Topic: Drugs. Decriminalize them?

Alright, so this argument isn't complete and it probably has flaws. But here's what I've got.

A distinction needs to be made amongst all of the different types of drugs that people may choose to use. The law punishes no one for caffeine consumption; Starbucks is rather widespread. While prohibition of alcohol did increase bootlegging and black market sales, in order for people to continue their consumption of alcohol, they had to put in more effort to obtain their liquor. The illegality of drugs has not stopped or diminished their use, and contrary to what Wilson claims, while heroin use decreased due to increased costs of acquiring it, its use also decreased because crack cocaine gave users a better high—a more addictive high. Decriminalization may be just the right action to take for certain drugs, because their effects are no worse than the effects of currently legalized alcohol and tobacco.

Decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing, but I agree with Douglas Husak’s version of decriminalization and would like to take it a step further ("Why We Should Decriminalize Drug Use"). Husak states that decriminalization would ban production and sale of certain drugs, but not the use or possession; I would extend that definition and only ban the production and sale of unsafe drugs. I make this claim for several reasons. Legal drug sales would be a good source of tax revenue, which could be used to combat excessive use of the drug. Similar to alcohol legislation, a legal age would curb drug use to some extent in certain age groups, and a legal intoxication level would allow law enforcement agents to punish users instead of providers.

Fear of the law prevents some people under the age of 21 from drinking or abusing alcohol, but wild high school and college parties still persist. On the same note, lowering or abolishing the drinking age wouldn’t definitively lead to a sharp increase in the number of abusers because young people drink because they want to, and those that want to are not usually deterred by the laws. Similarly, drug use might increase a little if it were decriminalized, but those that never wanted to abuse drugs wouldn’t start now. Decriminalization would affect desire to some extent, but people would still make their own decisions about using drugs. Suppliers would be taxed, and thus the sale price of the drug would remain high enough to prevent some from turning drugs into their next hobby. The government could fine suppliers if the drug was deemed unsafe or produced undesirable consequences, which is similar to the idea that Husak condones of making supplies pay for harm caused by their drug. This way suppliers would have incentive to make their drugs safer for use, and the amount of crime directly related to drug consumption would decrease.

I do not believe that drug decriminalization would lead to our entire society becoming drug-addicted leeches on our social welfare programs. James q. Wilson uses statistics to show that heroin use declined when its costs rose and its harmful health effects were more widely publicized and that cocaine is starting to follow that trend as fewer people are beginning to use the drug, after its negative health effects were discovered ("Against the Legalization of Drugs"). He furthers his argument against the legalization of drugs claiming that decriminalization would not lead to the sort of decline that has occurred naturally. I disagree and believe that even if those drugs had been decriminalized, people would have still been deterred from using the drugs once the health effects were discovered. If drugs were to be decriminalized, some percentage of drug users would lose their motivation to abuse drugs when given the chance. Many people under the age of 21 abuse alcohol and drink to excess, but most of those people give up such habits after college, once they enter the world of careers, employers, family, and responsibility. Similarly, those adolescents who abused certain drugs would find them less appealing as they grew older if the drugs were legal and could be obtained in a pharmacy alongside cigarettes and beer. Furthermore, the sales of the drugs could be monitored to prevent sales in excess, and a limit could be placed on the amount of a certain drug that could be bought by one person at any given time. Such legislation is in effect with legal drugs like Sudafed in many states in the U.S. requiring the consumer to provide a valid driver’s license by which to track sales of the drug to that person.

This brings me to the idea of a legal intoxication level, which would allow policing of drug use, allowing people to indulge a little but preventing most people from overindulging. When police raid parties, they can test for drug use and those who have been overusing or who is underage can be punished. If limits are in place for how much of the drug can be bought at one time, testing for overuse should not be too difficult. It would be more difficult than the simple Breathalyzer test for alcohol use, but it would be funded by the taxes from the drug sales. After all, crime rates from alcohol abuse are not much different from crime rates from drug abuse. Bedroom shootings, traffic accidents, and gang fights occur from any form of substance abuse, and punishing the individual people involved will probably have more of an effect than just punishing the distributor. People will be more careful about the amount of drugs they use and the situations they use them in if they would be held directly responsible for their actions. I agree with Husak about certain drugs; in the event that a drug should prove to be more dangerous and harmful than alcohol, that drug could continue to be illegal and its distribution, production, and sale banned from the country. I use alcohol as the benchmark for tolerable harmfulness because its effects are minimally harmful compared to the effects of hard drugs such as LSD. At this point, I would like to clarify that I extend decriminalization only to drugs whose effects do not impair motor functions any more than soft drugs like alcohol do. If certain drugs were proven to be a direct cause to violent or dangerous behavior, those drugs would remain criminalized.

In addition to a better regulation of drug quality and a better opportunity for safe usage, drug decriminalization would allow for better de-stigmatized access to health and rehab programs. With legalization, clinics could be set-up such as the ones currently available for alcohol and tobacco addicts, allowing people to get help for their problems without fear of prosecution or persecution by those who know them. This would prevent people from continuing to spiral downwards without any hope for ridding themselves of their addictions, and would decrease the incidents of crime related to acquisition of drugs by those fueling their addiction.

The revenue from tobacco and alcohol tax funds policing of the use of those drugs, and similarly, the revenue from the taxes levied on the currently illicit drugs would fund their policing once they were made legal. Legislation about those drugs in the form of legal levels of use and a legal drug use age—possibly 21, just like the drinking age, because most of those drugs impair people to the same level that drinking alcohol does—would allow the police to effectively combat use in individuals. Decriminalizing drugs would probably decrease the number of people who abuse alcohol and tobacco, the latter of which has a harmful effect on anyone in the surrounding area by way of secondhand smoke; and would also increase the number of people who would seek help for their addiction without fear of being imprisoned for usage or possession. Decriminalization of drugs would be a benefit to not only drug users, because many people frown upon helping those addicted to vice, but also to society as a whole.

Email #3

Your website makes no mention of the role of strict immigration limits on long waiting lists for legal immigration of skilled workers, academics, and the like, who could make an immediate and beneficial contribution to the American economy and public discourse.

Would you support as President, or introduce this year as a Senator, legislation to increase the limit by a factor of five or eliminate it for these categories of immigrants?

If the reader of this email would send acknowledgement of receipt to the above address, it would be appreciated.

Email #2:

As President, or this year, as a Senator, would you support or introduce legislation that would provide economic incentives to major urban areas (say, with over half a million residents) to develop, expand, or improve mass transit systems? These have major economic and environmental benefits, and also revitalize urban centers.

Today, I emailed the following to both of the major parties' presumptive nominees (to suggest policies, go to http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/mypolicy and http://www.johnmccain.com/Contact/), who both trumpet a cap-and-trade system as their method of reducing carbon emissions:

I understand that it is almost never politically viable to propose a tax increase of any sort. However, a carbon tax (or gasoline tax) would be a much more economically efficient method of reducing carbon emissions than the propsed cap-and-trade system on your website. Why do you support cap-and-trade over a carbon tax?

The carbon tax proposal could be coupled with an income tax cut for the bottom half of wage earners with a revenue-equivalent of approximately three-fourths of the expected revenue from the carbon tax, with the last fourth going to either paying down the federal debt or giving incentives for alternative energy developement.