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Politics Resource Center |
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October 21, 2002 Something to Think About
by Gordon Francis Corbett
To reduce the use of "recreational" drugs, we have tried two remedies: force and argument. Force has failed. Police arrest; courts try; prisons punish. Nevertheless, dealers sell, addicts use, and prisons bulge. Argument has failed. Parents, preachers, and police talk endlessly, but people do not listen. Why? They believe that lawmakers have no right to proscribe methods of reducing distress. When their cares hurt too much, they want an anodyne; and anodynes are what drug dealers sell. Despite fearing addiction, these people let a dealer persuade them to try "once." That first dose takes them to paradise. When they return, reality hurts more than ever; so, they buy more drugs and make another visit. Eventually, they stop visiting and emigrate. Then we bury them. Once, recreational drugs sat in drugstores on shelves next to the aspirins, priced, in today's money, at perhaps five per cent of today's street prices. Introduced today, this reduction would devastate the market. Compare multilevel or door-to-door sales of legal merchandise with sales of street drugs. Legitimate dealers work. They learn salesmanship. They fill out order forms. They keep records. They follow up misplaced shipments. They supply "downline" retailers and they sell to immediate customers. This prodigious labor earns little at the start and provides more only with aptitude, time, and energy. Street drug dealers also work. They too recruit, sell to their customers, and supply their networks. They too spend long hours in their trade. On top of that, they risk arrest and even murder. So, what makes them persist? The short answer is the margin of profit. Even at the start, new dealers rake in the money; then, when their customers begin selling to feed their habits, the dealers' networks, and the networks' earnings, explode. Repealing anti-drug laws will slash that margin, reduce the salesmen, curtail the recruitments, and, thereby, shrink the "recreational" drug market to a minimum. Force and argument have failed. Now, we must let experience, that greatest of teachers, do what they could not. Eventually, as they were before Congress passed the Harrison Act in 1914, addicts will be a despised and tiny minority, whose pitiful state will warn everyone to reject drugs and, if only by default, to embrace reality.
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