010809)
Prohibition and the Legalization of Drugs (Christian Post, 051122)
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Rarely do trial balloons burst so quickly. During the recent British campaign, Tory shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe had no sooner proposed tougher penalties for marijuana possession than a third of her fellow Tory shadow-cabinet ministers admitted to past marijuana use. Widdecome immediately had to back off. The controversy reflected a split in the party, with the confessors attempting to embarrass Widdecombe politically. But something deeper was at work as well: a nascent attempt to reckon honestly with a drug that has been widely used by baby boomers and their generational successors, a tentative step toward a squaring by the political class of its personal experience with the drastic government rhetoric and policies regarding marijuana.
The American debate hasn’t yet reached such a juncture, even though last year’s presidential campaign featured one candidate who pointedly refused to answer questions about his past drug use and another who — according to Gore biographer Bill Turque — spent much of his young adulthood smoking dope and skipping through fields of clover (and still managed to become one of the most notoriously uptight and ambitious politicians in the country). In recent years, the debate over marijuana policy has centered on the question of whether the drug should be available for medicinal purposes (Richard Brookhiser has written eloquently in NR on the topic). Drug warriors call medical marijuana the camel’s nose under the tent for legalization, and so — for many of its advocates — it is. Both sides in the medical-marijuana controversy have ulterior motives, which suggests it may be time to stop debating the nose and move on to the full camel.
Already, there has been some action. About a dozen states have passed medical-marijuana laws in recent years, and California voters, last November, approved Proposition 36, mandating treatment instead of criminal penalties for all first- and second-time nonviolent drug offenders. Proponents of the initiative plan to export it to Ohio, Michigan, and Florida next year. Most such liberalization measures fare well at the polls — California’s passed with 61 percent of the vote — as long as they aren’t perceived as going too far. Loosen, but don’t legalize, seems to be the general public attitude, even as almost every politician still fears departing from Bill Bennett orthodoxy on the issue. But listen carefully to the drug warriors, and you can hear some of them quietly reading marijuana out of the drug war. James Q. Wilson, for instance, perhaps the nation’s most convincing advocate for drug prohibition, is careful to set marijuana aside from his arguments about the potentially ruinous effects of legalizing drugs.
There is good reason for this, since it makes little sense to send people to jail for using a drug that, in terms of its harmfulness, should be categorized somewhere between alcohol and tobacco on one hand and caffeine on the other. According to common estimates, alcohol and tobacco kill hundreds of thousands of people a year. In contrast, there is as a practical matter no such thing as a lethal overdose of marijuana. Yet federal law makes possessing a single joint punishable by up to a year in prison, and many states have similar penalties. There are about 700,000 marijuana arrests in the United States every year, roughly 80 percent for possession. Drug warriors have a strange relationship with these laws: They dispute the idea that anyone ever actually goes to prison for mere possession, but at the same time resist any suggestion that laws providing for exactly that should be struck from the books. So, in the end, one of the drug warriors’ strongest arguments is that the laws they favor aren’t enforced — we’re all liberalizers now.
Gateway to Nowhere
There has, of course, been a barrage of government- sponsored anti-marijuana propaganda over the last two decades, but the essential facts are clear: Marijuana is widely used, and for the vast majority of its users is nearly harmless and represents a temporary experiment or enthusiasm. A 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine — a highly credible outfit that is part of the National Academy of Sciences — found that “in 1996, 68.6 million people — 32% of the U.S. population over 12 years old — had tried marijuana or hashish at least once in their lifetime, but only 5% were current users.” The academic literature talks of “maturing out” of marijuana use the same way college kids grow out of backpacks and Nietzsche. Most marijuana users are between the ages of 18 and 25, and use plummets after age 34, by which time children and mortgages have blunted the appeal of rolling paper and bongs. Authors Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter — drug-war skeptics, but cautious ones — point out in their new book Drug War Heresies that “among 26 to 34 year olds who had used the drug daily sometime in their life in 1994, only 22 percent reported that they had used it in the past year.”
