August 7, 2007
How to starve the terrorists of funds: legalise all drugs
By Willem Buiter
The UK government is con-sidering reclassifying cannabis from a class C drug to a class B drug, carrying higher penalties for using and dealing. As an economist with a strong commitment to personal liberty and responsibility, my preference would be to see all illegal drugs legalised. The only exception would be substances whose consumption leads to behaviour likely to cause material harm to others.
Following legalisation, the production and sale of these drugs should be regulated to ensure quality and purity. They should also be taxed, as are tobacco products and alcoholic beverages. Greater resources should be devoted to educating the public, especially children and teenagers, about the health hazards associated with the drugs; more money should be spent on the rehabilitation of addicts.
Ideally legalisation should occur simultaneously in a number of neighbouring countries, preferably at the level of the European Union. When the Netherlands became an enclave of tolerance of drug use, drug users from all over Europe congregated there.
Willem Buiter is this week’s guest commenter while Martin Wolf is on holidays. The remainder of this column can be read here (FT.com subscription required). Discussion from our guest economists is free.
Andrew Smithers: I was delighted to read this. Not only because I totally agree with it, but because it puts the case for ending this form of prohibition so well.
Posted by: Andrew Smithers | August 8th, 2007 at 1:08 pm | Report this commentMartin Wolf: Willem is, of course, correct. I have written a number of columns over the years in praise of drug legalisation or, at the minimum, decriminalisation. Willem’s encourages me to go back to this theme.
Critics of legalisation - some of whom have commented on the FT’s forum on this subject - write as if the act of criminalisation reduced both use of drugs and the harm done by them. The first of these propositions is at least debateable, because criminalisation creates vast incentives for suppliers to create addicts. The second is certainly untrue. Among the many terrible harms done by criminalisation are: the unregulated supply of dangerous drugs; the spread of disease; the creation of criminal sub-cultures; epidemics of theft, violence and murder; wholesale corruption of criminal justice systems; the incarceration of vast numbers of people (in the US, on some estimates, a million people are in prison for drug-related crime); and the destruction of political stability and the empowerment of drug lords in developing countries.
In fact, when one examines the data carefully, one finds that nearly all the damage done by illicit drugs is done by the fact that they are illicit. As we discovered with the prohibition of alcohol in the 1930s, terrible consequences inevitably follow from this policy. Thus, even if one takes a harm-minimisation (i.e utilitarian) rather than libertarian position (as Willem does), the case for big changes in current attitudes and laws is overwhelming.
The present approach was heavily influenced over the course of the 20th century by the US. This is because the home of the free is also the home of the puritan. But the “war on drugs” is certainly even more misdirected and unwinnable than the “war on terror”. I wish someone would declare a war on prohibition, instead.
Posted by: Martin Wolf | August 9th, 2007 at 12:17 pm | Report this commentWillem Buiter: A footnote to my Column: today’s Financial Times reports that “The US and UK yesterday unveiled a new counter-narcotics plan for Afghanistan, including a stronger eradication effort, in an attempt to deal with the growing poppy cultivation problem in the war-torn country”.
That’s bad enough. It then goes on to say “The US wants to use aerial spraying as one way to tackle eradication”.
The terminal stupidity and inability to learn of those in charge of the US anti-drug programmes and policies never fails to amaze me. Short of showing Allied troops bayoneting babies on prime-time news, aerial spraying must be the best way of creating popular support for the Taliban. We know how successful these policies were and how much support it created in the Andean coca growing regions.
In a different, non-drug context, the goodwill lost by the US through its experiments with defoliation through Agent Orange in Vietnam, should have given the US (anti-) drug czars pause for thought. But learning simply does not take place. When paternalistic morality interferes with normal brain functioning, costly, indeed dreadful things can happen.
Fortunately, the aerial spraying proposal “has met strong resistance from many European, Afghan and NATO officials who fear it will undermine counter-insurgency efforts”.
I hope the European, Afghan and NATO officials are successful in preventing a worsening situation from worsening even more rapidly. Until we legalise all opium derivatives, that is the most we can hope for.
Posted by: Willem H. Buiter | August 10th, 2007 at 5:34 pm | Report this commentJonathan Mueller (guest contributor): As a member of the US Foreign Service, I played a prominent role in the ‘war on drugs’, managing US assistance to the police forces of about half of South America. I received substantial recognition for my efforts re-directed funding from ‘unsuccessful’ to ’successful’ programmes, some of which have been regarded as so successful that they have received billions of dollars of fundng in the years since. Nevertheless, the great seizure figures we compled were all just ‘powder on the table’, a great show but irrelevant.
