Does anyone still think the “war on drugs” is a good idea?

That may strike some people as an odd question under the circumstances, so let’s take it from another direction. Have you seen the news stories about the violence on the border being perpetrated by the Mexican whiskey and cigarette cartels?

No? That’s probably because there was no such violence and are no such cartels.

So why are there violent cartels in marijuana, cocaine, and heroin but not in whiskey and cigarettes?

All together now: prohibition.

“Our” Fault?

Of course the politicians blame everything and everyone but themselves for this spreading violence. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “Our demand”? Including hers? “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.” Her answer, in addition to sending the Mexican government taxpayer money, is to go after consumers of drugs and manufacturers and dealers of guns she doesn’t like.

Drug users and gun dealers are to blame for drug-cartel violence? That makes no sense. If it did, then drinkers and smokers would be creating violence, too. What’s missing?

Once again in unison: prohibition. Who brought us prohibition? Politicians. Every politician, bureaucrat, and agent who facilitates or enforces prohibition is an accomplice in the violence because he or she helps to create the conditions in which thugs have a comparative advantage in dealing drugs.

For years advocates of free trade in drugs—that is, basic rights to life, liberty, and property for drug consumers, producers, and merchants—have pointed out that prohibition, besides being an immoral invasion of liberty by the state, sets in motion a variety of concrete evils that harm innocent people. (No one has been more consistent and rigorous in this than Thomas Szasz). These evils include the corruption of law enforcement, violent crime, and the expansion of intrusive government. Besides these domestic evils, the U.S. government has alienated farmers in foreign lands by helping to destroy their crops and livelihoods. If that’s not terrorism, nothing is. Crop destruction has been a recruiting tool for guerilla organizations, while black-market profits finance them and others with malign intent.

Few listened to these Cassandras against the anti-drug crusade. Maybe people will listen now.

Government Impotence

While violent gangs that make their money selling drugs in the black market are murdering and kidnapping people, invading homes, and committing other atrocities, the politicians have nothing to say but the same bromides they’ve been repeating for years. Thinking we’re either simpletons or amnesiacs, they expect us to be comforted by their words. (Will they be right?) They promise to defeat the cartels, crack down on drug use, and disrupt the gun trade. It won’t work. It’s never worked. It can’t work. Black-market operators are always steps ahead of the plodding bureaucrats. Break up one gang and another emerges. The drugs keep flowing (there’s plenty of bribe money), and consumers will have what they want when they want it. The profits made possible by the black market are powerful incentives to keep the industry going. Government is impotent. (They can’t even keep drugs out of prisons!)

Yet the gangs could be put out of business overnight. How? By removing the criminal penalties for the production, trade, and consumption of all drugs; by bringing the black market into the open, so disagreements can be resolved through civil channels and a talent for violence is no longer an advantage; by dissolving the extraordinary profits that illegal industries always reap.

Yes, it is that easy.

People will recoil. We can’t do that! No? Then accept as normal the unspeakable violence that is starting to spread from city to city, because that is the alternative to the stubborn refusal to end the “war on drugs,” which is really a war on people. Even full police-state tactics will not be able to control it, though that won’t stop demagogic politicians from giving them a try.

The Drug War Finances Government Careers

I don’t expect the multitude of officials who depend on the drug war for their livelihoods and power to endorse an end to prohibition. They have shown themselves more than willing to accept the violence (against others) as the price of their ambition. The new threat to us is an opportunity for them to amass more power, bigger budgets, and higher salaries.

But the rest of us have no reason to support the complex of government and “private” tax-financed agencies that grow fat prosecuting this war. The worn-out rationalizations can’t stand examination. Prohibition keeps no one from getting any drug he wants at an affordable price. On the contrary, it encourages the creation of cheaper, more potent drugs, just as alcohol prohibition replaced wine and beer with hard liquor. (More bang in a more compact form.) Prohibition doesn’t keep our children safe. It makes drugs into enticing forbidden fruits and pushes the trade into less-visible channels. Drugs aren’t “dangerous,” though people are capable of doing harmful things with them—and many other things. (Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes is an eye-opening book that I highly recommend.) Addiction is not a disease; it’s a choice.

Everything the drug warriors have said is wrong—and often a conscious lie.

