U.S. Policy: A Bad Export

Introduction

Almost everyone seems to agree that the "drug problem" is now a major international issue. U S. relations with several Latin American countries are seriously strained because of these countries' inability to control the drug trade. Political leaders across the spectrum are advocating U.S. military involvement in suppression efforts; U.S. troops have even been deployed abroad in an effort to disrupt the production and export of cocaine from Bolivia.

At home political figures endorse increasingly repressive measures to try to stamp out drug use. There are calls for more widespread drug testing, increasingly powerful investigative tools for drug enforcement agencies, and greater expenditures on all aspects of drug enforcement.

The political tide is now so strong that drug policy, perhaps more than any other domain of public policy, has been captured by its own rhetoric and effectively immunized from critical examination. Clearly the time has come for a more rational discussion of the drug problem--one that attempts to distinguish the problems of drug abuse, on the one hand, from the problems that result from drug prohibition policies, on the other.

Obsessed with the need to control drug trafficking, governments have enacted and enforced increasingly harsh criminal penalties regulating virtually every aspect of drug use with little regard for the costs imposed by these laws. These costs can be measured not just in tax dollars, but also in individual lives, personal liberties, political stability, social welfare, and moral well-being. Federal and state governments spend several billion dollars each year to enforce the increasingly repressive laws inside the United States. And U.S. diplomats press governments around the world to follow the American lead and enact their own harsh measures against drug use and trafficking. Meanwhile, there is no indication that the magnitude of the worldwide drug abuse problem is declining. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the current American approach actually may be exacerbating most aspects of what is commonly identified as the drug problem.

Sixty years ago, most Americans demonstrated a clear ability to distinguish between the problems of alcoholism and alcohol abuse and the costs imposed by the prohibition laws. The debate between proponents and opponents of Prohibition ultimately revolved around conflicting interpretations of what both sides regarded as a cost-benefit analysis. Unfortunately, today few Americans demonstrate any aptitude for distinguishing between the problems of drug abuse and those occasioned by the drug prohibition laws. Yet so much of what Americans typically identify as part and parcel of the drug problem falls within the latter, not the former, category.

No doubt most people resist thinking about the drug problem in terms of the Prohibition analogy because the notion of repealing the current drug laws is not regarded as a viable policy option. Indeed, the very suggestion of such a possibility quickly conjures up images of an America transformed into a modern- day Sodom and Gomorra. Yet there are powerful reasons to at least attempt a reasoned analysis of the costs and benefits of current drug policies. First, an optimal drug policy must aim to minimize not just drug abuse but also the costs to society imposed by drug control measures. Second, there are numerous alternatives to current policies, among which the libertarian vision of unrestricted access to all drugs is only one and certainly the most radical. Third, there is good reason to believe that repealing many of the current drug laws would not lead to a dramatic rise in drug abuse, especially if intelligent alternative measures were implemented.

All public policies create beneficiaries and victims, both intended and unintended. When a policy results in a disproportionate magnitude of unintended victims, there is good reason to reevaluate its assumptions. In the case of drug prohibition policies, the intended beneficiaries are those individuals who would become drug abusers but for the existence and enforcement of the drug laws. The intended victims are those who traffic in illicit drugs and suffer the legal consequences. The unintended beneficiaries, conversely, are the drug producers and traffickers who profit handsomely from the illegality of the market while avoiding arrest by the authorities and violence by other criminals. Each of these three categories is readily recognizable. The unintended victims of drug prohibition policies, however, are rarely recognized as such. Indeed, they are most typically portrayed as the victims of the unintended beneficiaries, that is, the drug traffickers - when in fact the drug prohibition policies are the principal cause of their victimization.

In certain respects, the Latin American are among the principal unintended beneficiaries of U. S. drug policies. The international demand for illegal drugs such as marijuana and cocaine has proved to be an economic boon for Latin America. This has been especially true for the main source countries - Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. Much, but by no means all, of the economic benefit has derived from the market's illegality. Government repression of the market has had the same effect as a huge tax except that the revenue is collected not by governments but by illicit sellers. Hundreds of thousands of farm families, primarily in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, have earned far more from growing coca, the agricultural raw material for cocaine, than they would have from growing any other crop. The same is true of tens of thousands of marijuana growers in Belize, Colombia, Jamaica, and Mexico. Others involved in refining, transporting, or protecting the illegal product have supplemented or replaced meager incomes earned in the legitimate economy. Countless corrupt officials likewise have pocketed money from the illicit trade. In addition to these groups that benefit directly, significant sectors of the population in several Latin American countries have benefited indirectly from the trickle-down effects of the trade.

Because the market is illicit, it is impossible to offer any but the most speculative estimates of its total value to Latin Americans. The Bolivian government has estimated that the cocaine trade brings about $6oo million per year into its economy, a figure equal to the country's total legal export income. Peru, which produces about the same amount of cocaine, probably earns a similar amount although it accounts for a lesser proportion of its total exports. In both these countries, a large proportion of the coca money is distributed among the growers and other low-level participants in the market. In Colombia, there are fewer growers but more people involved in support areas of the business such as transport and security. All told, cocaine and marijuana exports probably generate a minimum of $2 billion a year in foreign currency for Latin Americans - excluding the additional billions invested outside the continent.

