Drug Legalization: Interest Rises in Prestigious Circles

Hours before the Stanford-Notre Dame football game Oct. 7, a relaxed and candid George P. Shultz, wearing a Stanford-red polo shirt, outlined some of his philosophical ideas to a group of alumni of the Stanford Business School at Memorial Auditorium in Palo Alto.

“Now that I am out of government I can say this,” the former secretary of state began, speaking thoughtfully. Then, in a suggestion that would astound and infuriate former colleagues in the government, he told the alumni: “We need at least to consider and examine forms of controlled legalization of drugs.”

“I find it very difficult to say that,” Shultz said. “Sometimes at a reception or a cocktail party I advance these views and people head for somebody else. They don’t even want to talk to you.” He screwed up his face in mock imitation of the shock he has caused, drawing a roar of laughter from the alumni.

But no one ever associated wild and wooly ideas with the cautious and conservative Shultz when he served more than six years as secretary of state in the Ronald Reagan Administration and two years as secretary of the Treasury in the Richard M. Nixon Administration.

And Shultz’s current position on drugs does not put him in deepest left field. Interest is mounting in academic and scientific circles in the idea of legalizing drugs, and the number of those willing to be counted is increasing markedly.

Aside from Shultz, the list of those advocating at least a study of some form of controlled legalization now includes Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, former New York Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy, astronomer Carl Sagan, Executive Director Ira Glasser of the American Civil Liberties Union and a significant number of psychiatrists, doctors and political scientists.

To them, making drugs illegal merely fosters crime and violence while failing utterly to stop drug use, just as Prohibition of alcohol failed in the 1920s.

Opposition Exists

The Bush Administration, however, regards the arguments for legalizing drugs as anathema. “There is even a question (among Administration officials) that the discussion in itself is a little risky,” said Peter Reuter, co-director of the RAND Corp.’s drug policy research center.

William J. Bennett, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and education secretary in the Reagan Cabinet, branded Shultz’s ideas as “really stupid.”

“I think it would have been nice to have known at the time. . . ,” Bennett told reporters. “This might explain why we weren’t putting as much pressure as we should have on some of those (drug-producing) nations.”

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater tried to put Shultz down with ridicule. “Whoa, he’s been out on the West Coast too long, hasn’t he?” Fitzwater said. “The guy slips into retirement and right away he starts saying things that are strange.”

As Shultz himself acknowledged in his talk: “No politician wants to say what I just said, not for a minute.” Shultz never discussed drug legalization at State Department staff meetings, according to department veterans.

“I know that I am shouting into the breeze here as far as what we’re doing now,” Shultz told the Stanford alumni. “But I feel that if somebody doesn’t get up and start talking about this now, the next time around, when we have the next iteration of these (anti-drug) programs, it will still be true that everyone is scared to talk about it.”

Interest Mounts

Outside the government, however, interest in the idea is mounting in academic and scientific circles.

“There is an enormous closet elite interest in legalization,” said RAND’s Reuter, who describes himself as an “agnostic” on the question. “I address a lot of groups of the educated elite around the country and--even when I am talking about something quite unrelated to legalization--this is the central question that they want to discuss.”

Few, however, are willing to stand up and be counted on the side of legalization. It is not an easy commitment to make, as Baltimore Mayor Schmoke discovered.

Five months after his election in 1987, Schmoke, a former federal prosecutor, shocked the U.S. Conference of Mayors by calling for a public debate on drug legalization. Schmoke now has no doubt that “someone will run against me primarily on this issue” in 1991.

“The reaction was pretty negative,” Schmoke told the Baltimore Sun after his speech to the mayors. “My kids had it rough. My son called me from the basement of his school. He said: ‘What did you say? What did you say?’ My daughter, Kathy, came home and said: ‘The children say you’re for drugs and I told them you’re not for drugs.’ ”

Schmoke’s views closed doors in Washington. Bennett’s office--in preparing the Administration’s report to Congress on drug strategy--consulted each of the mayors of America’s dozen largest cities, except Schmoke.

In the report, which went to Congress in September, Bennett excoriated the idea of legalization.