Drugs are to our society what Eurasia and East Asia were to Oceania in Orwell’s 1984: a convenient conjured-up demon to justify expansion of power and the usurping of liberty—in the name of keeping us safe.

What will it take, if not the current violence from Mexico, to make people see through the scam?

Look around. It’s our self-proclaimed protectors from whom need we protection most.

Such is the intensity of tobacco litigation that every day somewhere in this great nation there’s a judge, lawyer, or juror pondering the evils of the weed. The sun never sets on tobacco litigation. Tobacco is addictive, say the trial lawyers. All I know is that if this product is addictive, it’s horribly flawed because at least 40 million Americans have shrugged off its clutches and turned to Lifesavers, chewing gum, or an extra slice of pie for dessert. Some narcotic.

Even I, well described by Oscar Wilde’s aphorism as a man who can resist anything but temptation, kicked Joe Camel, the Marlboro Man, and Herbert Tareyton (remember him?) out of my fraternity of friends. That was 17 years ago. And contrary to the wisdom of the streets, my dreams are void of the perfumed scent of cigs, but full of Chateaubriand with mushroom sauce, voluptuous women who think I’m Brad Pitt, and stocks that triple and pay a special surprise dividend in the first hour of ownership. I mean I never dream of nicotine. Today I’m as nicotine-free as a newly born babe.

But we have legions of state attorneys general suing Big Tobacco because the weed that eases life’s hurly-burly is “addictive.”

Cigarettes are addictive and Budweiser isn’t? The Bud Man is next in the lawyers’ sights. If I were the king of Anheuser-Busch, I’d be looking at diversification into a line of bottled barley soups-nonalcoholic, of course.

The vultures of state governments smell carrion. We claim, say the attorneys general of 20 states, that because of Big Tobacco–not the smoker–our medical bills have been astronomical. And when the states collect, do we taxpayers get a refund? Nope. Is it not our money? Who is the state if not me? Where’s my check?

So, smokers’ ills cost the state medical plan many dollars. But hasn’t the state’s lottery plan cost me and my fellow citizens many dollars? In the latter case it was the state’s intention to suck out of my wallet more money than the state lottery put into it. Intent is nine-tenths of the law, say my trial-lawyer friends. Intent is a huge legal discriminator when we talk sentencing and punitive damage. The states, with their lopsided lottery, intended to violate me economically. Can I sue? Not in this world. And maybe not in the next, since there’ll be few trial lawyers in Heaven, where I’ll renew my acquaintance with Herbert Tareyton, the Marlboro Man, and Joe Camel. Can’t hurt me there.

The simple truth is that smoking is fun–a small bonfire of happiness–and though we know it’s an ally of the old bony guy with the sickle, we’re hoping and praying that we can have our smokes and our life, too. Whistling past the graveyard is a tenderly human delusion. Don’t we all have a granddad or uncle who puffed his pipe for 60 years and hung out until he was 84?

Yes, but smokes are bad for kids, you say. But, so are the lessons we teach with our lawsuits. Our obsession with addiction tells our children that there are temptations in life that will turn your backbone into cherry Jell-O. You can’t resist. So don’t even start. And we tell them that we are no more responsible for our own actions than a cat licking milk out of a cereal bowl. This is a curriculum more deadly than hemlock and much more damaging than a smoke.

But the courtroom industry loves those gargantuan awards. The lawyers go after punitive damages with all the addictive zeal they attribute to victimized smokers. Recent business headlines announced that the tobacco industry would appeal a $145 billion judgment against it by a Florida jury. One-hundred-forty-five billion of anything, including dollar bills, reaches from here to the moon more than once. One-hundred-forty-five billion silver dollars rivals the weight of Hoover Dam. And though I haven’t done the calculation, I’m reasonably certain that if the award were paid in silver dollars, you would need ten of those monstrous dump trucks they use for dam building to haul away your loot. In fact, 145 billion silver dollars would plug up the gorge in the Yangtze River that the Chinese are now trying to fill. They would have done better joining the Florida class-action suit and using their award as fill.

Lethal Addiction?