If it is fair to say that some Latin Americans are the unintended economic beneficiaries of U.S. and international drug prohibition policies, it is equally valid to identify others as the unintended political and social victims of those policies. The recent dramatic increases in cocaine smoking among the youth of Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru are one consequence. Even more ominous, the drug market's huge size, combined with its illegality, has generated tremendous corruption, lawlessness, and violence throughout Latin America. It is not that these evils did not exist before the boom in drug trafficking, but that they have mushroomed in scope and magnitude. Government officials ranging from common police officers to judges to cabinet ministers have been offered bribes many times their annual government salaries, and often for doing nothing more than looking the other way. Inducing cooperation has been the threat of violence if the bribes are not accepted. In addition, the limits on what can be bought with corruption have evaporated. Supreme court judges, high-ranking police and military officials, and cabinet ministers are no longer above such things.

The ultimate degree of corruption is when government officials take the initiative in perpetrating crimes. This also has happened throughout much of Latin America. Police officers no longer just accept bribes or extort from traffickers but engage in trafficking themselves. Provincial mayors and governors enter into partnerships with full-time drug traffickers. And even military officers, who in at least a few countries traditionally have shunned drug corruption, have succumbed to the temptation of cocaine dollars. This has occurred not just in the major drug-producing countries but throughout the continent as well. No country, from Cuba to Chile, seems to be immune.

Perhaps even worse than the corruption of governments has been the growth in the power of criminal groups. The two cannot be disentangled from one another, of course, but they are distinct. In many Latin American countries drug trafficking organizations, rather than the government, now represent the ultimate power in portions of a country if not the country as a whole. Government officials who oppose this extralegal power know that ultimately the government cannot protect them or their families. In the United States, only one federal judge has been killed in a hundred years, and it is almost unheard of for a federal prosecutor to be killed. Even police rarely need to fear the vengeance of those they arrest. In Latin America, however, not just police but also prosecutors and judges have been killed by the dozens. In Colombia, drug traffickers have killed a minister of justice, a Supreme Court justice, an attorney general, and a chief of the narcotics police. In the final analysis, the monumental scope of the illicit drug traffic, created largely by U.S. demand and the illegality of the market, has eroded the ultimate authority of the state as a symbol and enforcer of law and order in many Latin American countries.

What can Latin American countries do? From their perspective, the most sensible solution to drug-related corruption and criminal activity would be international legalization of the marijuana and cocaine markets. Their drug problems, after all, stem almost entirely from the illegality of the market. If it were legal, it would function not unlike the international markets in legal substances such as liquor, coffee, and tobacco. It would be regulated to varying degrees by the governments of both producing and consuming countries; the individual and corporate participants in the market would pay taxes and duties; consumers would have available more accurate information on the products themselves; and the governments would spare themselves the exorbitant costs of trying to enforce the drug prohibition laws. No doubt companies already specializing in the production and marketing of alcohol, coffee, and tobacco would play a major role in this business as well. There probably would be some market adjustment. For example, foreign suppliers, especially of marijuana, might yield a sizable share of their market to new suppliers within the United States. And there undoubtedly would also be a certain amount of smuggling, largely to avoid duties and other customs regulations. But its incentives and scale probably would be most similar to those that attend the legal substance markets today.

The social and political benefits would be critical. Levels of corruption, violence, and lawlessness would decline dramatically. Latin American governments no longer would be placed in the awkward situation of trying to destroy the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of campesinos. Radical guerrilla groups such as Peru's Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), which have gained political support from their attacks on U.S. sponsored antidrug programs, would lose some of their appeal. Other guerrilla and terrorist groups, such as Colombia's FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces) and M-19, which have profited from their involvement in the illicit drug trade, would lose a major source of funding. And governments would be able to reassert some degree of control over regions of their countries that are now dominated by powerful narcotraficantes.

Today many drug specialists, including Drug Enforcement Administration chief John Lawn, concede that stopping the flow of drugs is impossible. They know that whenever drug control efforts succeed in cracking down on one source country or disrupting one major trafficking route, another soon emerges in its place. International drug enforcement efforts are thus justified on the grounds that they are essential in limiting consumption by keeping the retail street price of the substances as high as possible. But the price is, in fact, influenced little, if at all, by changes in drug enforcement efforts in the supplying countries. In 1987, for instance, average-grade marijuana reportedly was selling for $6- $11 per pound at Colombian beaches and airstrips. On arrival in the United States, its worth increased approximately ninetyfold, to $550-$990 per pound. With respect to cocaine, the markup from Colombian airstrip to Miami wholesaler was only fivefold, from $3,600-$4,400 to $17,000-$22,000 per kilo. But unlike marijuana, which increases only three or four times in value from wholesale to retail, the ultimate value of a kilo of cocaine is $80,000-$120,000, for as much as a sevenfold markup.

Although the tremendous range in drug prices renders precise calculations impossible, estimated average prices indicate that the foreign price of marijuana is only slightly more than 1 per cent of its U.S. wholesale price and .5 per cent of the retail price paid by the U.S. consumer. The foreign price of cocaine is 20 per cent of the U.S. wholesale price but only about 4 per cent of the ultimate retail price. Consequently, even if substantial enforcement efforts were to quadruple or quintuple the foreign prices of these substances, there would be almost no price effect on the American consumer - and only in the case of cocaine would wholesalers be much affected. With respect to heroin, the irrelevance of source control efforts to the retail street price in the United States is even greater.

