By
Jay B. Gaskill
On
We still need to learn the lesson
that the use of addictive, brain damaging
drugs weakens the social order.
Until 1999 I was head of the
nation’s third oldest public defender law office. Most of my early career was
spent in direct, confidential contact with criminals, and my later career as a
manager introduced me to law enforcement professionals whose integrity and
perspective I came to respect, just as they learned to respect the value of the
defense function. Over all those years,
the accumulated real world evidence persuaded me that legalization of most
addictive psychotropic drugs would be more than mere bad policy; it would lead to a profound regression of
civilization, a development unparalleled in post-Medieval history.
PART ONE:
RECOVERY
Reality is a great teacher and it rarely fails to trump mere ideology. I have defended thousands of criminals, most of whose lives were dominated in one way or another by the drug culture. Those of us who still love liberty and the civil society in which it flourishes need to understand why widespread drug use promotes crime, quite apart from the economic incentives to support addiction. Libertarians need to learn from conservatives, acquiring caution about change; liberals need to learn from conservatives, acquiring a hard edged sense of accountability; and conservatives need to recover the optimistic compassion of a recovering addict.
My own practical education began
in 1969 when, a freshly minted lawyer from U.C. Berkeley’s Boalt
Hall, and a liberal with strong libertarian tendencies, I began with the
Alameda County Public Defender, an office I would be appointed to lead twenty
years later. Headquartered in
Flash forward about three
decades. I was in the
Then I described the scene many years earlier as we public defender lawyers were allowed to mingle with the prisoners for interviews in the old Santa Rita. We stood in the open by wooden barracks, interviewing clients in the Compound, the wind ruffling our files and papers while prisoners lined up in orderly queues. Rarely was a deputy in sight, yet we moved in complete safety, surrounded by polite crooks.
Those days are gone. There were
knowing looks among the senior deputies as I told the graduating class about
the change in the custody population. We’ve all seen it in the typical
prisoner’s hard, wary eyes and the coiled spring body language. There are
complex reasons for this human deterioration, the necessary lexan
barriers, the difficulties getting a “contact” interview, and all the other
security precautions. But one factor towers over the rest: The drug culture has brutalized the criminal population.
Those who have close contact with the personalities of those besotted souls profoundly addicted to one or more of the hard drugs report the same dramatic deterioration in cognitive, ethical and empathetic mental processes. A spouse or child is reduced to an inconvenient object, and a stranger to a non-human obstacle. Think of the holdups at ATM’s where an addict gratuitously shoots an elderly woman in the face, and the carjackings where the victim is locked in the trunk and later murdered. These crime problems are characteristic of the modern drug culture. The level of venality and callousness exhibited by today’s common criminals is a new thing; few of the crooks of the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s in this country were even remotely comparable. Many of these dangerous behavioral tendencies persist in custody, long after all biochemical traces of the offending psychotropics have vanished from the bloodstream.
The naďve libertarian notion that drug consumption
is nobody’s business, but the user’s, may be a
principled stance, but it is a hopelessly utopian one. The real world is far too “messy” to be
force-fit into simple utopian models.
Some psychotropic chemicals are character poison and this effect leads to actions, the cumulative effect of which can be intolerable in any civilization worthy of the name.
Of course, we need to make some distinctions: The “drug problem” represents the spread of various forms of chemically induced irrationality, via psychotropic chemicals that exert an incredibly stubborn hold on the human will. If a given drug (like nicotine, for example) enhances cognition (or is neutral in that respect), it is not part of the problem as I am defining it here, however addictive its hold on the mind. If a drug (like ethanol, for example) produces only a transient deterioration of cognition and is not generally addictive, it is not part of the problem. Methamphetamines, on the other hand, are profoundly and quickly addictive, result in measurable brain damage, and in cases of prolonged abuse, induce paranoid ideation, and violent outbursts. While meth is part of the drug problem as defined here, marijuana is a minor issue about which reasonable minds still disagree.
Drug addiction
(as in “drug problem”) tends to sever the connection to social reality, burning
out the capacity for veracity, self discipline, integrity and empathy. It is no accident that few major drug dealers
themselves use their own products. The character deterioration caused by
major drug abuse can infect the larger society. Those who love liberty and the othher benefits of civilization should
consider a very real scenario. Suppose powerful psychoactive, addictive drug use were much more
widespread. Have you ever had the
experience of being the only sober, rational person in a group of people whose
personalities, mental state, and judgment were significantly altered by
chemicals? Consider that scenario writ
large. At what point does the scale of abuse begin to threaten the institutions
on which civilization depends? This is why the real world policy issues
invariably turn on questions of scale.
