The dubious policies of overcriminalization and drug prohibition are two frequent topics on this blog, so this excellent Ethan Nadelmann essay on the utter failure of America’s 40-year War on Drugs caught my eye. The entire piece is worth reading, but his final point is particularly illuminating:

Legalization has to be on the table. Not because it is necessarily the best solution. Not because it is the obvious alternative to the evident failures of drug prohibition. But for three important reasons:

First, because it is the best way to reduce dramatically the crime, violence, corruption and other extraordinary costs and harmful consequences of prohibition;

Second, because there are as many options — indeed more — for legally regulating drugs as there are options for prohibiting them; and

Third, because putting legalization on the table involves asking fundamental questions about why drug prohibitions first emerged, and whether they were or are truly essential to protect human societies from their own vulnerabilities. Insisting that legalization be on the table — in legislative hearings, public forums and internal government discussions — is not the same as advocating that all drugs be treated the same as alcohol and tobacco. It is, rather, a demand that prohibitionist precepts and policies be treated not as gospel but as political choices that merit critical assessment, including objective comparison with non-prohibitionist approaches.

My question is whether the elaborate law enforcement infrastructure that has been constructed to deal with drug prohibition policy become such a powerful political force that it effectively prevents Congress from changing this disastrous policy for the better good of the majority?

This recent WaPo article highlights one of the senseless incongruities of the U.S.’s dubious policy of drug prohibition:

Twice, the patient, a man in his mid-30s, said he lost his prescriptions for Valium and Percocet. Once, he said he was in a car accident that scattered his pills on the road. Another time, he said the medicine he was first prescribed was no good, so he “returned the pills.” Another time, his wife called and said their house had been “searched by authorities” and the medicine had gone missing.

Each time, no matter the story, Peter S. Trent or Hampton J. Jackson Jr., doctors at the same orthopedic practice in Oxon Hill, refilled the prescription, according to the Maryland Board of Physicians. Over the course of 21/2 years, the doctors gave the patient 275 prescriptions, mostly for Percocet, a powerful, highly addictive painkiller.

Sometimes they wrote the patient more than one prescription for the drug on the same day. In a single month, they wrote him 11 prescriptions for Percocet, totaling 734 pills.

On one hand, maybe the patients had a “legitimate” need for large amounts of narcotics, but most doctors wouldn’t write prescriptions for the drugs because they fear prosecution if they did so.

On the other hand, the patients may be addicts without a “legitimate” need for the drugs, but they seek to obtain the narcotics through prescription because it is safer and probably cheaper than buying them illegally.

Current U.S. drug policy mandates that the patients who have a “legitimate” need for the narcotics can buy them legally, but the addicts cannot.

What valid public policy purpose is served by that distinction? Such a distinction only leads to arbitrary and capricious enforcement of criminal laws that terrorizes citizens who desperately need treatment regardless of the cause of that need.

Irrespective of whether a patient has a “legitimate” need for narcotics or is simply an addict, the patient should be able to obtain the drugs legally through prescription. Such a policy would allow the patient to obtain a known product at a reasonable price without risking expensive incarceration. A reduction of the mass incarceration problem and the expensive and brutal black market for drugs would be two fringe benefits of such a change in policy.

The federal government already funds methadone clinics for heroin addicts. Why not extend such a policy to narcotic maintenance?

A truly civil society would find a way.