“Legalizing drugs would be an unqualified national disaster,” he wrote. “In fact, any significant relaxation of drug enforcement--for whatever reason, however well-intentioned--would promise more use, more crime and more trouble for desperately needed treatment and education efforts.”

A growing body of opinion holds otherwise. Shultz recommended that the Stanford alumni study what he called a “bold and informative article” in a recent issue of Science magazine by Ethan Nadelman, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University.

Shultz said that the article helped convince him that “we’re not really going to get anywhere until we can take the criminality out of the drug business and the incentives for criminality out of it.”

Nadelman, who has written a large number of articles on legalization in prestigious American publications in the last year, has become the de facto spokesman for advocates of legalization. He and other legalization advocates, including Dr. Lester Grinspoon of the Harvard Medical School, offer this reasoning:

--The current policy--the war on drugs--has failed. Neither drug interdiction at the borders nor police enforcement within the United States has decreased the demand for drugs. Despite all the law enforcement, anyone who wants to use crack can buy it.

--The drug laws themselves cause most drug-related crime. It is precisely because drugs are illegal that they sell for exorbitant prices and those prices in turn breed violence by both users and sellers.

Some drug users resort to robbery, burglary, prostitution, numbers running and drug pushing to earn enough money to feed their habits. As for the sellers, the potential profits are so desirable that they frequently murder each other to get them.

Breeds Violence

“Illegal markets tend to breed violence, both because they attract criminally violent individuals and because participants in the market have no resort to legal institutions to resolve their disputes,” Nadelman wrote.

Legalizing drugs would have the salutary effect of driving their price down, Nadelman argued. Taxes might then push the price part of the way back up, but because dealers would not benefit, they would not gain the same incentive to violence that they now have.

--Enforcing the drug laws succeeds only in driving prices up and thus aggravating the violence bred by the heavy profits earned by dealers.

“If the marijuana, cocaine and heroin markets were legal, state and federal governments would collect billions of dollars annually in tax revenues,” Nadelman said. “Instead, they expend billions in what amounts to a subsidy of organized criminals.”

--The government has no moral right to treat drugs differently from alcohol and tobacco.

“Enforcement of drug laws makes a mockery of an essential principle of a free society, that those who do no harm to others should not be harmed by others and particularly not by the state,” Nadelman wrote. “Most of the 40 million Americans who illegally consume drugs each year do no direct harm to anyone else; indeed, most do relatively little harm even to themselves.”

Crack Hysteria

None of today’s illegal drugs, the critics insist, is as addicting as nicotine or as harmful as alcohol. Crack’s terrible hold on the inner cities, they say, stems not from the power of the drug itself but from the desperation of the people smoking it. “Crack is today’s hysteria just the way heroin was 15 years ago,” Grinspoon said.

--Although legalization might encourage some increase in drug use, this could be offset by government campaigns to discourage use, heavy penalties for driving while using drugs, bans on advertising, taxes that boost prices, federal education and treatment programs, prohibitions of sales to minors and restrictions on the place and time of sales.

“It wasn’t the Draconian laws that stopped the spread of heroin,” Grinspoon said. “Kids saw what was happening to their older brothers.”

These arguments may have convinced Shultz and some other academics of all ideological stripes. But they have to overcome 75 years of laws prohibiting drugs and all the accompanying images of dope fiends and drug busts and heartless murder and filthy needles. To most Americans, the idea of allowing the sale of evil drugs without sanction remains abhorrent.

Crack deepens the abhorrence. Government drug officials insist that crack is special--that addicts can rarely break their habit, need ever-increasing doses and fall prey to a paranoia that makes them violent. The officials simply do not accept the relatively restrained assessment of crack by the advocates of legalization. Most news accounts of crack make it seem to be one of the most terrifying of drugs.

To the vast majority, drug legalization seems likely to increase drug use. Even if legalization would end most drug crime--an argument not accepted by many officials, who insist that a black market in untaxed drugs would spring up--that would still not justify a policy that allowed more people to use drugs.

“The war on drugs is not about facts. . . , it’s not about evidence,” said Steven Wisotsky of the Nova University Law Center in Florida. “It’s about symbols of life and death.”