{"id":924,"date":"2012-04-13T14:18:04","date_gmt":"2012-04-13T18:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/even-george-will-is-calling-for-drug-legalization.html"},"modified":"2012-04-13T14:18:04","modified_gmt":"2012-04-13T18:18:04","slug":"even-george-will-is-calling-for-drug-legalization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/even-george-will-is-calling-for-drug-legalization.html","title":{"rendered":"Even George Will is calling for drug legalization"},"content":{"rendered":"We can’t afford this anymore:\n
\nA $200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a three-year sentence.\n<\/blockquote>\nIt’s time to legalize, regulate, and tax drugs,\ntaking tax money away from private prisons and police militarization,\nand freeing it up for education, health care, and rehabilitation.\n

\nGeorge F. Will wrote 11 April 2012,\n\nShould the U.S. legalize hard drugs?<\/a>\n

\nAmelioration of today’s drug problem requires Americans to\n\n<\/a>\nunderstand the significance of the 80-20 ratio. Twenty percent of\nAmerican drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The\nsame 80-20 split obtains among users of illicit drugs.\n

\nAbout 3 million people — less than 1 percent of America’s\npopulation — consume 80 percent of illegal hard drugs.\nDrug-trafficking organizations can be most efficiently injured by\nchanging the behavior of the 20 percent of heavy users, and we are\nlearning how to do so. Reducing consumption by the 80 percent of\ncasual users will not substantially reduce the northward flow of\ndrugs or the southward flow of money.\n<\/blockquote>\nWill-like, he ignores the real reasons we’re locking up so many people\n(corporate greed), but he does get at the consequences:\n\n\n

\nMore Americans are imprisoned for\ndrug offenses or drug-related probation and parole violations than\nfor property crimes. And although America spends five times more\njailing drug dealers than it did 30 years ago, the prices of cocaine\nand heroin are 80 to 90 percent lower than 30 years ago.\n

\nIn “Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know,”\n\n<\/a>\npolicy analysts Mark Kleiman, Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken\nargue that imprisoning low-ranking street-corner dealers is\npointless: A $200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a\nthree-year sentence. And imprisoning large numbers of dealers\nproduces an army of people who, emerging from prison with blighted\nemployment prospects, can only deal drugs. Which is why, although a\nfew years ago Washington, D.C., dealers earned an average of $30 an\nhour, today they earn less than the federal minimum wage ($7.25).\n

\nDealers, a.k.a. “pushers,” have almost nothing to do\nwith initiating drug use by future addicts; almost every user starts\nwhen given drugs by a friend, sibling or acquaintance. There is a\nstaggering disparity between the trivial sums earned by dealers who\nconnect the cartels to the cartels’ customers and the huge sums\ntrying to slow the flow of drugs to those street-level dealers.\nKleiman, Caulkins and Hawken say that, in developed nations, cocaine\nsells for about $3,000 per ounce — almost twice the price of\ngold. And the supply of cocaine, unlike that of gold, can be cheaply\nand quickly expanded. But in the countries where cocaine and heroin\nare produced, they sell for about 1 percent of their retail price in\nthe United States. If cocaine were legalized, a $2,000 kilogram\ncould be FedExed from Colombia for less than $50 and sold profitably\nhere for a small markup from its price in Colombia, and a $5 rock of\ncrack might cost 25 cents. Criminalization drives the cost of the\nsmuggled kilogram in the United States up to $20,000. But then it\nretails for more than $100,000.\n<\/blockquote>\nWhich means a very few big drug dealers are rolling in cash,\nand a lot more “law enforcement” companies are laughing all the way to the bank\nat we the taxpayers’ expense.\n

\nKleiman, Caulkins and Hawken urge rethinking the drug-control triad\nof enforcement, prevention and treatment because we have been much\ntoo optimistic about all three.\n

\nAnd cartels have oceans of money for corrupting enforcement because\ndrugs are so cheap to produce and easy to renew. So it is not\nunreasonable to consider modifying a policy that gives hundreds of\nbillions of dollars a year to violent organized crime.\n<\/blockquote>\nOf both the illegal (drug cartel) and legal (drug interdiction product companies\nand misdirected LEO raids) kind.\n

\nStill think legalizing marijuana would be enough?\n

\nMarijuana probably provides less than 25 percent of the cartels’\nrevenue. Legalizing it would take perhaps $10 billion from some bad\nand violent people, but the cartels would still make much more money\nfrom cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines than they would lose from\nmarijuana legalization.\n

\nSixteen states and the District have legalized “medical\nmarijuana,” a messy, mendacious semi-legalization that breeds\ncynicism regarding law. In 1990, 24 percent of Americans supported\nfull legalization. Today, 50 percent do. In 2010, in California,\nwhere one-eighth of Americans live, 46 percent of voters supported\nlegalization, and some opponents were marijuana growers who like the\nprofits they make from prohibition of their product.\n

\nWould the public health problems resulting from legalization be a\nprice worth paying for injuring the cartels and reducing the costs\nof enforcement? We probably are going to find out.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>\nWe already know the answer, because\n\nPortugal already did it, and saw drug addiction decline,\nalong with law enforcement and health care costs.<\/a>\n

\nHere at home it would \nend the failed War on Drugs<\/a>,\nworldwide it would \nreduce pesticide spraying and pollution<\/a>,\nand it would\n\n<\/a>\n\ncut the profits of the private prison industry (CCA’s own 2010 SEC report says so)<\/a>.\nAnd it would \nremove a major\nexcuse for the militarization of local police forces.<\/a>\nA majority of the American people already want\n\nmarijuana legalized.<\/a>\n

\nIt’s time for the land of the free and the home of the brave\n\nto follow Portugal’s lead<\/a> by going beyond\n“a messy, mendacious semi-legalization”:\nlegalize, regulate, and tax all drugs.\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We can’t afford this anymore: A $200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a three-year sentence. It’s time to legalize, regulate, and tax drugs, taking tax money away from private prisons and police militarization, and freeing it up for education, health care, and rehabilitation. George F. Will wrote 11 April 2012, Should the U.S. legalize […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,202,1113,14,15,16,70,321,2,1381,72,20,940,21,22,32],"tags":[8736,8750,2715,2704,8817,2711,77,8704,8705,8706,8728,2710,8761,2709,8701,2707,8699,8830,8730,2714,8710,2650,7,81,2713,1299,2705,8810,8711,1270,813,8712,8715,2708,2651,2712,2706,60,6],"class_list":["post-924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-agriculture","category-cca","category-economy","category-education","category-environment","category-ethics","category-food-and-drink","category-government","category-immigration","category-incarceration","category-law","category-pesticides","category-planning","category-politics","category-pollution","tag-activism","tag-agriculture","tag-angela-hawken","tag-boliviana-negra","tag-cca","tag-drink","tag-drugs","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-ethics","tag-food","tag-food-and-drink","tag-george-will","tag-georgia","tag-glysophate","tag-government","tag-immigration","tag-incarceration","tag-jonathan-caulkins","tag-law","tag-legalize","tag-lowndes-county","tag-marijuana","tag-mark-kleiman","tag-militarization","tag-monsanto","tag-pesticides","tag-planning","tag-police","tag-policy","tag-politics","tag-pollution","tag-portugal","tag-regulate","tag-rehabilitation","tag-roundup","tag-tax","tag-valdosta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-eU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}