The smokers’ attorney, Stanley Rosenblatt, who weighs about 450 silver dollars, does not think that 145 billion is excessive. He laments that people have died “as a result of being addicted to this product.” This is a class-action suit wherein hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs hit a jackpot whose lever was pulled by only three people. In other words, it’s the antipodal position of taxation without representation. This is remuneration without obligation. No risk, no cost, no work. Sign a form and you’ve got a free lottery ticket. Somebody goes to court, but you stay home–light a Marlboro, pop the top on a Michelob, and wait for the phone to ring. The lawyers have learned how to virtually stuff the whole darn state in the courtroom.

This Florida award is granted to individual smokers. It’s entirely separate from the quest for funds by the states. The success of the plaintiffs, be they individuals or states, has resulted from the assumption that the weed–in whatever form–is irresistible. As I say, the hinge that swings the verdict is that word “addiction”–a curious phenomenon. Evidently, it is an invisible component of the human soul-body union that has no physiological essence whatsoever. It cannot be weighed, or measured, or lovingly caressed by the fingers like silver dollars. It is our 21st-century version of the vampires, witches, and spooks of mythology who haunted mankind’s uninformed past. Demon soul-stealers. You’d think they would be hooted out of the courtroom by a jury of mentally able citizens.

But no. Many a lawsuit-besides the tobacco litigation-hangs on the demonic theft of the body from its true owner. The villain: addiction–a vampire impregnable to crosses, wooden stakes, silver bullets or Yale Law School defense lawyers. And we laugh at the witch trials of Salem?

Today, in the enlightened 21st century, trial lawyers realize the power of these demons.

So, from dusty tombs emblazoned with ritual inscriptions, the trial lawyers resuscitate them, re-label them as addictions, and introduce them into the courtroom. They have made enough money to buy Transylvania and turn it into a refuge for retired vampires and old succubuses who no longer work a six-day week in the hearts of cigarette-smoking Floridians. They have learned that the pockets of Big Tobacco are deeper than the purses of black-gowned old ladies who like cats.

In determining the proper boundaries of government action consistent with a free society, it is instructive to explore whether drug prohibition is an appropriate response to actions that are clearly self-destructive to some. Following from concern over the harmful effects of drugs, the prevailing view is that government has a responsibility to protect its citizens from that harm through prohibition. Yet that position runs directly counter to the foundation and maintenance of a free society. Indeed, in today’s context, drug prohibition represents one of the single greatest threats to our liberties.

Foremost to understanding the threat prohibition poses to liberty is a proper understanding of rights. According to the Declaration of Independence, we are endowed “with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The underlying assumption is that one’s life is one’s own. Thus the choices a person makes with his own life properly belong to him.

This principle is not hard to embrace. The idea that the individual owns his own life is accepted almost implicitly, especially in countries with a tradition of free thought and institutions, such as the United States. Yet it is a principle readily abandoned when it comes to drugs. Underlying the idea that government, and not the individual, has the right to determine what one may or may not ingest is the assumption that government, and not the individual, has ultimate authority over, and ownership of, life itself. Taken to its logical conclusion, this principle leads to slavery.

This does not mean government has no right to restrict and prohibit harmful behavior. But it must do so only to enhance and protect freedom of action. The old axiom that “my freedom to swing my arms ends where your nose begins” applies here. The essential point is that the individual has the right to do whatever he wants with his own life, since he has a property in that life, provided that he does not interfere with the same freedom of another.

With drug prohibition, the government attempts to coerce citizens into abstaining from something it deems harmful. This, in essence, is criminal behavior elevated to the status of law because it involves the initiation of force, or threat of force, against a class of citizens (illicit drug users) who are engaged in voluntary, non-coercive behavior. Moreover, the policy is doomed to failure as witnessed by the daily news reports on the government’s drug war, which clearly show that the government will never be able to stop individuals from taking drugs short of imposing an Orwellian 1984 level of surveillance on its citizens. And judging from the ready availability of drugs in prison, even that is unlikely to work.

The bottom line is that “criminal” action implies a victim, where force, or the threat of it, is imposed on another. However, what the individual freely does to himself—such as taking drugs—does not constitute the imposition of force, and is therefore not a crime. On the contrary, it is the prosecution of the drug war that is the crime.

