Dangerous Drugs and Government Policy

on this topic, the specific details make all the difference

The way the drug law reform issue is portrayed is often confusing. It is not a two-valued choice between either the status quo of criminalization or commercial market legalization of every substance.

I support removing as much market demand as is practicable from the illicit marketplace that’s been empowered by Zero Tolerance Prohibition. 80% of customers for illicit drugs only buy marijuana, which was accounting for around 1/3 of the total profits of the cartels before state legalization began cutting into the demand.

Let’s be clear: decades on end of the iatrogenic War on Drugs is what got us into this mess. That legal regime is what put hundreds of thousands of addicts on the streets. Not the tentative moves made by some states over the previous ten years to legalize the cannabis market.

Oregon recently rescinded Measure 110, which is most well-known as an experiment in decriminalizing personal possession of all drugs. But the real problem in that case wasn’t decriminalization, per se. It was the failure to enforce laws against the public use of the drugs, group loitering in public places to purchase them in outdoor markets, and of law enforcement directed at the illicit retail street markets. This non-enforcement was tacitly encouraged by the mistaken narrative frame of Measure 110, which implicitly excused all dysfunctions associated with irresponsible drug use and addiction as the unfortunate side effects of a medical problem. Addiction may be a medical problem, but the criminal behaviors are still crimes. I don’t think people have some license to trespass, burglarize, shoplift, smoke meth and shoot dope in public, pass out on the sidewalk, etc. just because they’re drug addicts.

My suggestion is to bust people for those crimes. And if they’re repeat offenders, throw the book at them. Coincidentally that’s the population most in need of rehab, and the population that finds it most difficult to get it. The maximum for misdemeanors is either 6 months or 12 months in confinement. The most important condition of that confinement is accountability. The inmates need to be in a place where there are no drugs. The facility cannot have a drug trade going on inside the walls. Unfortunately, many jails do not meet that standard, and haven’t met it for decades. A situation that was most certainly not due to any move to repeal drug criminalization statutes, or “liberalize the drug laws.”

I support decriminalization of personal possession because even most users of “hard drugs” do not behave antisocially, and are not addicts. They’ve purchased a product that’s been legally forbidden because it’s too hazardous to safely market, or a substance that they aren’t legally authorized by prescription to possess. Confiscation is reasonable. But in the absence of any other criminal conduct, criminalization is too severe of a penalty.

We’re living in a society where minors are by law given more latitude to possess forbidden substances than adults; where otherwise entirely law-abiding adults can have their personal and occupational lives derailed from a single arrest for possessing a miniscule quantity of a legally forbidden substance; but the minority of users of forbidden substances who have plummeted into dysfunctional addiction have been granted something close to de facto impunity for a wide array of actual malum in se misdemeanors that many of them commit as a matter of routine. There’s no logic to that system.

So I support decriminalization of possession of any substance, in the narrowest sense- in the absence of other criminal behaviors (this includes DUI.) Because criminalizing otherwise law-abiding citizens for their substance use amounts to writing them off.

More than 80% of the demand for opioids comes from less than 20% of the people who try them (first use is always experimental, no?) If the demand of opioid addicts - the hardcore purchasing base-can be decoupled from the illegal markets, that potentially deprives them of another 30%-40% of those profits.

So I also support medical addiction maintenance—to opioid addicts only—although obviously the physicians supplying the substances would need to be forbidden from profiteering by a strict regime of accountability. The regulatory framework that was so blatantly absent from the catastrophe of the Oxycontin era. (It’s possible to identify an opioid addict by giving them a narcotic antagonist, which will put someone with a physical dependency into immediate withdrawal.) I challenge anyone to read the book Dopesick* and tell me that the main character in that nonfiction account would have been worse off if she had been allowed to live in her parents home and hold down steady lawful employment while receiving a maintenance prescription of opioids—even strong opioids—from the family physician, instead of…what ended up happening to her as a street addict.

(*the book, not the TV show made from it, that I won’t watch. Because I read the book. The book had me staring at the ceiling all night after I finished it. My hunch is that TV would only trivialize the story, or even glamorize it.)

This is not to be confused with a program of supporting indigent shiftless dysfunctional confirmed addicts with free drugs.

I don’t support addiction maintenance for anyone with such a persistent and self-destructive addiction that they’ve landed in the gutter. The goal of opioid maintenance is to stabilize an addict before they slide too far, with the ultimate objective of encouraging them to get over it and out of it. Once an addict has resigned themselves to a life of unending petty crime on the street, their resort to criminality disqualifies them from that option. They require—arguably deserve—a long stretch of forced abstention. And while they’re inside, efforts need to be made to reconnect them with the family and friends they’ve lost touch with, if possible.

As the market demand diminishes, the pressure to dismantle the drug dealing networks needs to continue.