The character-degrading tendency of chronic,
addictive drug use is qualitatively worse in the current culture than say, 60
years ago, because of the prevalent cultural and moral relativism, the spread
of materialist hedonism and the collapse of the authority of traditional
ethical systems. There is a critical mass effect, (more on this later), when
drug abuse overwhelms law enforcement.
Introducing hard drugs to our damaged culture is tantamount to
introducing a virulent infection to a compromised immune system.
This is why, after three decades of experience with criminals, I am (on this issue, at least) a recovering libertarian.
In more innocent times, various societies sanctioned use of at least eight categories of psychoactive drugs, all discovered and “field tested” many centuries ago: (1) nicotine (tobacco); (2) caffeine (coffee and tea); (3) ethanol (beer, wine, and distilled spirits); (4) cannabis (marijuana and hashish); (5) psilocybin (psychedelic mushrooms), (6) mescaline (peyote cactus), (7) opium (morphine, heroin); and (8) cocaine (coca). With few exceptions, the scope of use of these substances was confined by ritual, custom and availability.
That has changed. Modern communications and transportation have made all addictive drugs simultaneously available throughout the western world; this is an unprecedented situation for any culture; and the shopping list has greatly expanded. We are at the leading edge of an explosion of new psychotropic drugs, a narco tide of uppers, downers and hallucinogens that threatens to swamp law enforcement resources, degrade public civility, and corrupt democratic institutions.
Welcome to the brave new world of designer drugs. Chemical analogues of the original drug categories are in play in the marketplace; expect newer drugs based on the ephedrines, barbiturates, and amphetamines, and entirely new psychocative chemicals that will be far more popular than LSD. Ecstasy, a brain-damaging hallucinogen related to amphetamine, was just the beginning. The brutal truth is that human ingenuity will continue to generate new dangerous psychotropic chemicals, and human folly will continue to provide a market for them. This why the 21st century heralds an even more difficult struggle with the drug problem than the last.
Our age of innocence is over. It ended with modern biochemistry.
I have centered this discussion of drug policy on
the libertarian perspective because the model remains timely and
instructive. The libertarian
talking points are effective: “Support personal choice.” “Prohibition can’t
work.” “The war on drugs can’t succeed because liquor prohibition in the
Beyond the slogans, philosophical libertarianism
represents the application of the integrity principle to governed
and government alike. If
the governed are not to violate the volitional integrity of another by
refraining from assault, theft, and fraud, then neither is government free to
do those things. This recalls
Einstein’s explanation for why he was a socialist. It was, he said, because
that system was the only single form of social organization based on an ethical
principle. In this century, libertarianism may be entitled to make the same
claim, subject to similarly naďve mal-assumptions about the real world.
First level libertarian thinking is directed
almost exclusively at the actions of the state in the naďve notion that only
state action can threaten liberty. I
prefer a much larger vision of a libertarian civilization, one that seeks the
optimization of conditions for the rational and creative exercise of freedom by
individuals (who are protected from overt coercion but not from accountability
for their own venality, folly, or unwarranted coercive actions). In reality, the inaction of the state
can also threaten liberty by allowing or tacitly fostering the development of
private coercive regimes. It is this
realistic framework (second level libertarian thinking) that allows a new
coalition of libertarians, liberals, and conservatives to entertain a
post-libertarian drug policy.
Rasonable minds can reject the naďve libertarian position
on the matter of general drug decriminalization, just as reasonable minds have rejected socialist economic
doctrine. The problem with all purely
intellectual or theoretical approaches to the real word is that they tend to
fall into the utopian trap. Reality is
much too rich and reactive; like all ultra complex systems, social and
political reality is too “messy” to be forced to fit into simple utopian models. As moral agents, we have no choice but to
study a real world that continues to confound social theory.
When arguing policy questions of this kind, I prefer to on center on a single maxim: The core conditions that secure human life, dignity, and the freedom for self-expression, require a civilization dedicated to their support, protection and encouragement. I call this the “civilization imperative.”
Clearly, any
civilization does a better job in these support functions than the classic
brutal state of nature. But there are
urban territories within our borders that resemble a brutal state of nature. It
is no accident that these are areas shot through with drug abuse.