Some Pragmatic Considerations

The devastating impact of the drug war on society, along with its inevitable failure, is a consequence of its protagonists’ failure to recognize a salient fact of human nature—namely, there will always be some individuals strongly driven to take drugs because they provide pleasure or block pain, and no legal sanctions, no matter how severe, will prevent that. Furthermore, the more draconian the drug enforcement the more draconian the consequences by every measure imaginable, from diminished civil liberty to increased violent crime.

Criminal activity normally involves no more than a small fraction of any given population. Yet when laws are dramatically at variance with the legitimate exercise of freedom, wide-scale disobedience is often the result. Such was the case with alcohol prohibition, conscription during the War Between the States and the Vietnam War, civil disobedience during America’s civil rights movement, and general disregard for the national 55-mph speed limit.

Prohibition also fails to acknowledge the power of markets. By making a desired substance illegal, prohibition increases profitability by making the substance scarcer and more risky to handle. In the pursuit of self-interest, and in light of the enormous profits earned from the illicit drug trade, there will always be a plentiful supply of risk-takers willing to run the gamut of government interdiction efforts to meet the demand for drugs. Ironically, the scarcer drugs become because of prohibition, the more profitable they become for dealers and the greater the incentive to sell them.

Thus it is profit, and the pleasure derived from taking drugs, that thwarts the increasingly militant calls for an “all out” drug war. Not surprisingly, when government attempts to deny basic individual sovereignty, it must intrude with reckless abandon on other rights to enforce its objectives. Protection from unreasonable search and seizure, as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, is a prime target for the drug warriors. Calls for universal drug testing are beginning to surface, regardless of any concern for probable cause. Former New York Mayor Ed Koch and others have even called for shooting down planes merely suspected of carrying drugs.

Tragically, the war on drugs, allegedly being prosecuted to protect human life, has instead claimed many innocent lives. Take, for example, those caught in the crossfire between warring gangs of drug dealers fighting over turf, or trigger-happy drug-enforcement agents who raid the wrong homes and accidentally kill residents defending their families against violent assault. Additional fatalities in the drug war include deaths attributed to drug overdoses or poisoned drugs owing to the adulteration and unknown potency of drugs traded on the illicit market. The war on drugs has also become a significant factor in the spread of AIDS; almost 7,000 intravenous drug users a year have died of AIDS from sharing needles.^[1]

Despite this tragic loss of life, prohibitionists claim that legalization will result in a dramatic increase in use, thereby dwarfing the number of fatalities directly attributable to prohibition. However, considering that 80 percent of deaths from ingestion of heroin and cocaine is caused by their adulteration on the black market,^[2] leaving 20 percent who die as a result of factors that would exist after legalization, it would require a 400 percent increase in use to equal the current death toll. This is unlikely; at the end of alcohol prohibition, estimates of increased consumption have ranged from zero to 250 percent.^[3]

On the contrary, it could be argued that consumption of hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine would actually decline with legalization, especially among vulnerable youth in the inner cities. This is because tens of thousands of hard-core users would no longer be pushing drugs to non-users in order to make money to support their own habits, a common and well-known practice throughout the drug culture. When we look at how alcohol is marketed and distributed, we can see how legalization will put the neighborhood “pusher” out of business.

In addition to the death toll coming from prohibition, the costs related to drug enforcement are staggering. Since President Reagan launched his much-heralded “war” in the early 1980s, the United States has spent nearly $300 billion to stem the flow, with indirect costs put at $67 billion annually as government continues to beef up the budgets of law enforcement agencies and the military to prosecute the drug war.^[4]

The courts are so overwhelmed with drug cases that the administration of justice is being hampered to an intolerable degree. For example, in 1998 more than 400,000 Americans serving prison terms (one in four imprisoned) were doing so for drug offenses, up from 50,000, or one in ten, in 1980.^[5]

Prohibition also has the unfortunate consequence of corrupting law enforcement agents lured by the easy availability of huge sums of tax-free income in return for their cooperation in the drug trade. According to reporters Jack Nelson and Ronald J. Ostrow, “Law enforcement corruption, sparked mostly by illegal drugs, has become so rampant that the number of federal, state and local officials in federal prisons has multiplied five times in four years, from 107 in 1994 to 548 in 1998.”^[6]

On the civil liberties front, the drug war has led to the property of non-drug users being confiscated without due process. In operations labeled “zero-tolerance,” leased boats are searched (sometimes without satisfying the legal standard of probable cause) and then seized from their owners when even minute quantities of drugs are found onboard. Indeed, fully 80 percent of total asset seizures related to the drug war occur without a criminal charge being filed.^[7]

Another casualty in the war on drugs is legitimate scientific research with drugs such as LSD and MDMA. In addition, marijuana has been almost universally prohibited for use as a treatment for glaucoma, which leads to blindness, and for ameliorating the severe side effects of chemotherapy.

