HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ 1/HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ.iso/drugs/commentary.on.drug.war

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 8.2 KB | 164 lines

Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
From: [e-mail] (Jerry Gally)
Subject: Commentary on the Drug War by William J. Bennett
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 94 17:56:12 GMT

Reposted from alt.politics.usa.constitution:

From: <[e-mail]>
Subject: Commentary on the Drug War by William J. Bennett

       I would ask [my audiences],"If you saw a drug dealer selling
drugs to your children what would your impulse be?"  Most audiences
responded that their impulse would be to do violence to the drug
dealer.  And that impulse is right; it is simply a matter of
channeling that impulse into law, of civilizing our retribution
into a proper sense of justice.  "This war [on drugs] is not for
delicate sensibilities," I said in a speech at the National Press
Club.  "This is tough stuff.  We need to get tough, we need to get
tough as hell, we need to do it right now."  But many of the
critics didn't agree, and they couldn't quite figure out why I
wasn't brought down, or even harmed, by my "intemperate" comments
to Larry King.  What they didn't recognize is that the moral sense
of the American people is sound.  They had had it with drugs.  They
had seen the devastation.  And they wanted us to fight.

       In Alaska -- where personal possession of marijuana was legal
-- Senator Murkowski and others implored me to weigh in on behalf
of a new initiative seeking to recriminalize possession of
marijuana.  Not surprisingly, the percentage of high school
students using dope in Alaska was much higher than in the rest of
the nation.

       When I accepted the invitation, the prolegalization forces
went into action.  The "pothead lobby," as I called it, distributed
fliers in Anchorage and Fairbanks saying "Confront the Drug
Bizarre."  But when I arrived, there was very little opposition.
A few bedraggled sixties types (including one woman who introduced
herself as "the Dragon Lady") asked me mostly incomprehensible
questions at an assembly in Anchorage.  But there was no major
confrontation.  It later became apparent why.  When the "pothead
lobby" passed out fliers announcing my visit, they had put the
wrong date on them.  I had been saying for a long time that
marijuana makes people inattentive and stupid.  I rested my case.

       The legalization debate is for all intent and purposes over,
But even to call it a "debate" suggests that the arguments in favor
of drug legalization are rigorous, substantial and serious.  At
first glace some of the arguments sound appealing.  But on further
inspection, one finds that at bottom they are nothing more than a
series of unpersuasive and even disingenuous ideas that more sober
minds recognize as a recipe for a public policy disaster.

       Legalization removes the incentive to stay away from a life
of drugs.  Some people are going to smoke crack whether it's legal
or illegal.  But by keeping it illegal, we maintain the criminal
sanctions that persuade most people that the good life cannot be
reached by dealing drugs.  And that's exactly why we have drug laws
-- to make drug use a wholly unattractive choice.

       One of the clear lessons of Prohibition is that when we had
laws against alcohol, there WAS less consumption of alcohol, less
alcohol-related disease, fewer drunken brawls, and a lot less
public drunkenness.  And contrary to myth, there is no evidence
that Prohibition caused big increases in crime.

       I am not suggesting that we go back to Prohibition.  Alcohol
has a long, complicated history in this country, and unlike drugs,
the American people accept alcohol.  They have no interest in going
back to Prohibition.  But at least the advocates of legalization
should admit that legalized alcohol, which is responsible for some
100,000 deaths a year, is hardly a model for drug policy.  As the
columnist Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, the question is not
which is worse, alcohol or drugs.  The question is, should we
accept both legalized alcohol AND legalized drugs?  The answer is
no.

       If drugs were legalized, use would surely soar.  In fact, we
have just undergone a kind of cruel national experiment in which
drugs became cheap and widely available: the experiment is called
the crack epidemic.  It was only when cocaine was dumped into the
country, and a three-dollar vial of crack could be bought on street
corners, that we saw cocaine use skyrocket -- mostly among the poor
and disadvantaged.

       The price that American society would have to pay for
legalized drugs would be intolerably high: more drug-related
accidents at work, on the highway, and in the airways; bigger
losses in worker productivity; hospitals filled with drug
emergencies; more students on drugs, meaning more dropouts; more
pregnant women buying legal cocaine, meaning more abused babies IN
UTERO.  Add to this the added cost of treatment, social welfare,
and insurance, and welcome to the Brave New World of drug
legalization.

       If we did legalize drugs, we would no doubt have to reverse
the policy, like those countries that had experimented with broad
legalization and decided it was a failure.  In 1975 Italy
liberalized its drug law and now has one of the highest heroin-
related death rates in Western Europe.  One Italian government
official told me that the citizens of Italy are eager to
recriminalize the use of drugs.  They had seen enough casualties.

       And what about our children?  If we make drugs more
accessible, there will be more harm to children, direct and
indirect.  There will be more cocaine babies and more child abuse.
Children after all are among the most frequent victims of violent,
drug-related crimes -- crimes that have nothing to do with the cost
of acquiring the drugs.  In Philadelphia in 1987 more than half the
child-abuse fatalities involved at least one parent who was a heavy
drug user.  Seventy-three percent of the child abuse cases in New
York City in 1987 involved parental drug use.

       And it would be disastrous to suddenly switch signals on our
children in school, whom we have been teaching, with great effect,
that drug use is wrong.  Why, they will ask, have we changed our
minds?

       The whole legalization argument is based on the premise that
progress is impossible.  But there is not incontrovertible, unmis-
takable evidence of progress in the war on drugs.  Now would be
exactly the wrong time to surrender and legalize.

       In the end drug use is wrong because of what it does to human
character.  It degrades.  It makes people less than they should be
by burning away a sense of responsibility, subverting productivity,
and making a mockery of virtue

       Using drugs is wrong not simply because drugs create medical
problems; it is wrong because drugs destroy one's moral sense.
People addicted to drugs neglect their duties.  The lure can become
so strong that soon people will do nothing but take drugs.  They
will neglect God, family, children, friends, and jobs -- everything
in life that is important, noble, and worthwhile -- for the sake
of drugs.  This is why from the very beginning we posed the drug
problem as a moral issue.  And it was the failure to recognize the
moral consequences of drug use that led us into the drug epidemic
in the first place.  In the late 1960s, many people rejected the
language of morality, of right and wrong.  Since then we have paid
dearly for the belief that drug use was harmless and even an
enlightening, positive thing.

       Drugs undermine the necessary virtues of a free society --
autonomy, self-reliance, and individual responsibility.  The
inherent purpose of using drugs is secession from reality, from
society, and from the moral obligations individuals owe their
family, their friends, and their fellow citizens.  Drugs destroy
the natural sentiments and duties that constitute our human nature
and make our social life possible.  As our founders would surely
recognize, for a citizenry to be perpetually in a drug-induced haze
doesn't bode well for the future of self-government.

       When all is said and done, the most compelling case that can
be made against drug use rests on moral grounds.  No civilized
society -- especially a self-governing one -- can be neutral
regarding human character and personal responsibility.^Z

I hope you people find this enlightening.

J. Long, Esq.