Marijuana prohibitionists have for a long time had trouble maintaining that marijuana itself is dangerous, so they instead have relied on a bank shot--marijuana’s danger is that it leads to the use of drugs that are actually dangerous. This is a way to shovel all the effects of heroin and cocaine onto marijuana, a kind of drug-war McCarthyism. It is called the “gateway theory,” and has been so thoroughly discredited that it is still dusted off only by the most tendentious of drug warriors. The theory’s difficulty begins with a simple fact: Most people who use marijuana, even those who use it with moderate frequency, don’t go on to use any other illegal drug. According the Institute of Medicine report, “Of 34 to 35 year old men who had used marijuana 10–99 times by the age 24–25, 75% never used any other illicit drug.” As Lynn Zimmer and John Morgan point out in their exhaustive book Marijuana Myths/Marijuana Facts, the rates of use of hard drugs have more to do with their fashionability than their connection to marijuana. In 1986, near the peak of the cocaine epidemic, 33 percent of high-school seniors who had used marijuana also had tried cocaine, but by 1994 only 14 percent of marijuana users had gone on to use cocaine.
Then, there is the basic faulty reasoning behind the gateway theory. Since marijuana is the most widely available and least dangerous illegal drug, it makes sense that people inclined to use other harder-to-find drugs will start with it first — but this tells us little or nothing about marijuana itself or about most of its users. It confuses temporality with causality. Because a cocaine addict used marijuana first doesn’t mean he is on cocaine because he smoked marijuana (again, as a factual matter this hypothetical is extremely rare — about one in 100 marijuana users becomes a regular user of cocaine). Drug warriors recently have tried to argue that research showing that marijuana acts on the brain in a way vaguely similar to cocaine and heroin — plugging into the same receptors — proves that it somehow “primes” the brain for harder drugs. But alcohol has roughly the same action, and no one argues that Budweiser creates heroin addicts. “There is no evidence,” says the Institute of Medicine study, “that marijuana serves as a stepping stone on the basis of its particular physiological effect.”
The relationship between drugs and troubled teens appears to be the opposite of that posited by drug warriors — the trouble comes first, then the drugs (or, in other words, it’s the kid, not the substance, who is the problem). The Institute of Medicine reports that “it is more likely that conduct disorders generally lead to substance abuse than the reverse.” The British medical journal Lancet — in a long, careful consideration of the marijuana literature — explains that heavy marijuana use is associated with leaving high school and having trouble getting a job, but that this association wanes “when statistical adjustments are made for the fact that, compared with their peers, heavy cannabis users have poor high-school performance before using cannabis.” (And, remember, this is heavy use: “adolescents who casually experiment with cannabis,” according to MacCoun and Reuter, “appear to function quite well with respect to schooling and mental health.”) In the same way problem kids are attracted to illegal drugs, they are drawn to alcohol and tobacco. One study found that teenage boys who smoke cigarettes daily are about ten times likelier to be diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder than non-smoking teenage boys. By the drug warrior’s logic, this means that tobacco causes mental illness.
Another arrow in the drug warriors’ quiver is the number of people being treated for marijuana: If the drug is so innocuous, why do they seek, or need, treatment? Drug warriors cite figures that say that roughly 100,000 people enter drug-treatment programs every year primarily for marijuana use. But often, the punishment for getting busted for marijuana possession is treatment. According to one government study, in 1998 54 percent of people in state-run treatment programs for marijuana were sent there by the criminal-justice system. So, there is a circularity here: The drug war mandates marijuana treatment, then its advocates point to the fact of that treatment to justify the drug war. Also, people who test positive in employment urine tests often have to get treatment to keep their jobs, and panicked parents will often deliver their marijuana-smoking sons and daughters to treatment programs. This is not to deny that there is such a thing as marijuana dependence. According to The Lancet, “About one in ten of those who ever use cannabis become dependent on it at some time during their 4 or 5 years of heaviest use.”
