The Wall Street Journal Thursday, September 7, 1989
An Open Letter to Bill Bennet
Dear Bill:
In Oliver Cromwell's eloquent words, "I
beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think
it possible you may be mistaken" about
the course you and President Bush urge us
to adopt to fight drugs. The path you propose
of more police of more jails, use of the
military in foreign countries, harsh penalties
for drug users, and a whole panoply of
repressive measures can only make a bad
situation worse. The drug war cannot be
won by those tactics without undermining
the human liberty and individual freedom
that you and I cherish.
You are not mistaken in believing that
drugs are a scourge that is devastating our
society. You are not mistaken in believing
that drugs are tearing asunder our social
fabric, ruining the lives of many young
people, and imposing heavy costs on some
of the most disadvantaged among us. You
are not mistaken in believing that the majority
of the public share your concerns. In
short, you are not mistaken in the end you
seek to achieve.
Your mistake is failing to recognize that
the very measures you favor are a major
source of the evils you deplore. Of course
the problem is demand, but it is not only
demand, it is demand that must operate
through repressed and illegal channels.
IIlegality creates obscene profits that finance
the murderous tactics of the drug
lords; illegality leads to the corruption of
law enforcement officials; illegality
monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so
that they are starved for resources to fight
the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and
assault.
Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But
criminalizing their use converts that
tragedy into a disaster for society, for users
and non-users alike. Our experience with
the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our
experience with the prohibition of alcoholic
beverages.
I append excerpts from a column that I
wrote in 1972 on "Prohibition and Drugs."
The major problem then was heroin from
Marseilles; today, it is cocaine from Latin
America. Today, also, the problem is far
more serious than it was 17 years ago:
more addicts, more innocent victims;
more drug pushers, more law enforcement
officials; more money spent to enforce
prohibition, more money spent to circumvent
prohibition.
Had drugs been decriminalized 17 years
ago, "crack'' would never have been invented
(it was invented because the high
cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to
provide a cheaper version) and there
would today be far fewer addicts. The lives
of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands
of innocent victims would have been
saved, and not only in the U.S. The ghettos
of our major cities would not be drug-and-
crime-infested no-man's lands. Fewer people
would be In jails, and fewer jails would
have been built.
Colombia, Bolivia and Peru would not
be suffering from narco-terror, and we.
would not be distorting our foreign policy
because of narco-terror. Hell would not, in
the words with which Bllly Sunday welcomed
Prohibition, "be forever for rent,"
but It would be a lot emptier.
Decriminallzing drugs Is even more urgent
now than in 1972, but we must recognize
that the harm done In the interim cannot
be wiped out, certainly not immediately.
Postponing decriminalizatlon will
only make matters worse, and make the
problem appear even more intractable.
Alcohol and tobacco cause many more
deaths in users than do drugs. Decriminallzation
would not prevent us from treating
drugs as we now treat alcohol and
tabacco: prohibiting sales of drugs to minors,
outlawing the advertising of drugs
and similar measures. Such measures
could be enforced, while outright prohibition
cannot be. Moreover, if even a small
fraction of the money we now spend on trying
to enforce drug prohibition were devoted
to treatment and rehabilitation, in
an atmosphere of compassion not punishment,
the reduction in drug usage and in
the harm done to the users could be dramatic.
This plea comes from the bottom of my
heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know
you are one, must be as revolted as I am
by the prospect of turning the United
States into an armed camp, by the vision
of jails filled with casual drug users and of
an army of enforcers empowered to invade
the liberty of citlzehs on slight evidence. A
country in which shooting down unidentlified
planes "on suspicion" can be seriously
considered as a drug-war tactic Is not.the
kind of United States that either you or I
want to hand on to future generations,
Milton Friedman
Senior Research Fellow
Hoover lnstitution
Stanford University
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Flashback
This is a truncated version of a column
by Mr. Friedman in Newsweek's May 1,
1972, issue, as President Nixon was undertaking
an earlier "drug war":
"The reign of tears is over. The slums
will soon be only a memory. We will turn
our prisons into factories and our jails into
storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk
upright now, women will smile, and the
children will laugh. Hell will be forever
for rent."
That is how Billy Sunday, the noted
evangelist and leading crusader against
Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in early 1920.
We know now how tragically his hopes
were doomed.
Prohibition is an attempted cure that
makes matters worse-for both the addict
and the rest of us.
Consider first the addict. Legalizing
drugs might increase the number of addicts,
but it is not clear that it would. Forbidden
fruit is attractive, particularly to
the young. More important, many drug
addicts are deliberately made by pushers,
who give likely prospects that first few
doses free. It pays the pusher to do so
because, once hooked, the addict is a captive
customer. If drugs were legally available,
any possible profit from such inhumane
activity would disappear, since the
addict could buy from the cheapest
source.
Whatever happens to the number of addicts,
the individual addict would clearly
be far better off if drugs were legal. Addicts
are driven to associate with criminals
to get the drugs, become criminals
themselves to finance the habit, and risk
constant danger of death and disease.
Consider next the rest of us. The harm
to us from the addiction of others arises
almost wholly from the fact that drugs are
illegal. It is estimated that addicts commit
one third to one half of all street crime
in the U.S.
Legalize drugs, and street crime would
drop dramatically.
Moreover, addicts and pushers are not
the only ones corrupted. Immense sums
are at stake. It Is inevitable that some relatively
low-paid police and other government
officials-and some high-paid ones
as well-will succumb to the temptation to
pick up easy money.
Legalizing drugs would simultaneously
reduce the amount of crime and raise the
quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive
of any other measure that would accomplish
so much to promote law and order?
In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion
and example are likely to be far more
effective than the use of force to shape
others in our Image.
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