Limitations on the ultimate success of the international regime to control drug trafficking are best comprehended by comparing the drug regime with other international law enforcement regimes. In certain important respects the drug regime resembles other international law enforcement regimes, such as those that nearly eradicated piracy and slavery during the previous century or those established more recently that deal with counterfeit currency and airplane hijacking. In each case, the vast majority of governments ultimately recognized a mutual interest in not participating, directly or indirectly, in such illegal acts and in cooperating in their suppression. Moreover, each act has come to be regarded in international law as in some sense an international crime.

However, the drug regime differs from other international law enforcement regimes in at least two significant respects. First, despite rhetoric to the contrary, it lacks a deeply rooted moral consensus that the activity in question is wrong. Second, crimes that require limited resources and no particular expertise to commit, that are easily concealable, and that create no victims with an interest in notifying authorities are most likely to resist enforcement efforts. Each of these characteristics describes drug trafficking. For instance, unlike counterfeiting, no particular expertise is required to become a drug smuggler. Even in the United States, marijuana is grown profitably by tens of thousands of people with no more training than can be acquired in a local library. In the less developed countries where opium poppies, coca, and cannabis for foreign markets are grown and refined, hundreds of thousands of poorly educated farmers participate in the market. Nor does it require any special expertise to be a drug courier. The potential number of successful counterfeiters is an extremely small number; the potential number of successful drug traffickers is virtually infinite.

Most aspects of drug trafficking are easily concealable. The crops are often grown in inaccessible hinterlands and camouflaged with legitimate crops. Their transport to the United States is also exceedingly difficult to detect. The approximately 100 tons of cocaine exported from Latin America during each of the past few years constitute a small percentage of the total volume of exports. The private aircraft in which large shipments are typically transported are exceedingly difficult to interdict. There also are tremendous economic incentives to smuggle even very small amounts. An average profit for smuggling just 1, easily concealed, kilo of cocaine, after all, is $15,000. With temptation such as this, there is almost no limit to the number of individuals willing to transport 1 or 2 kilos on commercial aircraft.

Although the international slave trade, like the drug traffic, was driven by the prospect of higher profits than could be attained in legitimate commerce, it was a far more visible trade. Ships carrying slaves from Africa usually could be identified far more readily than the vessels that transport marijuana and cocaine today. Even more important, the purchasers of slaves had much more difficulty concealing their illegal "property" than do the ultimate customers of illicit drugs.

Finally, the victims of slavery, piracy, counterfeiting, and hijacking are eager to have others know of their plight. But the willing "victims" of the drug trade have no intention of notifying the authorities. Drug trafficking, which involves willing buyers and sellers, unlike the other targets of international law enforcement regimes, is an entirely consensual activity.

It can be argued, of course, that drug trafficking also creates its own victims - in particular those who become dependent upon the drugs and, less directly, those who suffer as a consequence of others' abuse of drugs. The great difference, however, is that the immediate victims of drug trafficking, unlike the victims of other international crimes, are self-chosen in that their initial steps on the road to victimization are consensual ones.

In the case of each successful international law enforcement regime, the activity could not be effectively suppressed until a broad consensus had developed across diverse societies that viewed the activity as morally noxious. Such a consensus in regard to the immorality of piracy developed throughout much of the world during the 18th century. A similar consensus evolved with respect to slavery during the 19th century. The reason these and subsequent consensuses underlying other international law enforcement regimes evolved was essentially the same: the activity itself directly victimized innocents. The basic problem of the antidrug regime, and for that matter of the efforts in the early part of this century to create antialcohol and antiprostitution regimes, has been the absence of just such a consensus. For all the undeniable victims of these vices, many others involved in the activities were not, and did not perceive themselves as, victims. Thus despite the efforts of the United States and some other governments to create the veneer of an international moral consensus on the drug issue, a true consensus does not exist - and will not be attained - either within the United States or around the world.

Comparing Risks

The case for legalization is particularly convincing when the risks inherent in alcohol and tobacco use are compared with those associated with illicit drug use. Both in Latin America and in the United States, the health costs exacted by illicit drug use pale in comparison with those associated with tobacco and alcohol use. In September 1986, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that in the United States, alcohol was a contributing factor in 10 per cent of work-related injuries, 40 per cent of suicide attempts, and also 40 per cent of the approximately 46,000 traffic deaths in 1983. That same year the total cost of alcohol abuse to American society was estimated at more than $100 billion. An estimated 18 million Americans are currently reported to be either alcoholics or alcohol abusers. Alcohol has been identified as the direct cause of 80,000 to 100,000 deaths annually and as a contributing factor in an additional 100,000 deaths (1). The health costs of tobacco use in the United States and elsewhere are different but of similar magnitude. In the United States alone in 1984, more than 320,000 deaths were attributed to tobacco consumption. All of the health costs of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin combined amount to only a fraction of those of either of the two licit substances.

According to the National Council on Alcoholism, only 3,562 people were known to have died in 1985 from use of all illegal drugs combined. Logic would dictate that, if any substances warrant criminal sanction for health reasons, they are alcohol and tobacco, which are used by 140,000,000 and 50,000,000 people respectively. However, most people seem to believe that there is something fundamentally different about alcohol and tobacco that legitimates the legal distinction between those two substances and the illicit ones. The most common distinction is based on the assumption that the illicit drugs are more dangerous than the licit ones. Cocaine, heroin, the various hallucinogens, and, to a lesser extent, marijuana, are widely perceived as, in the words of the President's Commission on Organized Crime, "inherently destructive to mind and body." They are also believed to be more addictive and more likely to cause dangerous and violent behavior than are alcohol and tobacco. All use of illicit drugs is typically equated with drug abuse. In short, the distinction between use and abuse of psychoactive substances that most people recognize with respect to alcohol is not regarded as relevant in the case of illicit substances.