The most basic principle of classical ecoomics - supply and demand - explains why Buiter and Wolf are right. As long as people in rich countries, first of all the US, want drugs, there will be supply.
There are two aspects to the drug problem: the damage done by drug abuse, and the damage done by drug trafficking. In the case of the first,I know of no evidence that anyone does not take drugs because they are illegal, so another approach needs to be tried. In the US, in my lifetme we have cut tobacco consumption frm 50 per cent of the population to 20 per cent without putting anybody in jail. It is not easy to do the same thing with drugs, but maybe we shold try a more public-health-centred approach.
As for trafficking, Martin Wolf has already descrbed the consequences with crystal clarity, so I will not repeat. We can end this part of the problem with the stroke of a pen!
The devil, of course, is in the details. De-criminalization, which to me means tolerating personal possession without legalizing distribution, accompilshes nothing - merely ratifies the status quo. To end trafficking, there must be a legal supply of drugs. But which? There is a whole host of psychotropic substances used for recreational purposes. Whch can we accept, and on what terms?
Nevertheless, it is time to recognize that this ‘war’ has failed and look for a different approach.
Posted by: Jonathan Mueller | August 14th, 2007 at 2:11 pm | Report this commentMartin Wolf: I liked Jonathan Mueller’s comment a great deal. Let me just clarify what I think of as the options, as between decriminalisation and legalisation.
Legalisation would involve going the current tobacco and alcohol route - taxation, product quality standards, restrictions on sales to minors, and so forth. Otherwise, all drugs would be for sale. Of course, manufacturers would be subject to standard legal penalties. If they sold things that killed people very quickly, they would be sued. But alcoholics cannot sue drinks companies. Smokers have sued tobacco companies, but only because they lied (as I understand it). So the sellers of drugs would have to put clearly on packets all the dangers attendant on using their various drugs.
I like this alternative, but know it is not going to happen. So the alternative would be to legalise relatively harmless drugs - cannabis, for example. I have seen no evidence that it is as dangerous as alcohol, which is a genuinely dangerous drug because it kills tens of thousands of innocent people in road accidents across the globe. But hard drugs would merely be decriminalised. By this I mean that trafficking would be illegal, but use would not be. So who would supply users? The answer is the state. Addicts would be registered through the health system and given maintenance doses, ideally under medical supervision. The volumes supplied would be sufficient to support one person’s habit, not create a business. There would be no point to creating a business since users could obtain drugs readily in this way. This used to be British policy three decades or so ago. It worked very well. Since it stopped the number of hard drugs users has exploded, as has associated criminal activity of all kinds. It is a good example of stupid prohibitionism.
I presume there would be no market for really lethal drugs: few people are suicidal and, if they are, there are so many alternative ways of killing oneself.
Posted by: Martin Wolf | August 16th, 2007 at 11:56 am | Report this commentJoseph Califano (guest):Willem Buiter’s proposal for the European Union (and the world) to legalise all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, is a one-way ticket to destroying millions of children, increasing violent crime and pushing up healthcare costs.
Like most legalisation buffs, Professor Buiter suggests a regulated system where access to drugs would be prohibited for minors. Our experience with laws restricting access by children and adolescents to tobacco and alcohol makes it clear that keeping legal drugs away from minors would be an impossible dream. Teen smoking and drinking are at epidemic levels in the US and across much of the European continent. In Great Britain, keeping bars open has led to an explosion of drunkenness among teens so widespread that the government is likely to return to limited hours for pubs.
Today, the US has some 60m regular smokers, up to 20m alcoholics and alcohol abusers and about 6m illegal drug addicts. Experts such as Columbia University’s Herbert Kleber believe that, with legalisation, the number of cocaine addicts alone could leapfrog beyond the number of alcoholics. The experience of European nations that have tried various shades of legalisation bears him out.
Switzerland’s “Needle Park”, touted as a way to restrict a few hundred heroin users to a small area, turned into a grotesque tourist attraction of 20,000 heroin addicts and junkies. It had to be closed before it infected the entire city of Zurich.
In the Netherlands, anyone over the age of 17 can drop into a marijuana “coffee shop” and pick types of marijuana just as they might choose flavours of ice-cream. As crime and the availability of drugs rose, and complaints from angry residents about the decline in their quality of life multiplied, the Dutch parliament trimmed back the number of marijuana shops in Amsterdam and the amount that can be sold to an individual.
