By BILL KING
By BILL KING
New York Times News Service
That drug addiction is one of the great plagues of our times cannot be denied. Most everyone in our country has been touched by the tragic consequences of this scourge. And that we, as a society, should have policies in place to reduce addiction and mitigate the effects of illegal drugs on individuals and society cannot be reasonably challenged.
However, as Einstein is famously said to have quipped, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. For more than 40 years, we have been following the strategy of attempting to control the supply of drugs by interdiction. At best, the strategy has had mixed results and many make a compelling argument that it has been a disaster.
A doctor who has worked with drug abusers for more than 40 years told me last week that the war on drugs was one of our generation’s greatest moral failures because it had not substantially reduced addiction while doing incalculable collateral damage to young people. And, of course, it has been astronomically expensive.
The bulk of our efforts to reduce drug abuse are focused on sanctioning users and attempting to interdict the supply. The latter involves trying to capture drug shipments coming mostly from South and Central America. However, by all accounts, we have been spectacularly unsuccessful in doing so. While it is almost impossible to know what percentage of drug shipments is interdicted, the U.S. Coast Guard estimated in 1998 that it was about 10 percent.
There are those who argue we just need to try harder. That means spending more money. If we are currently intercepting about 10 percent of the drugs and spending about $15 billion on the drug war, does that mean we would have to increase the budget to $150 billion? Does anyone really believe that we will do that, or that if we did, it would really dry up the supply of drugs?
In contrast to the supply side of the drug equation, we pay much less attention to the demand side. Experts estimate that about 90 percent of anti-drug funding is devoted to interdiction and enforcement, leaving only 10 percent for prevention and treatment. Yet most experts also agree that prevention and treatment are more cost-effective in actually reducing drug abuse.
The pathway to becoming a drug addict is fairly common; most become addicted in their teens. If a person makes it to their mid-20s without becoming an addict, it is less common for them to ever become one. However, abuse of prescription drugs, especially pain killers, is changing this pattern, to some extent. Science shows that our brains are still developing critical judgment functions in adolescence. Teens, and especially male teens, are far more likely to engage in risky behaviors. Drug dealers concentrate their marketing efforts on teens because they are more likely to ignore the risks and become lifelong customers.
A British organization called the Transform Drug Policy Foundation has published an analysis of alternatives to our current approach (www.tdpf.org.uk/Transform_Drugs_Blueprint.pdf). It suggests replacing the current criminalization of drugs with a comprehensive regulatory scheme that still attempts to control drug use to some extent, especially among adolescents. However, the manufacturing and distribution system would be highly regulated, much like prescription drugs are today.
Such a regime would deny profits to the crime syndicates, and it would ensure that drug supplies were pure and unadulterated, which would dramatically reduce the number of deaths from overdoses. But even this extremely reform-minded organization is adamantly opposed to the complete laissez-faire legalization of all drugs. They describe that alternative as drug anarchy. And therein may lie the way forward. So often our drug policy debate is reduced to the simple question of whether to legalize drugs or not. But we need not chose from two polar extremes in crafting policies to reduce drug abuse. It is not an either-or proposition.
Bill King is a columnist for the Houston Chronicle. Email him at weking@weking.net.