Many Americans also make the fallacious assumption that the government would not criminalize certain psychoactive substances if they were not in fact dangerous. They then jump to the conclusion that any use of those substances is a form of abuse. The government, in its efforts to discourage people from using illicit drugs, has encouraged and perpetuated these misconceptions not just in its rhetoric but also in its purportedly educational materials. Only by reading between the lines can the fact be discerned that the vast majority of Americans who have used illicit drugs have done so in moderation, that relatively few have suffered negative short-term consequences, and given available evidence, that few are likely to suffer long-term harm.

The evidence is most persuasive with respect to marijuana. The National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee, an interagency body that coordinates drug-related intelligence, did not include marijuana-related deaths in its June 1987 report, apparently because so few occur. Nor is marijuana strongly identified as a dependence-causing substance. The dangers associated with cocaine, heroin, and hallucinogens certainly are greater, but not nearly as great as most people seem to think. Consider the case of cocaine. In 1986 the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) reported that more than 20 million Americans had tried cocaine in 1985, that 12.2 million had consumed it at least once during that year, and that nearly 5.8 million had used it within the past month. It should be noted that the NIDA survey did not include persons residing in military or student dormitories, prison inmates, or the homeless.

Although a figure for weekly cocaine consumption among the entire survey population is unavailable, NIDA has compiled such information with regard to 18-25-year-olds: 250,000 had used it on the average weekly; 2.5 million had used it within the past month; 5.3 million had used it within the past year; and 8.2 million Americans in this age group had ever used cocaine. It could be inferred from these figures that a quarter of a million young Americans were potential problem users. It could also be determined that only 3 per cent of those 18-25-year-olds who had ever tried the drug fell into that category, and that only 10 per cent of those who had used cocaine monthly were at risk.

All of this is not to say that cocaine is not a potentially dangerous drug, especially when it is injected or smoked in the form of "crack." But there is also evidence that most cocaine users do not get into trouble with the drug. So much of the media attention has focused on the small percentage of cocaine users who become addicted that the popular perception of how most people use cocaine has become badly distorted. In one survey of high school seniors' drug use, the researchers questioned those who had used cocaine to whether they had ever tried to stop using cocaine and found that they could not. Only 3.8 per cent responded affirmatively, in contrast with the almost 7 per cent of marijuana smokers who said they had tried to stop and found they could not and the 18 per cent of cigarette smokers who answered similarly (2). Although a survey of adult users probably would reveal a higher proportion of cocaine addicts, evidence such as this suggests that only a small percentage of people who use cocaine end up having a problem with it. In this respect, most Americans differ from monkeys, who have demonstrated in tests that they will starve themselves to death if provided with unlimited cocaine.

With respect to the hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocybin, their potential for addiction is virtually nil. The dangers arise primarily from using them irresponsibly on individual occasions (3). Although many of those who have used one or another of the hallucinogens have experienced "bad trips," far more have reported positive experiences and very few have suffered any long-term harm.

Perhaps no drugs are regarded with as much horror as the opiates, and in particular heroin, which is a more concentrated form of morphine. There is no question that heroin is potentially highly addictive. But despite the popular association of heroin use with the most down-and-out inhabitants of urban ghettos, heroin causes relatively little physical harm to the human body and certainly far less than alcohol and tobacco (4). That is one reason many American doctors in the 19th and early 20th centuries saw opiate addiction as preferable to alcoholism and prescribed the former as treatment for the latter when abstinence did not seem a realistic option (5). It is both insightful and important to think about the illicit drugs in the same way as alcohol and tobacco. Like tobacco, many of the illicit substances are highly addictive, but many people can consume them on a regular basis for decades without any demonstrable harm. Like alcohol, most of the substances can be, and are, used by most consumers in moderation with little in the way of harmful effects; but like alcohol they also lend themselves to abuse by a minority of users who become addicted or otherwise harm themselves or others as a consequence. And like both the legal substances, the psychoactive effects of each of the illegal drugs vary greatly from one person to another. To be sure, the pharmacology of the substance is important, as is its purity and the manner in which it is consumed. But much also depends upon not just the physiology and psychology of the consumers but their expectations of the drug, their social milieu, and the broader cultural environment - what the Harvard University psychiatrist Norman Zinberg has called the "set and setting" of the drug (6). These factors might change dramatically, albeit in indeterminate ways, were the illicit drugs made legally available.

Clearly, then, there is no valid basis for distinguishing between alcohol and tobacco, on the one hand, and most of the illicit substances, on the other, as far as their relative dangers are concerned. However, even many of those who acknowledge this fact insist that there is another distinction, a moral one, that justifies the different legal treatments of the various drugs. But when this distinction is subjected to reasoned analysis, it also quickly disintegrates. Once the fact that there is nothing immoral about drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco for nonmedicinal reasons is acknowledged, it becomes difficult to condemn on moral grounds consumption of marijuana, cocaine, and other substances. The "moral" condemnation of some substances and not others is revealed as little more than a prejudice in favor of some drugs and against others. It could be argued, of course, that morality is really nothing more than the prejudices of the majority. But to the extent that it is defined as something more than that, there can be no legitimate reason for distinguishing on moral grounds between alcohol and tobacco use and the use of illicit substances.