Under decriminalisation in Italy, possession of a few doses of drugs such as heroin has generally been exempt from criminal sanction. Today, Italy has about 200,000 addicts, the highest rate of heroin addiction in Europe. Most Aids cases in Italy are attributable to drug use. England’s foray into allowing any doctor to prescribe heroin was curbed as heroin use increased. Professor Buiter would have legalisation occur across all of Europe so there are no countries that are enclaves of drug use. In other words, if you like what’s happened in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Italy, you’ll love legalisation across the European Union.
Easy availability of drugs will increase criminal activity. Most violent crimes, such as murders, assaults and rapes, occur when the perpetrator is high or drunk, and much of property crime involves people seeking money to buy drugs. In the US, half the beds in most hospitals are filled with people sick or injured as a result of drug use, drinking and smoking.
Professor Buiter promotes “our cigarette manufacturers, [as] well-positioned to enter this trade” of selling heroin, cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and designer drugs such as ecstasy. Talk about letting the fox loose in the chicken coop! For decades the nicotine pushers like RJ Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, and Philip Morris have been hawking their wares to kids. Twenty years ago the cigarette company Reynolds Tobacco (RJR) created a cartoon character called Joe Camel and so heavily promoted him that more children recognised him than Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse.
Only after years of complaints from public health advocates and parents, and the threat of legal action by the Federal Trade Commission, did RJR shut down its Joe Camel campaign. RJR tried to push candy-flavoured cigarettes that mask the harshness of natural tobacco for young first-time users.
Does the world want to create a Philip Morris for weed? An RJR for cocaine? Do we want cigarette companies that by their own admission seek “replacement smokers” for those who die or quit smoking, seeking “replacement drug addicts” for those who shake their habit?
There is no basis to assume that cigarette companies will take a different approach when selling drugs. After all, these are the guys who continue to promote a product that, when used as intended, kills and maims millions of people across the world.
Professor Buiter touts taxes on the sale of illegal drugs as a great source of revenue for public purposes. This blithely ignores the history of tenacious opposition to tax increases that has marked the tobacco and alcohol companies. As a result, taxes collected on the sale of these products cover only a small fraction of the costs in healthcare and criminal justice attributable to smoking and drinking.
Legalisation assures greater availability, and availability is the mother of use. That poses a clear and present danger to our children. Research at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University has found that an individual who gets to the age of 21 without smoking, using drugs or abusing alcohol is virtually certain never to do so. Every drug-dealer, cigarette manufacturer and spirits company knows this – and acts on it. Viewed from this perspective, substance abuse and addiction are diseases typically acquired during childhood and adolescence.
Today most kids do not use illicit drugs, but all of them, particularly the poorest, are vulnerable to abuse and addiction. Russian roulette is not a game anyone should play. Legalising drugs is not only playing Russian roulette with children, it is slipping a couple of extra bullets into the chamber.
Joseph Califano is writer is chairman and president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, and author of ‘High Society: How Substance Abuse Ravages America and What to Do About It’. He was US secretary of health, education and welfare from 1977 to 1979
Posted by: Joseph Califano | August 16th, 2007 at 12:38 pm | Report this commentSteve Rolles (guest): The problem with the debate on ‘legalisation’ is that the word itself comes with a great deal of baggage and is widely misunderstood. If its meaning - regards strict government regulation and control of production supply and use - is not clearly specified, then public, media and political misunderstandings will naturally fill the vaccuum, tending towards visions of an unregulated free market, with heroin available in sweet shops and so on. It is very welcome to see articles that more clearly express ‘legalisation’ as merely the process by which effective state control of drug markets can be achieved. Then, and only then, can government effectively intervene to reduce the harms that drugs and illicit drug markets cause to society.
The debate also suffers from the historical backdrop of moral posturing that can be traced back to the puritanical abstince campaigns of the temperance movement. The simplistic prohibitionist analysis maintains that any drug use is morally unacceptable (making no differentiation between problematic and recreational pattrens of use) and that anyone who questions prohibition is therefore pro-drug or in some way condoning drug use. This is, ofcourse, absurd. A regulated market is in no way incompatible with a strong anti-drug or abstinence message (anti-smoking health campaigners, for example, do not call for absolute tobacco prohibition). A criminal justice approach to managing drug use actually makes getting accross sensible public health messages to young people and vulnerable groups more difficult, by diverting resources away from eduction and prevention and by fostering distrust of authority through mass criminalisation. The key here is to express how public health messages about responsible lifestyle choices are best disseminated via the various mediums of public eduction and not through heavy handed enforcement (which has so demonstrably failed over the last 40 years or so). We need to move beyond the fantasy of a ‘drug free world’, accept the reality that to some people always have and always will always chose to use drugs, and go from there to rationally evaluate what policies are effective in reducing drug harms.