But it is important to realize that dependence on marijuana — apparently a relatively mild psychological phenomenon — is entirely different from dependence on cocaine and heroin. Marijuana isn’t particularly addictive. One key indicator of the addictiveness of other drugs is that lab rats will self-administer them. Rats simply won’t self-administer THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Two researchers in 1991 studied the addictiveness of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. Both ranked caffeine and marijuana as the least addictive. One gave the two drugs identical scores and another ranked marijuana as slightly less addicting than caffeine. A 1991 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report to Congress states: “Given the large population of marijuana users and the infrequent reports of medical problems from stopping use, tolerance and dependence are not major issues at present.” Indeed, no one is quite sure what marijuana treatment exactly is. As MacCoun and Reuter write, “Severity of addiction is modest enough that there is scarcely any research on treatment of marijuana dependence.”
None of this is to say that marijuana is totally harmless. There is at least a little truth to the stereotype of the Cheech & Chong “stoner.” Long-term heavy marijuana use doesn’t, in the words of The Lancet, “produce the severe or grossly debilitating impairment of memory, attention, and cognitive function that is found with chronic heavy alcohol use,” but it can impair cognitive functioning nonetheless: “These impairments are subtle, so it remains unclear how important they are for everyday functioning, and whether they are reversed after an extended period of abstinence.” This, then, is the bottom-line harm of marijuana to its users: A small minority of people who smoke it may — by choice, as much as any addictive compulsion — eventually smoke enough of it for a long enough period of time to suffer impairments so subtle that they may not affect everyday functioning or be permanent. Arresting, let alone jailing, people for using such a drug seems outrageously disproportionate, which is why drug warriors are always so eager to deny that anyone ever goes to prison for it.
Fighting the Brezhnev Doctrine
In this contention, the drug warriors are largely right. The fact is that the current regime is really only a half-step away from decriminalization. And despite all the heated rhetoric of the drug war, on marijuana there is a quasi-consensus: Legalizers think that marijuana laws shouldn’t be on the books; prohibitionists think, in effect, that they shouldn’t be enforced. A reasonable compromise would be a version of the Dutch model of decriminalization, removing criminal penalties for personal use of marijuana, but keeping the prohibition on street-trafficking and mass cultivation. Under such a scenario, laws for tobacco — an unhealthy drug that is quite addictive — and for marijuana would be heading toward a sort of middle ground, a regulatory regime that controls and discourages use but doesn’t enlist law enforcement in that cause. MacCoun and Reuter have concluded from the experience of decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana in the Netherlands, twelve American states in the 1970s, and parts of Australia that “the available evidence suggests that simply removing the prohibition against possession does not increase cannabis use.”
Drug warriors, of course, will have none of it. They support a drug-war Brezhnev doctrine under which no drug-war excess can ever be turned back — once a harsh law is on the books for marijuana possession, there it must remain lest the wrong “signal” be sent. “Drug use,” as Bill Bennett has said, “is dangerous and immoral.” But for the overwhelming majority of its users marijuana is not the least bit dangerous. (Marijuana’s chief potential danger to others — its users driving while high — should, needless to say, continue to be treated as harshly as drunk driving.) As for the immorality of marijuana’s use, it generally is immoral to break the law. But this is just another drug-war circularity: The marijuana laws create the occasion for this particular immorality. If it is on the basis of its effect — namely, intoxication — that Bennett considers marijuana immoral, then he has to explain why it’s different from drunkenness, and why this particular sense of well-being should be banned in an America that is now the great mood-altering nation, with millions of people on Prozac and other drugs meant primarily to make them feel good.