Denial of Individual Responsibility

Inherent in the prohibitionist position is the failure to recognize individual responsibility and autonomy as operating principles for an efficacious life. While taking drugs involves the freedom to engage in what may be self-destructive behavior, it also, and more importantly, involves the principle of allowing for life-enhancing activity. The freedom to fail is also the freedom to succeed, and vice versa. Ultimately, only the individual can determine what is in his best interest. While that is not a fail-safe mechanism, the alternative is tyranny. Drug prohibitionists embrace that alternative by presuming to know what is best for others, and in the pursuit of their vision of the good life they are willing to impose that vision on others by force.

To counter the argument for individual responsibility, prohibitionists claim that drugs necessarily hurt others and society at large. Discounting the preponderance of evidence that prohibition imposes a much greater cost on society than legalization ever could, the fact remains that even for those who use drugs in a life-threatening way, it is their lives that they threaten. Society, and even loved ones, do not have a property right in the life of the drug abuser. To assume otherwise is collectivism, pure and simple.

If prohibitionists were interested in consistency, their line of reasoning would take them down a path I doubt many of them would want to follow. Would they propose banning tobacco or alcohol consumption because of potentially harmful effects? How about high cholesterol foods? With heart disease being the single greatest killer of Americans today, are prohibitionists prepared to follow their own logic and ban bacon and eggs? And what about high-risk occupations and activities such as stunt-car driving, hang gliding, and motorcycling?

Assuming you could successfully ban such activities and substances, what would be the implications for the role that risk-taking plays in enhancing the enjoyment of life? While most people avoid risk in the realm of health or physical activity, others are drawn to it because it enriches their lives. The very essence of individuality implies that different people have different requirements in achieving happiness.

Drug prohibitionists, however, will claim that illicit drugs can never have any other effect than to debilitate and destroy. Yet even among the most dangerous drugs, “addiction” is far from guaranteed. Dosage has everything to do with a drug’s potentially harmful affects, and if doses are low enough, and taken infrequently enough, no long-term or short-term ill effects will result.

Besides, the critical point, which cannot be emphasized enough, is that ownership of one’s life entitles one to do with it what one chooses, even if that choice leads to self-destruction.

The Roots of War

In light of the futility in waging the war on drugs, what leads the government to pursue it and most Americans to support it? Part of the answer lies in the coercive nature of government itself. If war, as Randolph Bourne stated, is “the health of the state,” then the American government is on a very healthy diet.

Since government is predicated on the use of force, it oft-times sees its reason for being in exercising it. If this power is used to protect rights, it is a benevolent force. But the temptation to abuse that power is sometimes irresistible. While the line between using government force in retaliation against initiators and being the initiator itself is a clear one, it is a line easily crossed.

There is also a need on the part of government to fight an enemy, take on a menace, and be the paternalistic guardian of the people. Indeed, if officeholders do not have the commodity of fear and the specter of menace to incite people to rally around them for support, they risk, in a democracy, repudiation at the polls from bored and fickle voters, and in a dictatorship, the violent overthrow of the government.

Hollywood and the media have certainly done their parts in feeding the current frenzy. Grisly news reports on the drug war and its victims boost ratings and provide ample grist for sensationalized TV specials and movies. This in turn creates the popular illusion that it is the drugs themselves that cause the violence and crimes associated with them, rather than their prohibition. Yet we have only to look back to the era of alcohol prohibition to identify the real source of drug-related violence. In the ten years following the end of alcohol prohibition, the murder rate from assault by firearms went down from a prohibition high of 16 per 100,000 of population in 1933 to less than nine per 100,000 by 1943.^[8]

America’s drug war is also a manifestation of the historical pendulum swinging toward social conservatism. Operating in cycles that run on the order of 20 years, America is reacting to the social excesses of the 1960s. Sexual mores have become more restrictive, drinking is less socially acceptable, and smokers’ rights have become severely circumscribed.

