The Drug War Escalation Is Cruel and Stupid

Authored by reason.com and submitted by Eurynom0s

President Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, ordered federal prosecutors to seek maximum penalties for drug-related crimes.

This is both cruel and stupid.

It's cruel because Session's 5,000 prosecutors must now push for long jail sentences even for people who pose no violent threat and for some who are utterly innocent.

It's stupid because it will cost America a fortune but won't make us safer.

The U.S. already locks up more people than any other country. We have 4 percent of the world's population but more than 20 percent of the world's prisoners.

This happened partly because of bad reporting by people like me. Decades ago, my colleagues and I made people more terrified of crime than they need to be, by covering all the grisly details of local crimes.

"If it bleeds, it leads" became the mantra in newsrooms.

Our scary reporting, combined with a doubling in the crime rate from about 1960 to 1990, led politicians to say, "We must do something!"

Politicians reacted to the media hype by passing three-strikes laws and intensifying the war on drugs.

Three-strikes laws worked, if "worked" means locking people up for longer periods. But taking away judges' ability to use their own judgment is cruel to some defendants.

It's also not clear that the longer sentences made us safer. Crime dropped just as much in states that liberalized sentencing rules as states that did not.

Intensifying the drug war definitely did not work. America locked drug sellers up, but drug use remained the same. Fat black-market profits enticed new groups of sellers to enter the business.

Now, almost no one claims that getting stoned is a good thing. Drugs, like alcohol, should be kept away from children. I admire President Trump's self-restraint. He says he's never used drugs, cigarettes or alcohol partly because his brother, Fred, drank himself to death. Drugs, cigarettes and alcohol do a lot of damage.

But they don't do it to everyone. Lots of American adults manage drug or alcohol use while still raising families and going to work.

Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama used drugs when they were young, but then, when they became presidents, they hypocritically supported the drug war. They locked up other Americans who had less power than they had.

That didn't stop drug sales. The drug war just drove the trade into the hands of nastier criminal gangs. Violence between those gangs is a much bigger problem than the drug use itself.

As Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore police officer and former drug warrior, puts it, "Drugs are problematic. But the policies to prohibit their use are 10 times more problematic."

During Prohibition, gangs like Al Capone's shot each other over alcohol. It wasn't because alcohol suddenly made people more violent during those years. It was simply because a popular product was made illegal. The murder rate dropped by half when Prohibition ended.

Trump says he's worried about violence in black neighborhoods and violence committed by drug gangs along the U.S.'s southern border. He's right to worry. So legalize the stuff! Take sales away from the black market.

That's all he'd have to do to take the money and allure out of gang life. When drugs are legal, customers buy intoxicants from ordinary stores, businesses that settle disputes with lawyers instead of guns.

stargrunt6 on May 18th, 2017 at 23:22 UTC »

We should be well past this. The 60s happened. Everybody's parents and their parents' parents at least tried drugs. To act high and mighty and scoff at users while demanding their punishment is inordinately hypocritical. The motivation to enforce most drug laws is flagrant abuse of state power at worst and misguided benevolence at best.

motherentropy on May 18th, 2017 at 19:51 UTC »

Drugs are bad for you.

But being locked in a cage for decades is just dandy.

Get with the times, son.

BaSkA_ on May 18th, 2017 at 19:34 UTC »

Who the fuck am I or anyone else to tell what somebody can or cannot do to their own body?