Pubdate: Mon, 15 May 2000
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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Author: Joseph D. McNamara
RETURN TO TRUE LIBERTY, END DRUG WAR
Your May 4 editorial "Al Gore's Good Idea," praising
Mr. Gore's plan to
require coerced drug abstinence of people released on probation,
makes the
common error of attributing criminality to the use of certain
chemicals.
This plan assumes that those with dirty urine should be jailed
because they
will commit robberies, burglaries and other crimes. This supposition
trifles with our most precious right, the presumption of innocence.
Some
80 million people have used illegal drugs including the majority
of police
officers I hired during my 18 years as police chief of two of
America's
largest cities. These cops, like the next president of the U.S.,
be he
Republican or Democrat, did not commit other crimes and they grew
out of
their drug use.
Coerced abstinence displays a willingness to incarcerate hundreds
of
thousands of people because society thinks they may commit future
crimes.
However, as Milton Friedman, my colleague at the Hoover Institution,
has
pointed out, it is Prohibition, not the particular chemical substance,
that
leads to crime. During the 10 years I worked as a policeman in
Harlem I
reached the same conclusion. Hard-core drug users stole to buy
drugs whose
prices were inflated by as much as 17,000% because they were illegal.
But
those addicted to other mind-altering drugs such as alcohol, Methadone,
Prozac or Valium are viewed as patients, not predatory criminals.
Coerced
abstinence has been labeled as "a life sentence on the installment
plan."
You cite Mark Kleiman as the originator of the coerced drug
abstinence
plan. I have heard Prof. Kleiman also advocate that before someone
is
served a beer he should have to produce a government license for
the
bartender indicating that he is a responsible drinker. Presumably,
violators would land in prison.
Nowhere do you mention that for roughly the first 130 years
of our
republic, Americans' right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness
included the right to ingest whatever chemicals one desired. Lest
there be
any doubt about this, we should remember that Thomas Jefferson,
who penned
those words in the Declaration of Independence, subsequently ridiculed
France for imposing laws on diet and prescription drugs. Jefferson
said
that a government that controls what its citizens eat and the
kind of
medicine they take will soon try to control what its citizens
think.
Recently, the Clinton White House was embarrassed when it was
disclosed
that it had been secretly paying television networks, magazines
and
newspapers to include "correct" views on drugs for our
consumption.
In 1914, congress passed the Harrison Act leading to the criminalization
of
drugs and our disastrous drug war. Prior to that time, there was
no black
market in drugs and organized crime drug structure with its associated
violence and pervasive corruption of government officials. Drug
users were
not stigmatized as predatory criminals.
Drug historian David Musto, M.D., of Yale notes that narcotic
use in the
U.S. had been declining for some 15 years before the federal government
outlawed opium. The decrease occurred without the government trying
to
eliminate drugs or jailing hundreds of thousands of Americans.
It seemed
that requiring manufacturers to label what was in their products
combined
with public health messages was sufficient to reduce drug use.
Why does
the thought of responsible citizens controlling their own lives
without
government coercion seem so threatening?
Joseph D. McNamara, Police Chief of San Jose (Ret.) The Hoover
Institution
Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.