What is welcome is the incresed sophistication in the debate that is now emerging; The devil is indeed in the detail. The debate is moving beyond the polarised and emotive legalisation/prohibtion scuffles, towards a more level headed consideration of which regulatory frameworks are most appropriate for different drugs in different localities.
Steve Rolles, information officer, Transform Drug Policy Foundation (www.tdpf.org.uk), is author of ‘After the War on Drugs, Options for Control’, and ‘After the War on Drugs, Tools for Debate’
http://www.tdpf.org.uk/AboutUs_Publications.htm
Posted by: Steve Rolles | August 16th, 2007 at 3:01 pm | Report this commentJon Stern: I would like to take up Martin’s comment of August 14.
The regime he recommends for hard drugs is 90 per cent that which was in place in the UK until 1968. Registered addicts were supplied with heroin by their GPs, although the system unfortunately did not include supervised consumption on the premises. This weakness provided a leakage of heroin onto the street which provided the justification for a much more prohibitionary approach which I would argue has been highly destructive for the reasons listed by several of the commentators to this debate.
In 1968, following a moral panic, James Callaghan the incoming Home Secretary wishing to establish his anti-permissive credentials established prescription only at regional centres and then of methadone rather than heroin. This destroyed the previously well-functioning system which allowed (for instance) British modern jazz heroin users to have productive careers and stay out of gaol, unlike most of their US counterparts.
The truth is that, at least for the UK, possession and use of opium and its derivatives has only relatively recently been made a criminal offence. Banning laudanum from cough mixtures and children’s sleeping medicines pre-1914 was a clear social advance. But, to my mind, the 1968 changes, which prevented medical prescription and management of addiction, were clearly a misguided and retrograde step. They have probably increased the number of heroin users and have certainly increased the personal and social costs per heroin user.
Jon Stern is research director of the Centre for Competition and Regulatory Policy at City University, London
Posted by: Jon Stern | August 20th, 2007 at 12:15 pm | Report this commentWillem Buiter: I would like to thank all those who took the time to comment on my plea for full legalisation of all drugs. Without trying to be comprehensive, let me pick on a few important issues.
Like Martin, I believe that the only sensible route to go is what he calls the “current tobacco and alcohol route - taxation, product quality standards, restrictions on sales to minors, and so forth. Otherwise, all drugs would be for sale. Of course, manufacturers would be subject to standard legal penalties.”
Martin’s second-best proposal, offered because the believes that the first-best is not politically feasible, is to fully legalise soft drugs but to merely decriminalise hard drugs. His proposal that, with trafficking in hard drugs remaining illegal, the state would become the supplier to registered users is, as Jon Stern points out, very close to the scheme that used to be in effect in the UK until 1968 and not that far from the scheme currently in effect in the Netherlands. Steve Rolles also advocates more sensible regimes than the current ones prevailing in the UK and the USA, but short of full legalisation.
One problem with Martin’s second-best proposal is that it would keep alive a market for illegal hard drugs supplied from sources other than the state. Many drug users and drug addicts would not wish to register their habit with the state (or anyone else), because of the adverse personal and professional consequences of the information becoming public. Confidentiality guarantees are worth nothing. Such privacy-valuing hard drug users would continue to be supplied by criminals
I don’t really know how to respond to the long contribution by Joseph Califano, which is more of a rant than a logical and fact-based argument. The non-sequiturs in the way he jumps from the experience of localised liberalisation (in the Netherlands, Zurich and Italy), to the likely impact of global liberalisation are almost painful to behold. Righteous anger is no substitute for reason.