In the prevailing libertarian myth, monetary pressures created by the drug laws drives drug related crime. This point of view is naďve in its economic determinism, akin to the current (increasingly discredited) dogma that poverty “causes” crime.
The real world lesson from my own observation is quite different. The prevalent fallacy is that drug related crime is driven exclusively (or primarily) by the need to buy drugs in the black market created by the drug laws themselves. My close observation of a very large population over thirty years strongly suggests a more frightening view. Criminal neglect, brutality, and other forms of violence actually interfere with the ability to maintain a drug habit, yet these behaviors are common to the drug users, such is the power of the drugs themselves to alter personality.
Only the naďve ignore the power of addictive psychotropics to degrade personality. I am familiar with cases of drug addicted professionals (among them lawyers seduced by their own libertarian slogans). None needed to steal to keep themselves supplied with drugs. Yet most underwent the same moral meltdown as my clients; most of them, too, descended into criminal activity. These professionals were, on the whole, much cleverer than my former clients, and most escaped criminal sanctions. The affluent are better able to keep drug problems (and other criminal behavior) hidden just under the surface.
Yes there are exceptions. I think of intellectuals who have dabbled with psychotropic drugs while keeping otherwise within the bounds of civilized conduct. Bravo. Bear in mind that my focus here is on drugs that actively degrade cognition, impair judgment, and are profoundly addictive, a description that probably does not reasonably include marijuana or even low dose, occasional LSD use. I can also think of functioning alcoholics who have managed to drive while experiencing a blood alcohol level twice the current legal limit and haven’t (to date) killed anyone. Indeed, I knew a trial lawyer (now deceased from alcohol related health “issues”) who did some of his best work with a residual blood alcohol just over the legal limit. But don’t try doing watch repair or brain surgery while on heroin, cocaine, or meth. These exceptions reveal the strength of underlying character, the strength of will, and the stubborn persistence of the capacity for intelligent action by a small number of substance abusers. They are interesting cases, but beside the point.
The general population in the Western developed nations is increasingly prosperous and illegal drugs are increasingly inexpensive. The current generation of drug-influenced criminals is wreaking havoc because of the erosion of social restraint and character, a malign development strongly influenced by drug abuse. To increase the ready availability of these drugs would make the situation dramatically worse.
One of the arguments for the legalization of harmful drugs is the notion that suicide is a basic right. If one can choose to die, the argument goes, why can’t we respect the choice to self-inflict the damage of drug addiction? Superficially, the argument has appeal. After all, we wouldn’t seriously consider outlawing tobacco, would we?
Aside from the question of the morality of incremental suicide, induced at the outset by fraud or simple mistake, the argument misses the essential nature of profound addiction. The addict doesn’t immediately die, but lives on and on to cause incalculable social harm to others. Moreover, the case that addiction to powerful psychotropic drugs is a form of chemical slavery is compelling.
Heavy drug
addiction, when mental and social functioning is impaired, is almost
indistinguishable from classic slavery. Highly addictive drugs controlled
substances overwhelm the brain’s volitional capacity. Once addicted, the individual is a profoundly compromised free agent,
with impaired creative powers, damaged critical judgment, weakened life
affirmation, and destroyed empathy.
Recovery from addiction is far more complex and difficult than
liberating a kidnap victim, because the vital volitional centers of the brain
have been altered by chemical means.
The failure of alcohol prohibition in the 1920’s makes
a poor case for deregulation of opiates, cocaine, meth
and their highly addictive successors.
Over five thousand years we have learned that alcohol is powerfully
addictive only for a small percentage of the population, and then only after a
significant number of doses. By
contrast, heroin is powerfully addictive across a very wide spectrum of the
population, and after very few doses. The same is true of cocaine and
methamphetamine.
Of course, where the risk of addiction is
concerned, there will always be issues of degree. As I’ve just said, reasonable minds differ on
cannabis legalization. I’d add these cautions: Its carcinogenic and long term
cognitive impairment effects are documented. Advocates of marijuana
legalization need to know that the grass sold now is far more potent than that
used by flower children of the 60’s.
We learned an important lesson from the tobacco
companies who doped their product to enhance addiction. The goal of all
recreational drug marketing is to achieve the repeat customer. There is no
repeat customer quite as reliable as the drug addict. This is why the market
favors addiction. That said, no one can reasonably compare marijuana addiction with
chemical slavery in the same sense that the description aptly describes heroin,
cocaine and methamphetamine addicts.
