COMMENTARY ON LEGALIZING DRUGS : Judge’s Plan Would Cause More Agony Than It Would Heal

Judge James P. Gray (of the Orange County Superior Court) has proposed “making heroin, cocaine and marijuana legal because the war on drugs is lost.” Further he proposed that “narcotics would be sold at licensed neighborhood pharmacies and taxed to fund drug education and treatment programs.”

Judge Gray is correct in that certain aspects of this war have been lost. As we have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to arrest suppliers, interrupt supply routes and redirect Third World farming patterns, drug suppliers have managed to continue the flow of drugs into this country at a steady rate.

However, other aspects of the “war” have been successful. Both the National Household Survey and High School Senior Study have shown a gradual national decline in the use of all abuse drugs over the past six years.

Successful efforts at treating and preventing drug abuse have been demonstrated. Unfortunately, there is not sufficient funding to provide these efforts for those in need. Thus more drug enforcement monies should be diverted back to treatment and prevention.

As a provider of drug abuse treatment in a wide variety of settings since the early 1960s, I have had the opportunity to work intensively with tens of thousands of drug abusers over long periods of time. As I view his proposal from a vantage point of broad clinical experience, Judge Gray’s proposal for a solution to this critical issue raises more problems than it provides solutions.

In fact, the extent of these problems is nightmarish! A pharmalogic fact about heroin and cocaine is that they are both extremely addicting and this causes individuals to continue to use greater quantities at any cost.

Picture a pharmacy licensed to sell heroin, marijuana and cocaine. Heroin needs to be injected every four to six hours to provide relief from withdrawal, let alone euphoria. If individuals were to be given take-home doses, these would be readily sold to others. Otherwise the pharmacy would have to be a “shooting gallery” open at least 18 hours a day.

Would there be limits on the amounts sold? Cocaine abusers rapidly escalate from doses of 0.02 grams to 2.0 grams daily. However, on large doses they may become severely paranoid, murderously violent or have seizures. Even on small doses they may have cardiac irregularities, which can be fatal.

Could any ordinary pharmacy handle these cases? Would any other customers ever come to such a store? Methadone maintenance programs (an easier drug to manage than heroin) have, at the very least, counselors, physicians, nurses and most often armed guards to watch their wares as well as provide needed services. These pharmacies would require detailed procedures for registration and monitoring to ensure that the clinic was only receiving drugs at one site.

Obviously these various procedures would not permit an ordinary pharmacy to dispense these drugs. What are we left with? A small armed fortress, located every few blocks in ghettos, more spread out in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, either heavily staffed with security and treatment personnel or sparsely staffed. In the latter case clients in various stages of sedation or hyperexcitability would be mingling around the clinic while those who have not yet been declared eligible for drugs coerce and bribe clients to share their drugs. If few neighborhoods accept methadone clinics, which will receive, with open arms, heroin and cocaine dispensing stations?

Another key issue is the determination of eligibility. Would drugs only be given to hard-core users? If not, could someone who has never used cocaine or heroin walk into the pharmacy and walk out with a clean needle and a potentially fatal dose of 100 milligrams of heroin or cocaine? That procedure would rapidly entice many relatively drug-naive individuals into addiction. If drugs were only given to severely addicted clients, then a black market would still thrive for all other users. This black market would also greatly appeal to youth who would be excluded from Judge Gray’s proposal, yet given the message that these drugs were OK by society’s permitting them for adults.

I would assume that these drugs would only be dispensed with prescription, by physicians, otherwise their distribution would lead to high levels of physical difficulties and/or fatalities. This service would be costly as would any adequate distribution system. These costs, plus the tax to fund education and treatment, would make these drugs quite expensive. Yet regular users of all three cannot function productively in the work force. How would they support their habit? Would they borrow from family, steal or sell their drugs to those on waiting lists?

Still another difficulty is that there are many, many more cocaine and heroin addicts in our ghettos than in better residential neighborhoods. Such clinics in the ghetto would further victimize minorities by subjecting them to drugs which prohibited them and their progeny from leaving the ghetto.

Oh yes, what about the children? Judge Gray, have you ever seen the seizures or heard the high-pitched cry of babies born addicted? How would we handle women of childbearing age, particularly those who become pregnant, in your system? Also, would we permit some individuals to purchase and use all three drugs simultaneously and greatly multiply physical and psychological complications?

Just a reminder about marijuana, which, I believe, presents different problems from heroin and cocaine because it is less physically damaging: One marijuana cigarette is as carcinogenic as seven regular cigarettes and lowers one’s inhibitions about the use of other drugs.

We already have two legal mind-altering substances, tobacco and alcohol, that are quite dangerous to society. Do we need three more drugs widely distributed, two of which are inherently more dangerous than tobacco or alcohol?

Judge Gray’s proposal would not win the war on drugs, but it could go a long way toward producing anarchy.