In the end, marijuana prohibition basically relies on cultural prejudice. This is no small thing. Cultural prejudices are important. Alcohol and tobacco are woven into the very fabric of America. Marijuana doesn’t have the equivalent of, say, the “brewer-patriot” Samuel Adams (its enthusiasts try to enlist George Washington, but he grew hemp instead of smoking it). Marijuana is an Eastern drug, and importantly for conservatives, many of its advocates over the years have looked and thought like Allen Ginsberg. But that isn’t much of an argument for keeping it illegal, and if marijuana started out culturally alien, it certainly isn’t anymore. No wonder drug warriors have to strain for medical and scientific reasons to justify its prohibition. But once all the misrepresentations and exaggerations are stripped away, the main pharmacological effect of marijuana is that it gets people high. Or as The Lancet puts it, “When used in a social setting, it may produce infectious laughter and talkativeness.”
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It is a rare thing, indeed, to find myself in disagreement with Rich Lowry. I must admit, as well, that I sympathize with the central point of Lowry’s latest magazine article, on marijuana legalization. I have long thought that a compromise on decriminalization, modeled after the Dutch system, that allows for personal possession of the drug yet retains penalties for street-trafficking and mass cultivation, would be an apt solution for the current nationwide dilemma. Much of Lowry’s piece relies on a 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine, which is, as he points out, a highly credible source, and I have no quarrel with the vast majority of figures and statistics that make up the guts of his argument.
There are, however, a few important points where Lowry and I part ways — and I feel they are worth discussing here, considering their illustrative nature of the broader American political divide over the marijuana issue.
Lowry terms the “gateway theory” — the concept that marijuana use leads to the use of other drugs — as “a kind of drug-war McCarthyism” that is “dusted off only by the most tendentious of drug warriors.” The form of the gateway theory that he proceeds to lambast certainly sounds quite ridiculous — but in the process, Lowry ignores an important logical distinction between the variants of the gateway theory.
Because a cocaine addict used marijuana first doesn’t mean he is on cocaine because he smoked marijuana (again, as a factual matter this hypothetical is extremely rare — about one in 100 marijuana users becomes a regular user of cocaine).
There are a number of problems with this statement. First, even accepting Lowry’s statistic (and there are other studies that have produced much higher numbers), one out of 100 marijuana users is a very significant number; imagine if one out of every 100 hundred coffee drinkers got cancer, and you’ll see what I mean.
Second, Lowry supplies the wrong statistic for this portion of his argument: The more appropriate one to offer would be the percentage of cocaine users who originally started out smoking pot. The likelihood that a cocaine user smoked marijuana prior to ever using cocaine is actually quite high: The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has reported percentages higher than 80%.
This is, of course, merely coincidental data — assuming there is such a thing as coincidence — and it brings us to my third point. Proving direct causality between marijuana use and cocaine, heroin, or amphetamine use is a difficult, if not impossible, goal, considering that it relies almost completely on anecdotal evidence. The truth remains: Marijuana users are far more likely than non-marijuana users to go on to use any and all of the above substances, a fact we should not rush to ignore.
Lowry then proceeds to debunk another anti-marijuana claim:
The relationship between drugs and troubled teens appears to be the opposite of that posited by drug warriors — the trouble comes first, then the drugs (or, in other words, it’s the kid, not the substance, who is the problem). The Institute of Medicine reports that ‘it is more likely that conduct disorders generally lead to substance abuse than the reverse.
Again, the substance of some of this statement is accurate — marijuana is by no means the root cause of teenage depression, rebellion, suicide, etc. But does anyone honestly believe that unlimited access to their drug of choice would be a help for these teens? That allowing them to smoke pot more freely, publicly, or often would put them back on the right track, instead of taking them down a road that could lead to heavier drug use? Lowry might as well point at a random hash-smoking denizen of junior high America and declare aloud, “Leave that child behind.”
The final statement where I am at odds with Lowry comes near the end of the piece:
But it is important to realize that dependence on marijuana — apparently a relatively mild psychological phenomenon — is entirely different from dependence on cocaine and heroin. Marijuana isn’t particularly addictive.
While Lowry makes several comparisons in his piece between alcohol and marijuana, as he goes on to do here, that comparison distorts the medical truth about the differences between the two substances. It also ignores the plentiful evidence that marijuana, despite on-the-street myths, can actually be quite addictive.