Even if it were true that legalisation would increase the number of drug users (and specifically the number of children using drugs) – an assertion for which compelling empirical evidence is hard to come by – a cost-benefit analysis of legalisation cannot be restricted just to the populations of drug users under the two scenarios. As Martin pointed out in his first comment on my Column, there are countless other victims of the current policy of criminalisation, including the inhabitants of developing countries destroyed by the war on drugs (Bolivia, Columbia, Afghanistan come to mind) and those incarcerated for using and/or selling these now illegal substances. I accept Martin’s utilitarian case for drug liberalisation – there would be more winners than losers - but don’t wish to be shy about the libertarian case for liberalisation. If an adult of sound mind chooses to use drugs, it is not the state’s business to interfere with that choice, even if the use of the drug is likely to be harmful to that person. Only if the use by one person inflicts substantial preventable harm on others, can there be a proscriptive role for the state, and then only if the state intervention does not, directly or indirectly, do more harm than it prevents.
I cannot be sure about the degree of success of public health education campaigns to raise awareness of the damage to health caused by certain drugs. It must surely be encouraging, though, that, as Jonathan Mueller puts it “In the US, in my lifetme we have cut tobacco consumption from 50 per cent of the population to 20 per cent without putting anybody in jail.” More can no doubt be done. Why any advertising of tobacco products is still permitted is a deep mystery, for instance. In the UK, the limit on the Chancellor’s ability to tax cigarettes is not set by the clout of the tobacco industry, but by the availability of cheap sources of supply elsewhere in Europe, especially in France. A common policy for the EU on the taxation of tobacco would help here. Focusing law enforcement resources on keeping pushers and dealers away from schools, but without making use by adults illegal, would surely be more effective in cutting drug use than trying to spray Afghanistan’s poppy crop?
Posted by: Willem H. Buiter | August 20th, 2007 at 9:44 pm | Report this commentSteve Rolles: Martin Wolf has suggested that I respond to some of the factual errors in the Claifano comment above. My rebuttal is below.
A number of factual mistakes and misrepresentations in Califano’s comment piece ‘Drug legalisation is playing Russian Roulette’ should be addressed.
Califano’s suggestion that cocaine addiction would ‘leapfrog’ alcoholism is the un-evidenced supposition of a single individual, the former deputy US Drug Tsar. Nothing in the European experience that ‘bears him out’; Cocaine use is higher in the US than almost anywhere in the world and no country in Europe has legalised it. Alcohol remains the most widely consumed drug in Europe, as everywhere else, by an enormous margin.
‘Needle Park’ is of no relevance to this debate as it was in no sense ‘legalisation’ as heroin was not legally supplied, its reference being a familiar ploy to misrepresent the reality of regulated drug supply. As an experimental tolerance zone ‘Needle Park’ did indeed prove a failure. However, unmentioned by Califano, the Swiss Government responded to this failure with a pragmatic move to actual legalisation by setting up a network of heroin prescribing clinics for long term relapsing users, where they received pharmaceutical heroin (of known strength and purity, unlike illicit supplies) consumed under medical supervision in a clinical setting. This policy has been a great success on all public health and criminal justice indicators, has dramatically reduced crime, public nuisance, street dealing and drug litter, and has led many more long term users into rehab and abstinence than if they had remained in the clutches of the illicit underground drug scene. Given its success it has, unsurprisingly, been copied by many countries including Canada, Australia and much of mainland Europe.
The success of Dutch drug policy has also been misrepresented as failure. Since 1976 availability of cannabis in the Netherlands has been tolerated and de-facto licensed and controlled. Complaints focussed on a small area of Amsterdam frequented by rowdy tourists and stag parties. The system has recently been streamlined with some sensible new restrictions imposed, but it remains alive and well, enjoying broad (and increasing) support from the public, parliamentarians, and law enforcement community despite a few vocal dissenters. It should also be noted that cannabis use has risen across the Western world since 1976, but has risen slower in Netherlands than many other countries. Young people’s cannabis use in the Netherlands is substantially lower than either the UK or the US.
“Today, Italy has about 200,000 addicts, the highest rate of heroin addiction in Europe.”
This is incorrect. The highest level of heroin addiction is in the UK (with 300,000+ addicts for a comparable total population) where there is very much not a policy of tolerance, let alone decriminalisation. Califano further fails to mention the policies of Portugal, Germany, and the Netherlands, which have also de-facto decriminalised (and/or prescribe) heroin, according to the EMCDDA. Have equal or lower levels of heroin addiction than Italy.
“Most Aids cases in Italy are attributable to drug use.”
