Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (53 page)

Leary was the most credentialed salesman of legalization the American people had seen since Henry Smith Williams. Today, many people still believe that legalization would be an expression of his values—that drug use is a good thing and should be encouraged; that it would make drugs available to children; that legalization would lead to much more widespread drug use; and that it would end with the destruction of our culture as we know it.

But the people Mujica sought out make the case for legalization for precisely the opposite reasons. They want to legalize drugs because they want to get them out of the hands of our kids, defend the basic values of law and order, and reduce anarchy and violence. They don’t want a world where drug use becomes more exciting and revolutionary. They want a world where it becomes much more boring. They are a pair of English policy wonks called Danny Kushlick and Steve Rolles. Danny had been working for years with prisoners on probation, and he was sick of watching his clients die of overdoses. Steve was a scientist investigating the effects of ecstasy, who stood with a clipboard taking notes at raves and noticed that people on ecstasy were much more friendly and less violent than the alcohol drinkers he was used to. It was startling, he says, to see the police round them up and take them off to the cells.

Together, Danny and Steve formed a group called the Transform Drugs Policy Institute, to answer a question nobody else in the world was answering in any detail: In practice, on your street, what does legalization mean? If we end the drug war, how will drugs be distributed? Who will be allowed to use them? What would change?

I have been discussing these issues with Danny and Steve for nearly ten years now, and they have become my friends. As they began their investigations, Danny and Steve knew that most people believed legalizing drugs would mean there would be a crack-and-meth aisle in every branch of CVS, between the candy bars and the flavored water. Legalization, its opponents believe, means a free-for-all.

But as they looked at the evidence, Danny and Steve came to believe that it would mean the opposite. Today, the trade in drugs consists of unknown gangsters selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, in the dark. That is the definition of a free-for-all. The only way to regulate this trade, they believe, is to turn on the lights—and the first thing they discovered is that to legalize drugs, you don’t have to invent anything new. The structures already exist, all around us.

At the moment, we have a licensed and regulated way to sell the two deadliest recreational drugs on earth—alcohol and tobacco.

This wasn’t always the case. For a time, various governments experimented with suppressing them by force. In the seventeenth century, Czar Michael Fedorovitch of Russia decreed that “anyone caught with tobacco
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should be tortured until he gave up the name of the supplier.” Around the same time, Sultan Murad IV of the Ottoman Empire introduced the death penalty for smoking. In both countries, people still smoked. So we set up a system where adults can buy this drug legally—but at the same time we make it clear, as a culture, that it makes you sick, you can’t do it in most public places, and most of us find the habit unpleasant.

As a result of this policy where tobacco is legal but increasingly socially disapproved of, cigarette smoking has fallen dramatically. In 1960 in the United States, according to the General Household Survey,
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59 percent of men and 43 percent of women were smokers. Today, it’s 26 percent of men and 23 percent of women—a halving. There have been similar trends across the developed world. Just because something harmful is legal doesn’t mean people rush to use it: more and more are turning away from it.

So Danny and Steve concluded that we need to divide drugs into at least two different tiers, depending on how powerful they are. In the first tier, you find the less potent drugs, like marijuana. For them, their solution is: treat it like tobacco and booze. That would mean—in Europe, at least—no advertising. No promotions. Sell them in plain packages, with no logos but lots of health warnings, through licensed vendors. Impose strict age restrictions. Sell them in dull designated stores. If anyone uses drugs in public, while driving, at work, or while performing any responsible task that requires concentration, severely punish them. If they sell them to kids, strip them of their licenses. In other words—expand the web of regulation covering booze and cigarettes to cover them.

At the next tier, you find the more potent drugs, such as heroin. Again, Danny and Steve say, we already have a form of regulation suitable for them. Across every country in the developed world, there is a network of doctors and pharmacists who prescribe powerful chemicals, on the basis of your doctor’s assessment of whether you need them. As you read this, they are handing out opiates and amphetamines and everything in between, for medical purposes. This, too, can be expanded—just as they’ve done in Switzerland. Under this model, addicts would be prescribed their drug by their doctor, while being offered all sorts of programs to help them stop using.

Expanding these two tiers of regulation that already exist would, they argue, end most of the problems caused by the drug war today. It would mean people who go right now to armed gangsters on street corners will go either to licensed stores, or to doctors and pharmacists, for their drugs.

This isn’t a vision in which we lose control of drugs, Danny and Steve argue—it’s a vision in which we gain control, at last. Legalization is the only way of introducing regulation to the drug market. If this were done, the people selling drugs wouldn’t be shooting each other, any more than your local neighborhood barkeeps send hit men to slaughter each other. The users would know what they were taking. And through taxation, we would have a huge new revenue stream to educate kids and invest in reducing the real causes of addiction.

We have run this historical experiment once before, they point out, and we know what one of the effects will be. When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,
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and it didn’t rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and ’80s.

