CATO: Drug Policy Debate Online
[Courtesy of CATO]
Drug Reformers:
Last month Cato Unbound, our online forum for big picture topics, featured an exchange of views regarding drug policy and responsible drug use. Here's a summary description:
To some degree, we all know what life is like under drug prohibition. It's been the status quo for decades. But what would life be like without the war on drugs? This is much harder to imagine.
Those who support drug prohibition often do so with the premise, implicit or explicit, that life without prohibition would be marked by vastly more irresponsibility, addiction, accidents, health problems, and death. Those who favor ending drug prohibition are forced to argue, not only for an unfamiliar policy, but also against this parade of horribles. Yet are we not able to think about and manage these substances rationally and responsibly? If we are, then as a society, the more effective way to face psychoactive substances may simply be to allow each individual to decide for himself what role, if any, these substances will have.
For this month's lead essay , to discuss how prohibition itself has shaped the way we think about drugs, and how the drug war has prevented us from forming responsible, well-informed views of psychoactive substances.
Prohibition, they argue, has created an oversimplified and caricatured view of psychoactive drugs: On the one side are legal drugs, which are presumed to be relatively safe; on the other are the illegals, and public understanding of their effects often reaches no further than rumors and "Just Say No." This simplistic understanding has stunted any efforts toward building a culture of responsible use. Although it is virtually impossible to say that greater prohibition efforts have meant decreased drug use, these efforts certainly have produced less-informed drug use, and this has produced precisely the irresponsibility, addiction, accidents, and health problems that all of us worry about.
Commending on the Erowids' essay will be Jonathan Caulkins, former co-director of the RAND Corporation's Drug Policy Research Center and Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Qatar Campus; Jacob Sullum, senior editor at Reason magazine and author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use; and Mark Kleiman, professor of policy studies at the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research.
To check out this online exchange, go here: http://www.cato-unbound.org/archives/september-2008-responsible-drug-use