It
is a malevolent new age myth that “vice” offenses happen in some alternative,
life style centers. They happen in areas where murder and robbery are common
because the same offenders are doing drugs and violent felonies. That you can
find actual slavery in these crime centers is no accident. Character is degraded by addiction to hard
drugs on a level that has to be observed first hand to grasp just how insidious
and ultimately malevolent the personality change can be. Wealthy recreational
drug users, living in safe, gated neighborhoods, may pretend to ignore these
drug-ruined communities or live in the fantasy that “It’s just a matter of
personal choice.” A slave-holding pimp and a slave prostitute can both be
slaves to chemical addiction. In this milieu, the notion of “mutually
consenting adults” is the sad conceit of the affluent consumer who ventures
into the slave territory at night and slips away, leaving a “slave subsidy”
behind, blithely convinced that he/she isn’t accountable for the human degradation
there.
None of the addicts I observed over the years
blithely entered into this condition of chemical slavery; they had no real
appreciation of the nature of their Faustian bargain. But once trapped, their liberation became
effectively impossible without the help of external authority.
As
a former public defender, I have long argued that drug law reform is
needed. Current penalties for drug use
vary between the irrationally draconian and the dangerously lenient. But drug law reform must be guided by a
single overriding imperative: We must never give up on addiction, because we can never subsidize nor condone
slavery. Realistic, effective solutions exist, but they may be
unattainable in the present climate.
First we have to recover from our naiveté and our moral ambivalence.
All the libertarian/liberal solutions cluster around variations of the “let them suffer and die” theme, coupled with various forms of social quarantine. But in the real world, quarantine will prove impossible if we ever achieve general legalization. All of the law enforcement experts I have consulted concur that general legalization will dramatically increase drug abuse. For reasons I have developed separately in this essay, crime will increase too. This raises the stakes considerably for those who are depending on some form of social quarantine to contain the effects of drug abuse in a more tolerant society that refuses to incarcerate the drug abuser.
Consider that we inhabit a moderately repressive socio-political environment (at least where drug use is concerned) in which most addictive psychotropics are nominally or actually illegal, but there are varying degrees of social tolerance for drug use. That the current level of social quarantine is fairly permeable should be obvious from the pervasive nature of a residual level use of addictive drugs throughout the population. But the aggregate level of illegal drug use in this country remains below the levels that might destabilize public institutions; this reflects the containment effect achieved by law enforcement pressure and public education. It is important for those who are considering the prospective effects of general legalization to recognize and study the significant areas where extreme levels of drug abuse persist, most of which are easily located within the inner city. These areas have been written off by law enforcement and are avoided by most of the “respectable” population. But their cultural influence on the general population has not been contained.
Widespread drug abuse overtaxes law
enforcement resources causing whole areas to be ceded to barbarism.
Urban police officers know intuitively from street
level experience when there is a critical mass of drug use in any community or
area. When this level is exceeded, the crime burden on law enforcement
resources takes an exponential leap.
Usually, the area is ceded for routine enforcement. This gives us access
to working models of the consequences of general drug legalization. Like
Scrooge and the ghost, we can actually visit these blighted places and see our
possible future, first hand. If you live in any urban area, these places are
very close at hand: They are the sectors that police fear to go without backup.
This provides us with a working model of the
consequences of general drug legalization.
If the drug problem ever reaches critical mass for a sufficiently large
law enforcement region, there are not now nor
will there likely ever be enough police and
justice resources to deal with the overt behavioral consequences of drug abuse.
A social policy of waiting for the eruption of specific, overt criminal acts
caused or influenced by dramatically expanded drug use is folly. It is like scattering boxes of fried chicken
in a school parking lot, then introducing a population of hungry bears. The position of the advocates of general drug
legalization becomes, “so if the bears get out of line, call 911!” It ultimately boils down to a question of
scale and resources. How many bears? How
much chicken? How many police officers? The sale of drug abuse matters
immensely. This is why even partial
success in the war on drugs is a provisional victory for civilization.
Reform of the nation’s drug laws is a necessary
step to a social consensus on drug policy. At a minimum, we need more
uniformity in punishment and flexibility in administration. At present,
ambivalence competes with overreaction. In the
Traffickers in crack
cocaine and heroin have already spawned enclaves (within and outside the
In spite of the obvious personal and social damage done by narcotics, the single common denominator of national drug policy is ambivalence. Too many of us have blithely accepted the “live and let live” ethos without studying the larger consequences. I have encountered this mind set among police officials conflicted about their “vice” mission, among politicians who talk about giving up on the war on drugs, among lawyers who blur the line between drug dealer client and business client, and among the affluent recreational drug users who expect to benefit from a class-based double standard. The “drug war” (read the current criminal justice supported containment effort) flounders because of a lack of will. The source of the failure of will is the deeply rooted ambivalence I’ve just referred to, rooted in the non-interference ethos that treats narco-addiction as a fundamental right on the doubtful premise that “it does no harm.”