The same false distinction is drawn even more severely when it comes to those who provide the psychoactive substances to users and abusers alike. If degrees of immorality were measured by the levels of harm caused by a dealer's products, the "traffickers" in tobacco and alcohol would be vilified as the most evil of all substance purveyors. That they are perceived instead as respectable, even important, members of the community while providers of the no more dangerous illicit substances are punished with long prison sentences says much about the prejudices of most Americans with respect to psychoactive substances but little about the morality or immorality of their activities.

Although a direct moral distinction cannot be drawn between the licit and the illicit psychoactive substances, it is possible to point to a different kind of moral justification for the drug laws. Those laws can be viewed as embodying a paternalistic obligation to protect those who cannot protect themselves from succumbing to their own weaknesses. If the illegal drugs were legally available, most people would either abstain from using them or else use them responsibly and in moderation. A small minority who lacked sufficient self-restraint, however, would end up harming themselves if the substances were more readily available. Therefore, it is argued, the majority has a moral obligation to deny its members legal access to certain substances because of the foibles of the minority. This obligation presumably applies most strongly when children are included among the minority.

This argument, at least in principle, seems to provide the strongest moral justification for the drug laws. But ultimately the moral quality of laws must be judged not by how those laws are intended to work in principle but by how they function in fact. When laws intended to reflect a moral obligation cause new harms of a different kind, arguably even greater in impact, there is a need to re-evaluate them and inquire whether those laws have become in some sense immoral.

Drug-Policy Alternatives

There are those who acknowledge the greater harms caused by alcohol and tobacco but who justify the criminalization of other substances on the ground that two wrongs do not make a third wrong right. The logic of their argument, however, ultimately crumbles when the costs of the drug laws are considered. There is little question that if the production, sale, and possession of alcohol and tobacco were criminalized, the health costs associated with their use and abuse could be reduced. But most Americans do not believe that criminalizing the alcohol and tobacco markets would be a good idea. Their opposition stems largely from two beliefs: that adult Americans have the right to choose what substances they will consume and what risks they will take, and that the economic costs of trying to coerce so many Americans into abstaining from those substances would be enormous and the social costs disastrous.

An assessment of the costs and benefits of current drug control policies in the United States requires some sense of what the alternatives would be. When Prohibition's proponents and opponents debated the merits of the 18th Amendment, they were able to draw on their recent memories. The difficulty in contemplating the alternatives to drug prohibition is that few people can remember when heroin, cocaine, and even marijuana were legally available. The first federal legislation severely restricting the sale of cocaine and the opiates was the 1914 Harrison Act. Marijuana did not become the subject of federal legislation until 1937, when Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. In both cases, however, state legislatures around the country already had imposed their own restrictions on the availability of these drugs, motivated in good part by the popular association of these substances with feared minorities - the opiates with the Chinese immigrants; cocaine with blacks; and marijuana with blacks and Hispanics. Even so, the late 19th century and the first years of the 20th century could be described as a period in which most of today's illicit drugs were more or less legally available to those who wanted them. The United States at that time had a drug abuse problem of roughly similar magnitude to today's problem, but it was perceived almost entirely as a public and private health issue. Crime and law enforcement played little role in the nature, perception, and handling of the problem.

In 1987 direct expenditures on drug interdiction incurred by the military, which markedly underestimate actual costs, increased significantly from almost nothing in 1981 to about $165 million. Expenditures in this area by the three principal intelligence agencies - the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency - also have increased dramatically. The Drug Enforcement Administration's budget has risen from about $200 million in 1980 to a projected $500 million in 1988, and almost all of the other federal law enforcement agencies - in particular, the FBI and the U.S. Customs Service - have increased dramatically the proportion of their resources devoted to drug enforcement activities. In an August 1987 study prepared for the U.S. Customs Service by Wharton Econometrics, state and local police were estimated to have devoted about one-fifth of their total budgets, or close to $5 billion, to drug-law enforcement in 1986. This represented a 19 per cent increase over the previous year's expenditures. All told, 1987 expenditures on all aspects of drug enforcement, from drug eradication in foreign countries to imprisonment of drug users and dealers in the United States, probably totaled at least $8 billion.

Even more significant than the actual expenditures has been the diversion of limited resources - including experienced and talented judges and prosecutors and law enforcement agents, as well as scarce prison space - from enforcement against criminal activities that harm far more innocent victims than do violators of the drug laws. Drug- law violators account for approximately one-tenth of the roughly 800,000 inmates in state prisons and local jails and more than one-third of the 44,000 federal prison inmates, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics. These proportions are expected to increase in coming years even as total prison populations continue to rise dramatically. Largely as a consequence of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act passed by Congress in 1986, the proportion of federal inmates incarcerated for drug violations is expected to rise from one- third of the 44,000 prisoners currently sentenced to federal prisons to one-half of the 100,000-150,000 federal prisoners anticipated in 15 years. The direct cost of building and maintaining enough state and federal prisons to house this growing population is rising at an astronomical rate. The opportunity costs in terms of alternative social expenditures forgone and other types of criminals not imprisoned are perhaps even more severe.