Indeed, the current trend—popular among both conservatives and “liberals”—is to place under cultural and political assault activities that give pleasure and hold the potential for harm. The “safety at any cost” approach toward regulating consumer choices, championed by environmental and consumer activists such as Ralph Nader, is but one variant of the kind of government paternalism now in vogue.

America’s puritanical heritage, while dramatically at variance with its heritage of political liberty, has endured as well as it has owing to the lure of messianic perfectionism. Few countries in the West are as “blessed” as the United States with the number and intensity of moral crusaders determined to use government to impose their moral values on others by force.

This puritanical impulse is enjoying a major resurgence in the United States. Historically, America has been a magnet for cultural extremes, ranging from the free love communes of the sixties to the abstinent Shaker communities of the early nineteenth century. In the history of the Western world, no other country embarked on the bizarre path of alcohol prohibition, despite alcohol’s deep historical, cultural, and economic roots.

The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights have held America’s crusading impulse in check. Nevertheless, it persists, ebbing and flowing as circumstance and public opinion dictate.

Another factor fueling the drug war is an undeniable increase in drug use, a trend that started in the sixties. Yet can the increase in any way correlate with the hysteria that has overtaken America in the decades that followed? Indeed, deaths attributed to drug use are but a small percentage of deaths related to alcohol and tobacco. And despite hyperbolic claims by politicians and the media over the threat that drugs pose to our society and culture, the economy continues to grow, life expectancies continue to increase, technological advances continue unabated, and Americans in all walks of life continue to build lives of meaning and value, both for themselves and their families.

The most tragic consequences related to drug use persist in America’s inner cities. Yet here it is government paternalism that is the culprit, leading people without hope into lives of drug dependency. As the debilitating effects of welfare dependency strangle motivation and opportunity, the seductive lure of drug profits or the temporary relief that drugs bring provides a market for drugs that otherwise would not exist.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Predicting the future is always a risky business, but when it comes to determining what path Americans will choose concerning drug policy, both history and a proper understanding of human nature give us some guideposts.

People eventually tire of moral crusades. No matter how lofty or seemingly righteous, there comes a time when people’s energy and direction must go elsewhere. For example, the wave of progressive reform that began at the end of the nineteenth century eventually burned itself out, to be replaced by the relative social liberalism of the roaring twenties. The strident anti-communism of the McCarthy era in the fifties gave way to the New Left that engulfed America’s universities in the sixties.

But the real undoing of the drug war will be the eventual realization that government cannot alter human nature and that society is no longer willing to pay the price required, in money, social disruption, and reduced liberty, to prosecute this war. In the past decade especially, many prominent voices have been raised against prohibition, and no doubt many others will join them in the near future. Moreover, prohibitionists are finding themselves compelled to respond in public to the growing call for legalization to an extent that would have been unheard of ten years ago.

Yet until the current level of support for prohibition burns itself out, vigilance and the courage to speak out are required if we are to avoid the permanent establishment of new forms of government intrusion into our personal lives. That is the real threat facing us today.

Notes

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, 1997.
2. James Ostrowski, “Thinking About Drug Legalization,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis, No. 121, May 25, 1989.
3. David V. Kyvig, Repealing National Prohibition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 24, 112-13, 131,186.
4. “Poison across the Rio Grande,” The Economist, November 15, 1997, p. 36.
5. Jacob Sullum, “Prison Conversion,” Reason, August/September 1999; http://www.reason.com/9908/fe.js.prison.html.
6. Jack Nelson and Ronald J. Ostrow, “Illegal Drug Scene Spurs Rise in Police Corruption,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1998.
7. DEA data reported by A. Schieder and M. Flaherty, Pittsburgh Press, reprinted in the San Francisco Examiner, August 25, 1991, p. 1.
8. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, part 1 (Washington, D.C., 1975), p. 441.