Alcohol is a water-soluble chemical — it is metabolized or “washed-out” of the body relatively quickly. Anyone who drinks too much will probably get sick and suffer a hangover the next day, as the stomach and liver process the alcohol, a form of detoxification that is completed within 12 to 24 hours.
The culprit chemicals in marijuana consist of THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) and other cannabinoids, substances that accumulate in the fatty linings of the cells in the body, and are therefore metabolized very slowly — unlike alcohol, THC is not water-soluble, so it is washed out of the body only over long periods of time. According to the SMAHSA: “A week after a person smokes one marijuana cigarette, 30 to 50 percent of the initial fat-soluble chemical deposited from marijuana smoking remains in their body; it is estimated that four to six weeks are required to eliminate all marijuana chemicals.”
Even if it’s only a weekend habit, marijuana ingestion steadily increases the level of THC in the human body. Several recent evaluations show that heavy, long-term use causes serious dependency in users as they increase their dosage to satisfy higher tolerance levels. The danger of addiction is heightened for teens, whose changing body chemistry and physical development makes them more susceptible to the accumulation of THC and other chemicals than adults. In July, a survey of more than 75,000 high school and junior high students found that only 30.2% of teens smoked cigarettes in the previous six months, while 35.3% used marijuana or other illegal drugs.
Dr. Charles Schuster, Director of Clinical Research on Substance Abuse at Wayne State University School of Medicine, has also performed numerous studies of marijuana users, all indicating a high incidence of the “abstinence syndrome,” one of the chief indicators of physical dependence:
Physical dependence, which is what most people mean by addiction, has been methodically scientifically demonstrated. The abstinence syndrome can occur when a state of marijuana intoxication is maintained over a prolonged period of time and then abruptly discontinued. Anorexia, anxiety, agitation, depression, restlessness, irritability, tremors, severe insomnia, sweating, exaggerated deep tendon reflexes, tremulousness of the tongue and extremities, and dysphoria have all been observed when marijuana use is rapidly withdrawn. It is important to note that these effects occur after only a few weeks of constant use and at dosages that are common among users.
To sum up: Marijuana is an addictive substance. Marijuana, like most other substances, can cause serious physical harm if ingested in great amounts for a long enough time. Marijuana users are more likely to go on to use harder drugs than those who never smoked pot in the first place.
Do any of these facts about marijuana, however, mean that we shouldn’t decriminalize it? Of course not. Like alcohol, marijuana use is only significantly unhealthy if it is ingested irresponsibly or in great amounts, and it would hardly be consistent to allow tobacco cigarettes and ban marijuana ones merely on the basis of addictive properties. While I disagree with him about some of the ramifications of marijuana use, on this point at least, I couldn’t agree with Lowry more.
Some advocates of decriminalization, however, disregard many of marijuana’s serious side effects in devotion to their cause. Drug use is not a thing to be taken lightly, whether in the form of alcohol, nicotine or pot, and with greater freedom will come greater irresponsibility. It would be foolhardy to ignore the serious problems that marijuana can and will cause, regardless of which side you take in this political debate. Legalize it, but do not allow the social consequences to take you unawares.
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I respond to Ben Domenech’s “Legalize With Caution” not because I think that he has too low an opinion of marijuana, but rather because — like many reluctant anti-prohibitionists — he underestimates the harm done by marijuana prohibition.
Frankly, I was surprised that he defends the “gateway theory.” I still think that it was best described by Bill Buckley almost 30 years ago when he defended my call for conservatives to support the legalization of marijuana in the December 6, 1972 issue of NR when he called it “Post Pot Ergo Propter Pot.”
“After That Therefore Because of That” is actually a textbook logical fallacy. It is perhaps the worst of the prohibitionist arguments, but it continues to confuse even people as bright as Mr. Domenech.
