TIME Magazine Feb. 28,1994 page 70
Barbara Ehrenreich
Kicking the Big One

AN EVIL GRIPS AMERICA, A LIFE-SAPPING, DRUG-Related habit. It beclouds
reason and corrodes the spirit. It undermines authority and nourishes
a low-minded culture of winks and smirks. It's the habit of drug
prohibition, and it's quietly siphoning off the resources that might
be better used for drug treatment or prevention. Numerous authorities
have tried to warn us, including most recently the Surgeon General,
but she got brushed off like a piece of lint. After all, drug
prohibition is right up there with heroin and nicotine among the
habits that are hell to kick.

Admittedly, legalization wouldn't be problem-free either. Americans
have a peculiarly voracious appetite for drugs, and probably no one
should weigh in on the debate who hasn't seen a friend or loved one
hollowed out by cocaine or reduced to selling used appliances on the
street. But if drugs take a ghastly toll, drug prohibition has proved
itself, year after year, to be an even more debilitating social toxin.

Consider the moral effects of marijuana prohibition. After booze and
NyQuil, pot is probably America's No. 1 drug of choice--a transient,
introspective high that can cure nausea or make the evening sitcoms
look like devastating wit. An estimated 40 million Americans have tried
it at some point, from Ivy League law professors to
country--and-western singers. Yet in some states, possession of a few
grams can get you put away for years. What does it do to one's immortal
soul to puff and wink and look away while about 100,000 other
Americans remain locked up for doing the exact same thing? Marijuana
prohibition establishes a minimum baseline level of cultural
dishonesty that we can never rise above: the President "didn't
inhale," heh heh. It's O.K. to drink till you puke, but you mustn't
ever smoke the vile weed, heh heh. One of the hardest things a parent
can ever tell a bright and questioning teenager--after all the
relevant sermonizing, of course--is, Well, just don't get caught.

But the prohibition of cocaine and heroin may be more corrosive still.
Here's where organized crime comes in, the cartels and kingpins and
Crips and Bloods. These are the principal beneficiaries of drug
prohibition; without it they'd be reduced to three-card monte and
numbers scams. Legitimate entrepreneurs must sigh and shake their
heads in envy: if only the government would ban some substance like
Wheat Chex, for example, so it could be marketed for hundreds of
dollars an ounce.

Yes, legal drugs, even if heavily taxed and extensively regulated,
would no doubt be cheaper than illegal ones, which could mean more
people sampling them out of curiosity. But this danger has to be
weighed against the insidious marketing dynamic of illegal drugs,
whose wildly inflated prices compel the low-income user to become a
pusher and recruiter of new users.

Drugs can kill, of course. But drug prohibition kills too. In
Washington, an estimated 80% of homicides are drug related, meaning
drug-prohibition related. It's gunshot wounds that fill our urban
emergency rooms, not ODs and bad trips. Then there's the perverse
financial logic of prohibition. The billions we spend a year on drug-
related law enforcement represents money not spent on improving
schools and rebuilding neighborhoods. Those who can't hope for the
lasting highs of achievement and self-respect are all too often
condemned to crack.

So why don't we kick the prohibition habit? Is it high-minded
puritanism that holds us back, or political cowardice? Or maybe it's
time to admit that we cling to prohibition for the same reason we
cling to so many other self-destructive habits: because we like the
way they make us feel. Prohibition, for example, tends to make its
advocates feel powerfully righteous, and militant righteousness has
effects not unlike some demon mix of liquor and amphetamines: the eyes
bulge, the veins distend, the voice begins to bray.

But the most seductive thing about prohibition is that it keeps us
from having to confront all the other little addictions that get us
through the day. It's the NutraSweet in the coffee we use to wash down
the chocolate mousse; a dad's "Just say no" commandments borne on
martini-scented breath. "Don't do drugs," a Members Only ad advises.
"Do clothes." Well, why "do" anything? Why not live more lightly,
without compulsions of any kind? Then there's TV, the addiction whose
name we can hardly speak--the poor man's virtual reality, the
substance-free citizen's 24-hour-a-day hallucinatory trip. No
bleary-eyed tube addict, emerging from weekend-long catatonia, has the
right to inveigh against "drugs."

When cornered, the prohibition addict has one last line of defense. We
can't surrender in this war, he or she insists, because we'd be
sending the "wrong message". But the message we're sending now is this:
Look, kids, we know prohibition doesn't work, that it's cruel and
costs so much we don't have anything left over with which to fight the
social causes of addiction or treat the addicts, but, hey, it feels
good, so we're going to keep right on doing it. To which the
appropriate response is, of course, heh heh.

We don't have to quit cold turkey. We could start with marijuana, then
ease up on cocaine and heroin possession, concentrating law
enforcement on the big-time pushers. Take it slowly, see how it feels.
One day at a time.