Our borders leak like sieves. Illicit chemical labs spring up like
weeds. Mind poison; character poison;
commerce in chemical slavery, all continue. The
control of national borders, of the traffic, all of the related enforcement
efforts, are all subject to demoralization and de-stabilization precisely
because of the ambivalence I have described.
A perceived lack of moral confidence by policy makers not only
undermines public education, it implicitly sanctions law enforcement corruption
by the drug lords. I personally am
convinced that this problem must be countered at every level, psychological,
political, and organizational.
The emerging pattern of malevolent biochemical
innovation will force us to confront the demand side with something far more
robust than “just say no.” A dramatic reduction in demand requires education
and treatment but it also calls for muscle.
We need to explicitly recognize that, at a certain point, there is no
such thing as “innocent” market participation.
Modern society can properly make it illegal to sell the skin of a
sacrificed person, in order to kill the market.
It doesn’t matter that the end user isn’t directly hurting the
sacrificial victims because the market is. We need to recognize that control of
the demand side of the market for addictive drugs means that the consumer must be sanctioned.
The economic backbone of the cocaine trade is the
affluent, “respectable” user. Poor
people living in inner cities are recruited in a “loss-leader” market strategy
to create a sales infrastructure ultimately funded by recreational drug sales
to the affluent buyers. Without these
buyers, the overall cocaine traffic would suffer a catastrophic economic
setback. The solution, as painful and
politically difficult as it may be, is really very simple.
In
every large urban area there is a nightly stream of taxis between the suburbs
and the inner city. Money and drugs
change hands. For reasons that should be
self evident, but apparently are not, the sellers, customers, and the willing drivers belong in custody. A double
enforcement standard for rich and poor is intolerable on both practical and
moral levels. But jail, alone, is not enough, and draconian prison sentences
are too much.
As a general rule, penalties must be widely
applied, but rationally calculated to assist the rehabilitation of users
without destroying their lives. The
affluent and poor recreational drug users alike must be consistently penalized
with more than a fine or diversion from the criminal process; whenever repeated
use is involved, the convicted users should be required to participate in
rigorous drug rehabilitation.
The single most powerful demand control strategy
yet developed is criminal
sanction-supported rehabilitation. Successful drug court programs are
producing measurable, encouraging outcomes, helping to liberate addicts across
the
The new model, “rehabilitation with teeth,”
developed with the help of addiction specialists (notably Dr. Alex Stalcup of
I have witnessed a hopeful scene many times,
starting with Judge Tauber’s courtroom in the 90’s.
Repeated daily in courtrooms across the
A celebration is
warranted. Breaking genuine drug addiction
is an act of
liberation, on a par with cutting the leg irons of a slave.
I recall another graduation. I was a guest at a major live-in drug rehab program, a well regarded, very strict, live-in program with tough graduation requirements and a very high success rate. During the graduation ceremonies, formerly estranged children and other loved ones gathered as former addict after former addict took the microphone. Hulking, tattooed males, the kind I represented on the heaviest cases, appeared on stage with kind eyes. It was a remarkable thing to see. Their core humanity had been restored. Men wept. Others made jokes about having to pay income taxes for the first time in their lives. As these graduates talked about their experiences, one thing became obvious. Without criminal sanctions hanging over them, not one of these men and women would have gone into the program in the first place. On that day, all were secure and confident in their recovery. And all, without exception, exulted in a sense of liberation.
Designer psychotropics
threaten to overwhelm society’s capacity to pass laws. Beyond that, we face the prospective of mass
home-manufacture of dangerous drugs. Indeed, methamphetamine
abuse is the growing drug epidemic in rural
Most
addictive narcotics and stimulants profoundly impair cognitive function during
use; and long term damage typically results.