Upon pressure from the World Health Organization and other branches of the United Nations, the government of the United Kingdom had announced that after December 31, 1955, the manufacture of heroin would be prohibited. Subsequently, at the insistence of many competent medical men in Britain, that decision was reconsidered and postponed at least through 1956.
This article was presented in the bulletin of the British Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine, May 1956, as an open letter to the physicians of the United Kingdom.

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The arguments for and against the proposed ban on heroin were closely followed in the United States. To the physicians of America who have entered into their professional careers since 1925 the drug is known only as a material used by addicts for self-gratification. Its medicinal virtues in uterine inertia, cough, and for the relief of terminal pain in malignancy are dimly remembered classroom phrases uttered by those of our teachers whose practices antedated our own ban on heroin. Federal law has prohibited its importation, manufacture, and even its medicinal use in this country for the past thirty-one years.

You who have, for the time being at any rate, escaped from embarking on a similar adventure with this drug may be interested in learning of our experience as we have traveled down this long and sordid path. In 1925 there were a few heroin addicts in the United States. The number is unknown, but hospitals and penal institutions of that period report that most of our addict population was using crude opium for smoking, tincture of opium, and morphine. The same institutions report heroin to be the material of choice in about 86 per cent of those apprehended today. Yet, and this needs the greatest emphasis, the material cannot be procured from any legal source anywhere in the United States. As we explore our experience, the means of obtaining this material will become apparent.

Addicts May Number 200,000!

We in the United States of America have counted 60,000 heroin addicts. An addict known to our officials is one who has run foul of the law. Countless others can either afford their habits or have never been arrested. Therefore, the actual number of addicts is a multiple of 60,000. No one, in or out of government, knows the exact figure. The Mayors Committee on Narcotics, investigating addiction in New York City, estimated that there were 90,000 in the city alone. A figure of 200,000 for the entire country is probably not an exaggeration.

Each of these thousands of people obtains enough heroin for several injections each day despite the best efforts of the Narcotics Bureau to prevent smuggling. In fact Federal Commissioner of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, recently testified before a Congressional Committee, If we had the Army, the Navy, the Coast Guard, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation all working together we could not prevent heroin smuggling through the Port of New York.

At this point we may begin to perceive one of the cardinal effects of a ban on heroin. Lawlessness! There are, as the story unfolds, others.

Perhaps an investigation into the nature of narcotic addiction is in order. The following paragraphs are, of course, elementary. They are inserted in the interests of completeness and because there is so little addiction in the United Kingdom that some of those who read these lines may have had little opportunity to study this symptom-complex at first hand.

A point of departure might be a short review of narcotic drugs. These materials are sedatives. They induce sleep, allay anxiety, relieve pain. This is their action in addict and in non-addict alike. It is just as important to state what they are not. They are not stimulants. They do not induce violence. Crimes are never committed under their influence.

From this necessarily short summary, let us proceed to investigate the target for this substance, the addict himself. He is, as a general rule, a shy, retiring person who is incapable of facing the vicissitudes of life. He must, like so many of the rest of us, escape from every unpleasant situation. But while others recover from periods of remorse or depression with patience, insight, a new interest, or hard work, he tries to solve all of lifes problems chemically. As the years go on, he retreats ever further from the complexities of the world. He becomes the procrastinator of all procrastinators. He has now found the answer to every pain, every difficulty, every unpleasant sensation, every trial. His dread of withdrawal symptoms further enslaves him to the drug so that he believes implicitly that he cannot live without it.

Strangely enough, the addict is a rather normal person under the influence of drugs, a highly abnormal one without them. This is the reverse of the situation observed in alcoholism. These addicts can, while they have narcotics, work in responsible positions and are not likely to be a charge on the public. Without them they are one or another variety of psychopath.

This short study of the drugs and of the addicts makes one wonder why crime and drug addiction are so closely allied in the United States. The term criminal addict, on the other hand, had to be defined every time I used it during my recent visit to the United Kingdom. Since the material cannot be obtained legally here, and furthermore, as the addict believes he cannot live without it, he must obtain it, perforce, from the underworld. These materials costing only a few cents for a days supply in Red China or in the Middle East where it is produced, are sold here for at least 1,000 times the purchase price. Such profits were sure to attract our worst criminal element. An ounce of heroin purchased for $5.00 in Syria sold for $8,000 after it was cut and diluted on the New York market.