When Rich Lowry pointed out that most marijuana users do not use cocaine, Domenech argues, “The more appropriate (number) to offer would be the percentage of cocaine users who originally started out smoking pot.”
First, I cannot imagine anyone ever using hard drugs without having first tried marijuana, but that is not always the case. Even if there were such an absolute correlation, that would still not prove causation. The Institute of Medicine Report points out that because “underage smoking and alcohol use typically precede marijuana use, marijuana is not the most common, and is rarely the first, “gateway” to illicit drug use. There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.”
As for Domenech’s comment, “(I)magine if one out of every 100 hundred coffee drinkers got cancer, and you’ll see what I mean.” Actually, because coffee is so widely consumed, and cancer is such a major cause of death, far more that one percent of coffee drinkers do get cancer, but that is not causation. Post Starbucks Ergo Propter Starbucks.
However, the more important point made by the IOM Report is that the real-world connection between marijuana and hard drugs is that they are sold in the same markets. “(I)t is the legal status of marijuana that makes it a gateway drug.”
The foundation of all Dutch drugs policies is what they call the “separation of the markets,” and that is one reason for their cannabis-only “coffee shop” system. One result is that there are very few young Dutch junkies. In other words, marijuana prohibition is actually counterproductive and creates the “gateway” between marijuana and hard drugs. Legalization would remove that connection. Freedom works.
As for marijuana being “addictive” — the IOM report does not support the dire description by Dr. Charles Schuster, former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a highly politicized prohibitionist propaganda organization. Schuster himself has said that “the likelihood of that occurring in people is much less than with drugs such as cocaine and heroin.”
The IOM report says that A distinctive marijuana withdrawal syndrome has been identified, but it is mild and short-lived.” Two prominent British scientists recently wrote in the London Times that “For some users, perhaps as many as 10 per cent, cannabis leads to psychological dependence, but there is scant evidence that it carries a risk of true addiction. Unlike cigarette smokers, most users do not take the drug on a daily basis, and usually abandon it in their twenties or thirties. Unlike for nicotine, alcohol, and hard drugs, there is no clearly defined “withdrawal syndrome” — the hallmark of true addiction — when use is stopped.”
Dependence is not addiction. I know thousands of marijuana smokers, some are such heavy users that they might be described as “dependent,” but I know of no non-medical users who have ever had serious problems when they had to stop suddenly. People may become “dependent” on anything that they really enjoy, but when they are dependent on something illegal their problems are made worse by prohibition, not helped. And that is the whole point.
Domenech should not worry that legalization will worsen the problems that rightly concern him. On the contrary, the Dutch experiences with tolerating marijuana use, and virtually all human experience with freedom, tell us that coercion is usually counterproductive. He should not fear that marijuana prohibition is somehow an exception.
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Last week, North Carolina former state Supreme Court chief justice, Burley Mitchell, said the war on drugs in the Tar Heel State and the nation has been a “total failure.” According to an MSNBC report, Mitchell spoke at a luncheon organized by North Carolina Policy Watch and Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Mitchell said: “What if we decriminalized drugs? Then you’d knock out all the profits of every dealer and, more to the point, the big producers.” He further argued that the way to reduce law enforcement costs and the prison population, and to open up funds for drug treatment was to legalize drugs.
Mitchell is not alone in his beliefs that America should legalize drugs. Robert L. Maginnis -- in Legalization of Drugs: The Myths and the Facts -- notes that heavyweights like Reagan administration Secretary of State George Shultz, Nobel laureate in economics Milton Friedman, and former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders also believe this way. Maginnis writes, “U.S. Federal District Judge Robert Sweet says the nation should learn the lesson of Prohibition and the crime that ensued when alcohol was illegal.”
I’ve always thought it somewhat ironic that proponents of drug legalization often use the repeal of Prohibition (1920-1933) against alcohol sales to bolster their argument. For those who really know the facts, however, fewer examples better refute their position.