The clearest evidence of brain impairment has been developed for the
amphetamine family of psychotropics, but there is ample
anecdotal evidence that all the major addictive drugs can produce long term,
harmful brain changes. Recent research
at the Brookhaven National laboratory confirms that methamphetamine use
eliminates dopamine transporters and reduces the number of dopamine receptors,
eventually burning out the ability to experience pleasure. Memory and motor
functions are impaired as well. Measurable brain damage happens in mere months
of frequent methamphetamine use. Meth is just one cheap,
stimulating brain poison, and human ingenuity
guarantees that other cheap, equally damaging drugs will follow. The means to make them at home will not be
far behind.
Given
the reality of limited police resources, the unadvertised law enforcement
strategy is quarantine. This
policy is problematic on both practical and moral grounds. All quarantines tend to leak. Eventually,
even the “good Germans” were no longer able to ignore
Without robust
containment, the task of insulating the institutions of democracy will be
hopelessly impractical, given modern political realities. The drug problem, if uncontrolled, will
resemble welfare dependency ramped up ten thousand fold. Civil democracy, the kind in which constructive
individual liberty is both protected and actually possible, will be remembered as an unrecoverable dream. Addicts will be encouraged to vote if their
“handlers” have to bus them to the polls.
Is this scenario too far fetched?
Consider the defensive option.
Drug testing at the polls? That
scenario is far fetched.
Small, beleaguered, enclaves may survive, where the remaining drug free citizens will live in gated, sub-communities, hoping vainly that their children will never leave.
As
I have pointed out, we are on the precipice of the greatest influx of new pyschotropic chemicals in human history. We would do well to consider our next options
very carefully.
This reality means that the flood of newly released designer drugs, of new recreational uses for the prescribed psychotropics, and the spread of cheap drug lab technologies will pose an enormous legislative challenge. Mere inaction will be tantamount to eventual legalization. As new psychotropic agents hit the black and gray markets, rational drug policy must competently and continuously address at least five clusters of questions:
1. What are the cognitive and emotional impairment effects?
2. Is the agent likely to be administered to children?
3. Is the agent associated with behavior that violates the rights of others?
4. What are the agent’s overall addictive properties:
(a) mild or severe?
(b) rapid or gradual?
(c) population selective or population general?
5. Overall, what are the risks of rapid, widespread use among the general population? Is there a danger that regulation will be practically impossible if delayed?
These are serious questions, but number # 5 is of huge importance for the reasons that follow.
Addictive, mind altering drugs
are the bulldozers of mind and soul. Whole
communities have been taken down.
The
Chinese boxer rebellion of 1900 was sparked partly because of the West’s
continued role as drug dealer, the supplier of opiates for the subjugated
Chinese population. It would be ironic
if the West succeeded in a form of self-subjugation through improvident
narcotic legalization.
The question of irreversibility is a very real
one. Substantial narco-legalization
will inevitably be accompanied by powerful market forces. This is a dynamic that can quickly get out of
hand, especially where interest group politics and the media can drive policy. Consider the prospect of a drug dealer
consortium with powerful media and political support. We may naively rely on
cigarette pack style warnings, but narco-advertising
will not effectively be curbed once legalization of the underlying activity has
been achieved. The dirty secret of drug legalization is that drug sales will
soon be out of control. We know that an addicted customer is a market
manipulator’s wet dream. In a country of
addicts, the sellers would soon rule.
How far down that road dare we go?
Would we be able to deny the franchise to drug users and sellers alike?
Would we institute drug testing at all polls?
The possible (make that probable) corruption of the democratic system is
chilling to contemplate.
As an alternative, our present problems look pretty
benign. But, surely we can do better. Drug
treatment and rehabilitation facilities need better funding, and we need to
frankly acknowledge the indispensability of criminal sanctions as a necessary
adjunct to recovery. Legislators need to
adjust sanctions, eliminating the draconian, but ensuring uniform, rigorous
justice. Judges need sentencing
flexibility and treatment options. Law
enforcement needs our moral support.
In this ongoing struggle, the liberation model is a powerful moral insight. We need desperately to recover from our naiveté and our moral ambivalence. We may not ever finally “win” the war on drugs, but we dare not finally losing it.
Slogans favoring general drug legalization should
carry a warning label. If we ever
achieve full scale drug legalization, the days of the current, “ineffective”
war on drugs will glitter in our cultural real view mirror like a retreating
oasis of sanity. The rest of the view
will be straight out of Dante.
Addiction is an equal opportunity slave master.
Copyright ă 2003
Jay B. Gaskill
For permission to reproduce or publish,
contact: Jay B. Gaskill, Attorney at Law at
Links:
Drug
Court http://www.nadcp.org/
Addiction
Medicine http://www.asam.org/