FBI figures show that during each of the last few years, about 750,000 people were arrested on drug charges. Slightly more than three-fourths of these arrests were not for manufacturing or dealing drugs but solely for possessing an illicit drug, typically marijuana. (Those arrested, it is worth noting, represented less than 3 per cent of the 30 million Americans estimated to have consumed an illegal drug during the past year.) Criminal justice systems in many cities are clogged. In New York City, 41 per cent of all felony indictments during the first 3 months of 1987 were for drug offenses (7)

Other costs are equally great but somewhat harder to evaluate: the governmental corruption that inevitably attends enforcement of the drug laws; the effects of labeling the tens of millions who use drugs illicitly as criminals, subjecting them to the risks of criminal sanction and obliging many of those same people to enter into relationships with drug dealers - who may be criminals in many more senses of the word - to purchase their drugs; the cynicism that such laws generate toward other laws and the law in general; and the sense of hostility and suspicion that many otherwise law-abiding individuals feel toward law enforcement officials. It was costs like these that strongly influenced many of Prohibition's more conservative opponents. As John D. Rockefeller, Jr., wrote in explaining why he was withdrawing as a leading supporter of Prohibition and calling for its repeal:

That a vast array of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale; that many of our best citizens, piqued at what they regarded as an infringement of their private rights, have openly and unabashedly disregarded the Eighteenth Amendment; that as an inevitable result respect for all law has been greatly lessened; that crime has increased to an unprecedented degree - I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe.

The unintended beneficiaries of the drug laws, as in Latin America, have been the organized and unorganized criminals who thwart the law to their great profit. A report issued by the President's Commission on Organized Crime identified the sale of illicit drugs as the leading source of revenue for organized crime in 1986, with the marijuana and heroin business each providing more than $7 billion and the cocaine business more than $13 billion. By contrast, revenues from cigarette bootlegging were estimated at $290,000,000. If the marijuana, cocaine, and heroin markets were legal, state and federal governments would collect billions of dollars annually in tax revenues. Instead they expend billions.

During Prohibition, violent struggles between bootlegging gangs and hijackings of liquor- laden trucks and sea vessels were frequent and notorious occurrences. Today's equivalents are the booby traps that surround some marijuana fields, the Caribbean pirates looking to plunder drug laden vessels en route to U.S. shores, and the machine-gun battles and executions of the more sordid drug mafias - all of which occasionally kill innocent people. Most law enforcement authorities agree that the dramatic increases in urban murder rates during the past few years can be explained almost entirely by the rise in drug- dealer killings, mainly of one another.

Perhaps the most unfortunate victims of the drug prohibition policies have been the law- abiding residents of America's ghettos. These policies account for much of what ghetto residents identify as the drug problem. In many neighborhoods, it often seems to be the aggressive, gun-toting drug dealers who upset residents far more than the addicts nodding in doorways. As in Medellin, Colombia, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the drug dealers are widely perceived as heroes and successful role models. In impoverished neighborhoods, they often stand out as symbols of success to children who see no other options. At the same time, the increasingly harsh criminal penalties imposed on adult drug dealers have led to the widespread recruitment of juveniles by drug traffickers. Where once children started dealing drugs only after they had been using them for a few years, today the sequence is often reversed. Many children start to use illegal drugs now only after they have worked for older drug dealers for a while. And the juvenile justice system offers no realistic options for dealing with this growing problem.

Among the most difficult costs to evaluate are those created by the high price of most illicit drugs, notably cocaine and heroin. Whereas drug laws and their enforcement seek to make the drugs so prohibitive in price that people cannot or will not pay for them, there are vast costs involved in making drugs so expensive. In particular, many of those who desire or become addicted to the illicit substances not only divert substantial portions of their incomes to drug purchases but often end up committing crimes to fund their drug needs. Unlike the millions of alcoholics who can support their habits for relatively modest amounts, many cocaine and heroin addicts are reported to spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars per week. If those drugs were dramatically cheaper, which would be the case either if they were legalized or if the drug laws were no longer enforced, the number of crimes committed by drug addicts to pay for their habits would obviously decline dramatically. So would the profits, power, and incentives of the drug traffickers.

The drug prohibition laws pose additional problems for the millions of drug users who have not been deterred from using illicit drugs in the first place. Nothing resembling an underground Food and Drug Administration has arisen to impose quality control on the illegal drug market. Many marijuana smokers are worse off for having smoked cannabis that was grown with dangerous fertilizers, sprayed with the herbicide paraquat, or mixed with more dangerous substances. Consumers of heroin and the various synthetic substances sold on the street face even severer consequences, including fatal overdoses and poisonings from unexpectedly potent or impure drug supplies. Many advocates of current policies argue, probably correctly, that the unreliable quality of illicit drugs serves as an important deterrent to more widespread use. The question that few ask, however, is whether the costs of that deterrent factor outweigh the benefits.

In fact, intravenous drug users accounted for more than 50 per cent of all deaths related to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in New York City from 1981 to 1986. Reports have emerged that drug dealers are beginning to provide clean needles along with their illegal drugs. But even as other local governments around the world actively attempt to limit the spread of AIDS by and among drug users by making treatment programs more readily available and instituting free needle-exchange programs, state and municipal governments in the United States resist following suit. Only in January 1988 did New York City approve such a program on a very limited and experimental basis. The thought cannot help coming to mind that government policy in this area is motivated in part by the unspoken assumption that AIDS will resolve the heroin problem in a way the criminal justice system never can.