Contrary to popular opinion, Prohibition was quite successful. It didn’t eradicate drinking, but it did significantly reduce consumption rates and thereby improve the public health. In his book The Devaluing of America, William Bennett, former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H.W. Bush, said: “One of the clear lessons of Prohibition is that when we had laws against alcohol there was less consumption, less alcohol-related disease, fewer drunken brawls, and a lot less drunkenness. Contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused any big increases in crime. The real facts are these: As a result of Prohibition, 180,000 saloons were shut down, and 1,800 breweries went out of business. In ten years of Prohibition, the death rate due to alcohol decreased 42 percent, the death rate due to cirrhosis of the liver decreased by 70 percent, crime decreased by 54 percent, and insanity decreased by 66 percent.”
Norman H. Clark in Deliver Us From Evil argues that alcohol’s trail of trouble was nearly absent during Prohibition. Clark contends: “There are today few reasons to believe that these legends, even those so recently embellished, are more than an easy and sentimental hyperbole, crafted by men whose assumptions about a democratic society had been deeply offended .... To suppose, further, that the Volstead Act (Prohibition) caused Americans to drink more rather than less is to defy an impressive body of statistics as well as common sense. The common sense is that a substantial number of people wanted to stop both their own and other people’s drinking, and that the saloons where most people had done their drinking were closed. There is no reason to suppose that the speakeasy, given its illicit connotations, more lurid even than those of the saloon, ever, in any quantifiable way replaced the saloon. In fact, there is every reason to suppose that most Americans outside the larger cities never knew a bootlegger, never saw a speakeasy, and would not have known where to look for one.”
Ross J. McLennan writes in Booze, Bucks, Bamboozle and You that one of the most convincing proofs of Prohibition’s success is the government reports that compare the use of alcohol before and after Prohibition. According to McLennan, in 1914 the per-capita use of alcoholic beverages was 22.80 gallons. In 1934, the first year after repeal, the amount was 8.96 gallons. In other words, the nation had been weaned away from drinking during the nearly 14 years alcohol sales were illegal. And it took years of promotion by the alcohol industry to get consumption levels back up to their pre-Prohibition levels.
To advocate the legalization of drugs on the basis Prohibition was a failure is to perpetuate a myth that could intensify America’s problem with dangerous substances. The legalization of alcohol sales didn’t improve the nation’s alcohol-related problems; instead it terribly exacerbated them. Alcohol-related crime didn’t go down after the repeal of Prohibition; it exceeded far more than the nation could have ever imagined. The public health was so deeply affected that today the Marin Institute says 25 to 40 percent of all patients in America’s general hospital beds (not in maternity or intensive care) are being treated for complications of alcohol-related problems. This is to say nothing of the astronomical social costs of $184.6 billion annually for alcohol abuse that the nation endures. Moreover, MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) reports an alcohol-related traffic accident kills one person every half hour in this country. One can hardly imagine compounding these problems with the legalization of drugs and the exceedingly negative environment it would create!
I agree with Theodore Dalrymple, who says, in Don’t Legalize Drugs, “If the war against drugs is lost, then so are the wars against theft, speeding, incest, fraud, rape, murder, arson, and illegal parking. Few, if any, such wars are winnable .... The extreme intellectual elegance of the proposal to legalize the distribution and consumption of drugs, touted as the solution to so many problems at once (AIDS, crime, overcrowding in the prisons, and even the attractiveness of drugs to foolish young people), should give rise to skepticism. Social problems are not usually like that. Analogies with the Prohibition era, often drawn by those who would legalize drugs, are false and inexact ....”
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not advocating a return to Prohibition. Putting that genie back in the bottle would be impossible now. The best our nation can hope for in that arena is the enactment and enforcement of strong alcohol-control policies that curb consumption levels and consequently reduce alcohol-related troubles. But what I am saying, without the slightest apology, is that Prohibition doesn’t support the argument for the legalization of drugs -- in fact, it disproves it!
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Rev. Mark H. Creech (calact@aol.com) is the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.
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