It is ‘HIV/AIDS’ not ‘Aids’. Most cases of HIV transmission in Italy are attributable, very specifically, to injection of illicit drugs, mostly heroin. Significantly there is no HIV transmission or AIDS caused by non-injecting drug use, or indeed any form of legal drug use. The use of prescribed heroin with clean needles as discussed above re: the Swiss system is not associated with any HIV transmission, so let us be completely clear on this: Drug related HIV transmission amongst injecting drug users is very specifically a result of prohibition. Califano is defending a policy that has caused widespread misery and death, whilst attacking those who propose proven approaches that entirely eliminate the problem.
“England’s foray into allowing any doctor to prescribe heroin was curbed as heroin use increased.”
Doctors can and do still legally prescribe heroin in the UK. The UK is currently trialling Swiss-style drop in centres for supervised use of prescribed heroin based on the success of such schemes elsewhere, with a view to substantially expanding the number of prescribed users. In 1967, following (primarily political) concerns about several rogue prescribing doctors, and diversion to the illicit market, the ability of General Practitioners to prescribe heroin was removed and replaced by a system where prescribers required a licence from the Home Office. Since that change a sprawling, often violent, multi-billion pound illegal market has developed to serve the ever growing number of heroin users, expanding from between 5-15,000 in the late 60’s to over 300,000 today. This 2000+ percentage increase under has occurred under prohibition, not to mention the emergence of a situation under which more than half of all acquisitive property crime is committed by addicts raising funds to pay the inflated prices on the illicit market (as opposed to none when it is prescribed), and indeed the corruption, violence and conflict the illicit opium market has spawned internationally.
‘Easy availability of drugs will increase criminal activity. Most violent crimes, such as murders, assaults and rapes, occur when the perpetrator is high or drunk, and much of property crime involves people seeking money to buy drugs. In the US, half the beds in most hospitals are filled with people sick or injured as a result of drug use, drinking and smoking.’
Illicit drugs are easily available now, indeed it is testimony to the failure of the enforcement approach that illegal drugs have become increasingly cheap and available year by year. The vast majority of related criminal activity is created by the illegal markets themselves, a result of prohibition rather than intoxication. The large majority of intoxication-related crime and violence is alcohol related, and the vast majority of drug related public health problems are alcohol and smoking related.
“Legalisation assures greater availability, and availability is the mother of use.”
Again, wrong. It is demonstrably a myth that prohibition prevents or reduces availability. It clearly does not, as the ongoing rise in availability of drugs during decades of prohibition demonstrates with undeniable clarity. Legalisation and regulation allows controlled availability, and precisely the kind of Government interventions, controls and public health infrastructure that are demonstrably impossible when markets are controlled by gangsters, and unregulated street dealers. Once an illicit market is established, and criminal profiteers will see to that, levels of use are predominantly demand led. Availability then follows demand rather than the other way around. This is particularly the case with problematic use, as noted by the Prime Ministers 2003 strategy Unit report:
“Supply-side interventions have a limited role to play in reducing harm – initiation into problematic drug use is not driven by changes in availability or price:
• risk factors -particularly relating to deprivation -are the prime determinant of initiation into problematic drug use; price and availability play a secondary role
• there is no causal relationship between availability and incidence; indeed, prices and incidence often fall or rise at the same time” (p.79)
Califano finishes with a Russian roulette gambling analogy, ignoring the fact that prohibition itself is not a gamble. We know with some certainty that it cannot be, and has never been, anything but a counter-productive disaster.
Steve Rolles, information officer, Transform Drug Policy Foundation (www.tdpf.org.uk), is author of ‘After the War on Drugs, Options for Control’, and ‘After the War on Drugs, Tools for Debate’
http://www.tdpf.org.uk/AboutUs_Publications.htm
Posted by: Steve Rolles | August 21st, 2007 at 2:48 pm | Report this commentMartin Wolf: I want to thank Steve Rolles, in particular, for destroying the factual basis of Joseph Califano’s shocking intervention. It is depressing that this combination of hysteria, misrepresentation, intellectual confusion and mindless moralism continues to foist upon our countries a policy with such catastrophic consequences.
Like the Bourbons, Mr Califano has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. He seems totally incapable of distinguishing the consequences of drugs from the consequences of prohibiting them. Tragically, the attitudes he displays continue to sustain a policy that is destroying millions and millions of lives around the globe.
I am encouraged, however, by some of the other comments here, which suggest that people are relearning the good old principle that when in a hole one should first stop digging.
Posted by: Martin Wolf | August 22nd, 2007 at 8:36 pm | Report this comment