Another cost of current drug prohibition policies, caused largely by the government's enthusiasm for demonizing the drugs that are illegal, are the restrictions on using the illicit drugs for legitimate medical purposes. For example, marijuana has been found to be useful in treating glaucoma and as an anticonvulsant for some victims of cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis, and it is particularly effective in reducing the nausea that accompanies chemotherapy. And research indicates that psychedelic drugs, such as LSD, peyote, and MDMA (known as Ecstasy), may be helpful in psychotherapy and in reducing tension, depression, pain, and fear of death in the terminally ill. Similarly, heroin has proved more effective than other painkillers in helping some patients deal with acute pain. But current drug prohibition laws make it difficult, if not impossible, for doctors to prescribe these drugs, and they severely hamper the efforts of researchers to investigate these and other potential medical uses of the illegal drugs.

Perhaps the most intangible costs of the drug prohibition policies stem from the ways in which they are enforced. Because violations of the drug laws involve consensual activities and create no victims with an interest in reporting the crime to the police, law enforcement authorities are particularly dependent upon the most invasive and noxious investigative techniques to detect criminal violations. Drug enforcement agents rely heavily on informants drawn from the criminal milieu, on undercover operations, and on electronic surveillance. These techniques are certainly indispensable to effective law enforcement, but they are also among the least desirable of the tools available to police. And there are good reasons for requiring that they be used sparingly. Certainly a country committed to many of the values reflected in the U.S. Constitution should find it hard to admire the notion of police spying on citizens and paying others to do the same.

Voices for Legalization

Despite the soaring costs - economic, political, and social - associated with drug prohibition policies, little popular support can be found for repealing drug laws. The percentage of Americans supporting legalization even of marijuana has dropped markedly since the late 1970s. Liberal politicians tend to choose the drug issue as the most profitable one on which to abandon their liberal principles and prove their tough-on-crime credentials. Even the civil liberties unions shy away from this issue, limiting their input primarily to the drug-testing debate. The minority communities in the ghetto, for whom repeal of the drug laws promises the greatest benefits, fail to recognize the costs of the drug prohibition policies for what they are. And typical middle-class Americans, who hope only that their children will not succumb to drug abuse, tend to favor any measures that they believe will make illegal drugs less accessible to them.

The few scholars who have spoken out in favor of repeal are primarily from the conservative end of the political spectrum: the economists Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, the criminologist Ernest van den Haag, and the magazine editor William F. Buckley, Jr. However, there is also a significant silent constituency in favor of repeal found among the criminal justice officials and scholars, intelligence analysts, and military interdictors who have spent the most time thinking about the problem. More often than not, job-security considerations combined with an awareness that they can do little to change official policies ensure that their views remain discreet and off the record.

Among Latin American officials, the need for discretion in advocating repeal of some or all of the drug prohibition laws is only slightly less than in the United States. During the late 1970s, the Colombian National Association of Financial Institutions lobbied for the legalization of marijuana. More recently, numerous high-level Colombians, including a former justice minister, a former attorney general, and the current president of an appointed advisory group, the Council of State, Samuel Buitrago Hurtado, have spoken publicly in favor of legalizing and taxing the illicit drug industries. And in a potentially significant development, the Inter-American Dialogue, a group composed of prominent politicians, scholars, business leaders, and former high-level government officials from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, has called for serious study of "selective legalization" as one approach for dealing with the inter-American drug problem.

There can be no guarantee, of course, that legalization would lead to better and healthier societies in either the short or the long run. Indeed, the possibility cannot be excluded that drug abuse would become more widespread than it is now. But that prospect is by no means a certainty. At the same time, it is certain that most of the costs of current drug policies would be reduced dramatically in both North and South America. If the objective of American and international drug control policy is to consider the costs not just of drug abuse but also of drug control measures, then it is essential to consider the legalization option.

Of course, there is no single legalization option. Legalization can mean a free market, or one closely regulated by the government, or even a government monopoly. Just consider the range of regulatory regimes for the control of alcohol that state and even municipal governments have devised. Nor does legalization imply an end to law enforcement, as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms can attest. Legalization under almost any regime, however, does promise many advantages over the current approach. Government expenditures on drug-law enforcement would drop dramatically. So would organized crime revenues. Between reduced expenditures on drug-law enforcement and increased revenues raised by taxing drug consumers and producers, the net benefit to government treasuries in the United States would easily be many billions of dollars per year. In Latin America, the net benefits would be smaller in terms of dollars, perhaps only a few billion, but far greater in terms of social gain - less corruption, more law and order, and a strengthening of the role of government in society.

It is troubling to note the opposite trends in the purity of legal and illegal substances. The average tar content of cigarettes is declining as smokers seek relatively safer products. Similarly, alcohol drinkers are shifting away from hard liquor and toward wine and beer, motivated in good part by health concerns. During the same period, conversely, the average amount of THC, the primary psychoactive ingredient of marijuana, has increased significantly; the average purity of cocaine has risen from 12 per cent to 60 per cent; and smoking crack has become far more widespread. In addition, the spread of high-potency "black tar" heroin from Mexico has contributed to an increase in the drug's average purity. Government law enforcement efforts help explain these trends in that they place a premium on minimizing the bulk of the illicit product to avoid detection. But the increasing purity is also an indication of the failure of law enforcement efforts. Under a legal drug regime, government regulators could establish relatively low purity levels, thus reducing the potential for drug abuse and addiction. They also could ensure quality and provide warnings as to the potential dangers of the licit substances. A black market still would exist for higher purity and even more dangerous substances, but it would be a fraction of its current size. Given the option of obtaining reliable supplies from government-regulated vendors, few drug users would have much to gain by resorting to the black market. And the government could set drug prices at a level high enough to discourage consumption but low enough to minimize black market opportunities.

