Drug Policy: It’s Time to Try Something Very Different

The event of the incoming Administration of William Jefferson Clinton provides America with a considerable opportunity to rethink its national and local narcotics-control policies. We very much hope America makes the best of this rare chance. Current U.S. drug policy is a conspicuous national and international failure.

American drug policy relies on law enforcement to reduce the drug problem. Between 70 and 80 cents of every drug-control dollar goes to enforcement. Despite some brave and imaginative police work, at both the federal and local levels, that policy has led to one frustration after another.

State and local arrests nationwide for drug offenses rose from 581,000 in 1980 to 1,090,000 in 1990, but there was scarcely any perceptible dampening of overall use, except for marijuana use in the nation’s high schools; there was little effect on price or supply, and of course in the last decade there has been an explosion in drug-related violence.

Politically, the law enforcement approach has had a devastating effect on the young, black males of the inner cities. Blacks now make up more than two-fifths of all drug arrestees--up from one-fourth 10 years ago, and those blacks who do wind up in prison tend to represent not the big-money drug lords but the “salespeople” who do the dirty work.

The effect is to devastate minority communities without significantly impairing narcotics distribution in those areas. As Peter Reuter, co-director of RAND Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center, puts it in a recent issue of the scholarly magazine Daedalus, “Politically powerless inner-city communities not only suffer the most from the drug trade’s effects--from crime, violence, AIDS, crack babies, and a host of other ills--they also bear the brunt of harshly punitive policies.”

Irrationally punitive anti-crack laws have also had an unintended negative effect. In 1988, for example, Congress raised the penalty for selling 50 grams of crack cocaine (perhaps worth several thousand dollars in low-level street sales) to a mandatory sentence of five years. The net effect has been to swell prisons to 150% of capacity--with no substantial effect on cocaine trafficking. There has been one other notable effect--and it, too, is not positive.

That’s the increasing demoralization of honest and hard-working police officers and narcotics agents who seriously care about taming the drug monster; and the increasing demoralization of judges, forced to incarcerate low-level drug violators for long periods in jails that are increasingly crowded with small-time criminals. In California alone over the last decade, more than 10,000 people were sent to state prisons for drug offenses.

America’s drug policy--a lethal mix of dead-end positions and unfair laws--is now at a crisis state. And this is where the Clinton Administration comes in.

In his choice of the new federal drug czar, President-elect Bill Clinton can redirect American policy away from its no-win position. He knows, or should know, that there is no magic bullet; but there is a very fast-growing consensus, especially among caring and committed law enforcement people as well as among health professionals, that America’s drug problem is America’s problem--not Bolivia’s or Thailand’s--and that the way out of the problem is to take on the drug habit directly here in the United States.

That means America must stop practicing denial and realize that it has a serious drug problem and needs national AA-type programs to kick the habit and clean itself up. That means many more drug education and treatment programs in the schools, in workplaces, in the inner cities. An estimated 2,000 people are on waiting lists for drug treatment programs in Los Angeles County alone.

Yes, some programs won’t work and some will inevitably be found fraudulent; but just as there now are many proven effective programs for alcoholism, we need parallel programs for narcotics abuse.

To change the direction of America’s drug policy, Clinton, as President, will have to bite the bullet in one of two ways: He will need to increase overall federal spending for drugs--already at $6.7 billion by 1990, up from $1.5 billion in 1980--or redirect monies from law enforcement to treatment and education.

If he increases funding, he needs to instruct his drug czar to make sure every new dollar goes to the so-called demand side of the problem. If he decides additional funding is not possible right now because of other spending priorities and looming deficit-reduction needs, then he has to move the nation’s drug-spending priorities to at least 50-50: not one more dollar for law enforcement than for education, prevention and treatment.

And, you know what? Not a single reasonable law enforcement official, whether cop or judge, will complain. These officials know that American policy has been failing--for years. Let’s hope that Bill Clinton knows it, too.

The Jail Habit Defendents imprisoned for violating federal drug laws. 1980: 1,945 1985: 3,701 1989: 8,151 1990: 9,804 Source: U.S. Statistical Abstract