A Really Good Day(60)

The fact that conservative thinkers are making these arguments is an indication that change is, if not probable, then possible.

Some countries around the world have begun to rethink their drug policies. In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. It did not legalize drugs. Possession and use are still prosecuted, but as administrative violations instead of crimes. Distribution is still a criminal offense. The results of this dramatic change in approach are striking. As was anticipated by advocates of harm reduction, the spread of disease, petty crime, and overdose were substantially reduced or eliminated. More interesting: the massive increase in rates of drug use and addiction that opponents of decriminalization threatened simply did not materialize. As the award-winning journalist and author Glenn Greenwald writes in a white paper published by the Cato Institute,

By freeing its citizens from the fear of prosecution and imprisonment for drug usage, Portugal has dramatically improved its ability to encourage drug addicts to avail themselves of treatment. The resources that were previously devoted to prosecuting and imprisoning drug addicts are now available to provide treatment programs to addicts. Those developments, along with Portugal’s shift to a harm-reduction approach, have dramatically improved drug-related social ills, including drug-caused mortalities and drug-related disease transmission.*3



Turns out, when you stop fighting a war, fewer people die.

I asked a number of drug policy analysts, including Michelle Alexander, Dr. Carl Hart, Ethan Nadelmann (executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance), Stephen Gutwillig (its deputy executive director), and Major Neill Franklin (a thirty-four-year veteran of the Baltimore and Maryland state police departments, now the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), to help me imagine what a world without drug prohibition might look like. They all embraced the challenge.

Ethan Nadelmann believes that to effect real change one would need to imagine the existence in our Constitution of a freedom over consciousness, in the same way that there is a right to free expression. As difficult as this is to contemplate, he points out that when the Bill of Rights was first imagined, it, too, was radical. Freedom of speech was considered something that could bring down a society. In the same way, he urges us to imagine a core freedom over our minds around which to structure any efforts to regulate drug use and abuse.

My experts all agree that there is an inherent human instinct to alter consciousness, one so powerful that there has never in human history existed a drug-free society. As Neill Franklin told me, “There have always been drugs, and there will always be drugs.” At the core of our current punitive system, Stephen Gutwillig argues, is a profoundly puritanical rejection of this impulse to alter consciousness, a hatred of drugs and drug users. Ending prohibition would require letting go of this control.

I asked them to imagine a world without this puritanical impulse, or at least a world where governments recognized that drugs will always exist, and the only question is who will control their promulgation: criminal enterprises or governments. Would the ideal system be one like Portugal’s, with the use of drugs decriminalized? Or would a system of full legalization be preferable, in which the production and distribution of currently illegal drugs were actually made legal? In that system, would I be able to use my sixty feet of accumulated CVS ExtraBucks to buy my next little blue bottle of diluted LSD?

Dr. Hart told me that, though he used to support a policy of decriminalization such as Portugal’s, he is now in favor of the legalization of all drugs, with a regulatory system put in place like the one we currently have for the drug he views as the most dangerous—alcohol. Nadelmann and Gutwillig agree, though they don’t aspire to a world where all drugs are commodified and controlled by the free market. They believe that a sensible drug policy includes a public health component, with regulators playing a role by making decisions about which drugs should be available to adults under what circumstances. They seek “to reduce the role of the criminal justice system in drug control as much as possible while still advancing health and safety.” All of my experts, in fact, advocate a public health model that begins with a robust system of education for adults and children about both the benefits and the risks of drugs.

Though Dr. Hart rejects what he calls “drug-by-drug bullshit,” to the Drug Policy Alliance and to Michelle Alexander, it makes sense to treat different classes of drugs in different ways. Marijuana, for example, is a drug for which they support full legalization. Unlike nearly every other medicine, marijuana has no lethal dose. Simply put, you cannot ingest enough of the drug to kill you (no matter what your freaked-out mind thinks when you’ve gobbled up too many edibles). This does not mean that there aren’t harms associated with frequent marijuana use, especially by children and adolescents, but Gutwillig and Nadelmann believe that we can model marijuana legalization on our current approach to the far more harmful drugs nicotine and alcohol. In those situations, we leave it up to individual communities to decide how to regulate distribution.*4

Recently, I took a trip to Louisiana, where you can buy alcohol not only at gas stations and supermarkets, but in drive-through liquor stores, which will sell you a Jell-O shot covered in a plastic film, the way we here in California sell bubble tea.*5 I asked Gutwillig how he would feel about marijuana’s being sold in a similar manner. He told me that he’s not personally comfortable with having marijuana available outside of dedicated marijuana outlets, such as the ones currently licensed under Colorado’s legalization scheme. When I posed the same question to Neill Franklin, he told me that he has no problem with seeing supermarkets sell drugs in their “natural” plant-based state—drugs like low-THC*6 weed or even coca leaves, which South Americans have chewed and brewed in tea for millennia as a low-grade stimulant similar to coffee. In fact, Franklin believes that under such a regulated system marijuana would end up being used as a substitute for alcohol, which he, like Dr. Hart, views as the drug associated with the most risk and negative outcomes. If marijuana use increases and alcohol use decreases, we will avoid at least some of the deaths associated with alcohol toxicity, and other harms as well. Driving under the influence of marijuana, though hardly safe, is much less dangerous than driving under the influence of alcohol. Furthermore, alcohol use is closely associated with violence, including sexual and domestic violence. Marijuana use is not.