At its heart, legalization is, Danny tells me, “a drama reduction program. Because all the excitement, the salaciousness, the sexiness of drugs is very much in their prohibition, not their regulation. Somebody once said to me—what you really need to do is get a movie made of what legalization would look like. And I said—Jesus, that would be the most boring film in the world. Because it would be. It’s going to be watching somebody walk into a shop and say, ‘Please can I have some MDMA?’ and they will say, ‘Yes, here’s some. That’ll be £4.50 please.’ There’s a real danger as we move toward the end [of the war] and the beginning of the new [system] that we continue to associate the horrors and the excitement of prohibition with a new regime that is [actually] incredibly boring.” The culture of terror will turn—slowly, but ineluctably—into a culture of tedium.

But what happens next? I had seen clearly that prohibition doesn’t work, and Portugal shows that decriminalization is a significant advance. But what about legalization? The difference is simple. When you decriminalize, you stop punishing drug users and drug addicts—but you continue to ban the manufacture and selling of the drugs. They are still supplied by criminal drug dealers. When you legalize, you set up a network of stores or pharmacies or prescription where users and addicts can buy their drugs.

One crucial question hangs over this vision—one that understandably stops many people from buying this whole argument. If we make drugs more easily available, won’t more people use them? And a whole range of concerns follows from that. There are, for me, three in particular. If more people use them, won’t more people become addicted? Won’t more people overdose? And won’t more kids get hold of drugs? If you are thinking of moving beyond decriminalization into legalization, these are the central questions that have to be answered.

To determine whether drug use would increase, I started to go through the evidence carefully—and I soon found that it is mixed. There are two important pieces of proof from the past—the quasi legalization of marijuana in the Netherlands, and the end of alcohol prohibition in the United States. They offer different lessons.

In 1976, the Dutch introduced
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a new drug policy. They announced if you had up to 30 grams of marijuana on you, the police wouldn’t take it away. This is, in effect, decriminalization of personal use. All legal punishments for cannabis use among adults ended. What happened next? According to all the available evidence,
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over the next seven years, levels of drug use remained the same. Then the Netherlands took another step, which was to allow cannabis to be sold openly in licensed cafés. This was a move from the decriminalization of personal possession to—effectively—the legalization of selling the drug itself. They backed away from calling it legalization, because that would breach the UN treaties authored by Harry Anslinger. But it is, for all intents and purposes, a very modest form of legalization.

And the results, it turns out, were equally clear. There
was
an increase in the use of the drug. Among the group most likely to smoke weed, eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds, the proportion of people who had used cannabis in the previous month rose from 8.5 percent to
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18.5 percent. For other age groups, there was a smaller but still real rise. This increase did not
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happen in other European cities at that time, so it is reasonable to assume it was a result of this policy. Some of this increase was probably due to the fact that people are more likely to openly admit to smoking cannabis when it is no longer a crime—but it is unlikely that this explains all of the rise.

This finding suggests that there is no significant increase in drug use if a country decriminalizes possession, but some increase when they legalize sale. The reason seems to be pretty obvious: it’s about ease of access. We all, I think, know people who would not approach a street dealer for a drug in an alleyway, but who might buy it if it were sold in a store or pharmacy in the local shopping mall.

It’s important to be candid about this rise, but also important not to exaggerate its scale. Cannabis use rose a little, but it is still low in the Netherlands. Some 5 percent of Dutch citizens
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reported smoking cannabis in the previous month, which is lower than the United States
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at 6.3 percent and the EU average of 7 percent. Cannabis consumption didn’t spiral out of control, and it remains low compared to other countries.

But there’s a significant complicating factor to this rise—one explained to me by Danny. Try, as you read this, to see “drug use” as an overall number—everyone in the world tonight who is taking a drug counts as one drug user. You’d include everyone buying a joint or taking an ecstasy pill. But should you include every pint of beer and every shot of whisky in that tally? If you don’t count alcohol as drug use, then drug use would go up. But if you do count alcohol as drug use, then there is some evidence suggesting overall drug use will
not
go up after legalization. Why? What seems to happen when you legalize marijuana is that a significant number of people looking to chill out transfer from getting drunk
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to getting stoned. After California made it much easier to get marijuana from your doctor—anyone claiming a bad back was given a permit—traffic accidents fell by 8 percent,
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because lots of people made this shift, and driving when you’re stoned (while a bad idea) is nowhere near as dangerous as driving drunk.

That’s why Danny believes that talk about a rise in “drug use” is the wrong way of thinking about it. The more interesting question, he says, is how patterns of drug use will change. If we legalized ecstasy and lots of people transferred from getting drunk on a Saturday night to taking ecstasy on a Saturday night, that would count in the official statistics as an increase in “drug use.” In fact, he says, it would be an improvement. Our streets would be less violent. Domestic violence would fall. Fewer people would get liver diseases. This is a more complex calculation, he says, than can be measured on a narrowly statistical balance sheet.