Of all the drugs that are currently illicit, marijuana perhaps presents the easiest case for repeal of the prohibition laws, in good part because it presents relatively few serious risks to users and is less dangerous in most respects than both alcohol and tobacco. Moreover, the available evidence indicates no apparent increase in marijuana use following the decriminalization of marijuana possession in about a dozen states during the late 1970s. In the Netherlands, which went even further during the 1970s in relaxing enforcement of marijuana laws, some studies indicate use of the drug has actually declined. Marijuana arrests may not account for most of the drug offenders in U.S. federal and state prisons, but they do account for most of the drug arrests as well as for a large portion of the money spent on local drug enforcement by municipal criminal justice systems and on interdiction by the Coast Guard and the military.

Cocaine, heroin, and the various amphetamines, barbiturates, and tranquilizers that people consume illegally present much tougher policy problems. If they were legally available at reasonable prices, would millions more Americans use and abuse them? Drawing comparisons with other countries and historical periods provides clues but no definitive answers for the simple reason that culture and personality often prove to be the most important determinants of how drugs are used in a society. Availability and price play important roles, but not as important as cultural variables. There is good reason to assume that even if all the illegal drugs were made legally available, the same cultural restraints that now keep most Americans from becoming drug abusers would persist and perhaps even strengthen.

No progress can be expected, however, until more people and governments realize the extent of the costs exacted by current drug control policies. Every once in a while, a commission appointed to study a public-policy problem actually makes a difference. One such example was the Wickersham commission appointed by President Herbert Hoover in 1929 to evaluate the state of law enforcement and especially Prohibition in the United States. Its report played an important role in educating Americans about the limits and costs of Prohibition and helped shape the national debate that preceded the repeal of the 18th Amendment.

A similar commission, composed of North and South Americans, could evaluate the costs and benefits, as well as the potential and limits, of the international drug control regime. Unlike the recently created White House Conference for a Drug Free America, this commission could examine the entire range of options for reducing not just drug abuse but also the costs of drug prohibition policies. It would not begin its investigation, as the White House Conference has, with the unquestioned assumption that any use of illicit drugs is by definition drug abuse. Nor would it automatically assume that increased law enforcement and increasingly harsh criminal sanctions can produce a more effective drug control strategy. Rather, its mandate would include intensive scrutiny of the very assumptions that underlie current drug policies. For instance, the commission could make recommendations on how to deal more effectively with the violence, crime, and corruption that stem in good part from current drug prohibition strategies. In short, it would be an inter-American commission mandated to evaluate the value and effectiveness of current drug control strategies and to consider any and all alternatives.

In the final analysis, the drug problem remains an international problem that needs international solutions. Latin American governments realize the consequences for their countries of the U.S. inspired policies, but they are unable to offer alternatives. They are hampered not only by their historical incapacity for concerted action but also by their recognition that the drug issue is one on which the U.S. government is liable to act impulsively, and even irrationally, to the detriment of everyone's interests. So rather than seek more effective and less costly drug policies, the Latin American governments find themselves torn between trying to appease their powerful neighbor to the north and trying to minimize the harmful consequences of a problem that lies beyond their control. Publicly they proclaim their adherence to the chimerical objectives of eliminating illicit drug production and use. But in practice they pursue "drug control" policies that really are nothing more than damage-limitation strategies designed to keep the drug traffickers from taking over their countries and the U.S. government from striking out at or abandoning them.

One of the most important steps the U.S. government could take, therefore, would be to let the Latin Americans evaluate their own best interests independent of U.S. demands. If they determine that their overall interests are best served by policies designed not to suppress but to control and regulate the production of marijuana and cocaine, then the U.S. government should be willing to consider policy alternatives that acknowledge those interests. Indeed, it is far from certain that the interests of the United States in this regard necessarily conflict with those of Latin America. For U.S. interests lie not only in reducing the costs of drug prohibition policies abroad but also in developing alternatives to a drug control policy that has proved both largely unsuccessful and increasingly costly at home.

Notes

1. Tom Wicker. "Drugs and Alcohol," New York Tomes, 13 May 1987, A27.
2. Patrick M. O'Malley, Lloyd D. Johnston, and Jerald G. Bachman, "Cocaine Use Among American Adolescents and Young Adults," in Cocaine Use in America: Epidemiological and Clinical Perspectives, ed. Nicholas J. Kozel and Edgar H. Adams, National Institute of Drug Abuse Research Monograph 61 (Washington, D.C., GPO, 1985), 73.
3. Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 157-191.
4. John Kaplan, The Hardest Drug: Heroin and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 127.
5. Consumer Reports Book Editors and Edward M. Brecher, Licit and Illicit Drugs: The Consumers Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens, and Marijuana - including Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol (Boston: Little Brown, 1972), 8-9.
6. See Norman Zinberg, Drug, Set, and Setting: The Basis for Controlled Intoxicant Use (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984).
7. New York Times, 7 June 1987, 39.