Ending the war on drugs does not equal legalization

An interesting take on the growing chorus of calls to end the war on drugs.

The first problem I have with the op-ed is that she conflates ending the drug war with legalization, offering an fallacious binary choice. The piece is a hard sales pitch for her position.

She offers 2 reasons for these calls:

Two significant developments are contributing to the sudden surge in calls for reconsidering prohibition. The first is that drugs are now damaging long-term Western security interests, especially in Afghanistan and Mexico. The second is that production is migrating away from its traditional homes like Colombia and the Golden Triangle and moving into the heart of Western consumer areas like Canada, the Netherlands and Britain.

I don't have a global perspective, but, in the US, it seems to me that domestic policy is driving the reconsideration of drug policy. One factor is moral, the insane incarceration rates for drug offenders (From the early 1980s to the to the early 2000s, the number of inmates whose worst offense was a drug crime grew by 1540% in federal prisons and 1195% in state prisons.) The other is financial, with state budgets buckling under the recession and the cost of incarcerating all these people.

She goes on to make a humanitarian case based on the suffering in the developing world. Ironically, Antonio Maria Costa makes a humanitarian case against legalization based on the suffering it would cause in developing world.

At the moment, fewer than 5% of all adults in the world take drugs at least once a year, compared with around one-quarter who smoke tobacco and about a half who drink alcohol. Drugs kill about 200,000 people a year, tobacco 5 million and alcohol 1.8 million. Why open the floodgates to addiction by increasing access to drugs? Would the world really be a better place with a lot more people under the influence of drugs?

John Gray seems to think so. In last week's Observer he argued that the case for legalising all drugs is unanswerable. Yet who would answer for the havoc wrought on the vulnerable? Maybe western governments could absorb the health costs of increased drug use, if that's how taxpayers want their money to be spent.

But what about the developing world? Why unleash an epidemic of addiction in parts of the world that already face misery, and do not have the health and social systems to cope with a drug tsunami?

Critics point out that vulnerable countries are the hardest hit by the crime associated with drug trafficking. Fair enough. But these countries would also be the hardest hit by an epidemic of drug use, and all the health and social costs that come with it. This is immoral and irresponsible.

He ends with the same kind of hard sell, resorting to an appeal to classism.

Let's be open-minded about how to improve drug control. But let's do it in a way that will improve the health and safety of our communities and not just make it easier for City bankers and high-street models to snort cocaine.