Many of our addicts must spend $100 per day to satisfy their needs. Few of our people can hope to earn such sums legitimately, particularly since they must of necessity conceal their habit and hide from the police. In addition, the somnolence produced by the heroin makes them less capable employees, further reducing their opportunity for income. As a consequence, most of them enter into a life of crime.

How They Pay For Their Drug

The most dastardly of all their activities is the initiation of neophytes into addiction. By this means they guarantee their own source of supply, for they are paid 25 per cent commission on all the heroin they can sell. We have instances where addicts desperate for drugs have induced their wives, sisters, parents, and even their children into the habit.

Unequivocally then, I would prophesy for the people of Great Britain, if a ban on heroin were ever to be imposed, that you, a nation historically and ethnically allied to our own, would repeat our unhappy experiences. In a few years your now noncriminal 279 drug addicts (figures from Mr. A. L. Dyke, Chief Inspector, Department of Dangerous Drugs, Home Office) would have expanded to many many thousands. Many of your youth, the easiest prey for the addict peddlers, would become enslaved. Your young girls who became addicted would have sold themselves in order to support the ever-increasing costs of their addiction. You too will begin to spend sums approximating to the colossal sum that heroin costs the United States.

There are other difficulties. The peddlers of narcotics dilute the material repeatedly so that by the time the consumer receives it, it may be only 3 per cent purethe average figure in New York City. What happens when the addict by some mischance gets 20 per cent pure heroin? He receives seven times his usual dose and his life is forfeited. Many of them are sickened by the diluents which are usually non-sterile. The customer may never dare complain. He is threatened with either an interruption in his supply or a Hot Spot (one containing poison, usually cyanide). The latter is responsible for many lost lives each year.

Since Britain no longer exports heroin, even under conditions of strict control, the presence of the meager quantities of this material legitimately stocked in your country in no way influences our narcotic problem. I suppose it would be true to say that none of your heroin finds its way into the United States. Therefore, the argument that the ban is necessary in order to protect other nations is untenable.

Were the proposed ban on heroin to be revived, your presently addicted patients would be deprived of the counsel and advice of their physicians. These people will obtain heroin, come what may. Prohibition would cause them to substitute an underworld character for the one person who could have helped them, their own personal physician. I am sure that this is not the intention of your well-meaning Legislature. Make no mistake, the narcotic racketeers of the world eagerly awaited the enactment of your prohibitive law. It would have opened an illegitimate income of millions to them. May I ask your indulgence if I repeat: Heroin addicts will obtain heroin, ban or no ban.

Those of us who have interested ourselves in narcotic addiction have always admired the British management of the problem. Representatives of Medical and Bar Associations have joined forces before our Congressional Committees requesting repeal of our ban and our punitive legislation. Your heartening experiences to date have been the strongest proof that this medical problem is best managed by physicians. A complicated psychological illness cannot be cured by legislative decrees or by a policemans truncheon.

You, in the United Kingdom, have 279 registered narcotic addicts; we number ours by the hundred thousand. You have no criminal problem with addiction; ours is enormous. You know little of the social ravages of drug use; to us it is relatively commonplace.

May I then, in conclusion, urge you to bend every effort to ensure that the withdrawal of the ban is made permanent to prevent this legislative mishap. We, your American colleagues, wish you every success in this effort which demonstrates the traditional altruism of the medical profession. []

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Freedom To Choose Foolishly

It must be obvious that liberty necessarily means freedom to choose foolishly as well as wisely; freedom to choose evil as well as good; freedom to enjoy the rewards of good judgment, and freedom to suffer the penalties of bad judgment. If this is not true, the word freedom has no meaning. Yet there are persons in America who wish to pass laws to force people to do only good, or at least their concept of what is good. These would-be dictators are not content with a preventive law which punishes a person who deliberately chooses to injure his neighbor; a law which prevents any person from forcing his viewpoint upon any other person; a law which penalizes the person who interferes with the liberty of others. On the contrary, these persons who arrogate to themselves the functions of God demand a positive law to compel others to do as they wish them to do.

Ben Morreel, Survival of the Species