Seated from left are: the Drug Policy Alliance’s Ethan Nadelmann, UCLA professor Mark Kleiman, the DEA’s Gary Hale and the Baker Institute’s William Martin.
For 40 years, the United States has waged a “War on Drugs,” based on the belief that laws that criminalize the sale or use of illegal drugs are the best way to prevent drug use and protect national security. But opponents argue that U.S. drug policy is counterproductive at best, with some suggesting legalizing marijuana makes more sense.
A recent Baker Institute event, “Cannabis, Cartels and Crime: Would Legalization Help?” featured three speakers with distinctly different views on drug policy. The program was sponsored by the Baker Institute’s Drug Policy and Latin American Initiative programs with the goal of “sharing information, ideas and perspectives that might foster more cooperative, perhaps more effective, ways of dealing with these issues,” according to Baker Institute Senior Fellow William Martin.
Gary Hale, chief of intelligence at the Houston Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told the audience that the term “war” is appropriate because “it’s a conflict that’s marred by death and certainly threats to our national security.”
Hale said that drug producers respond to demand. In the U.S., they have a big consumer base for marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines that offers the prospect of huge profits. He also discussed the rise of Mexican drug cartels from the almost-exclusively Colombian narcotics network of the 1980s.
But Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, describes the U.S. government’s drug policy as “a fundamental evil in our society and in global society,” generating “immense harm, immense death and suffering and crime and organized crime and violence all around the world.”
Nadelmann said “prison and incarceration need to be the last resort, not the first” when dealing with drug offenders. Criminal sanctions, “are supposed to reflect a moral consensus,” like laws criminalizing rape, murder and theft, he said, noting polling data shows roughly 40 percent of Americans favor legalizing marijuana. “Ending marijuana prohibition would be a huge step forward in injecting a level of sanity into our drug-policy debates,” he said.
The third panelist, Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy and director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at the UCLA School of Public Affairs, noted that cocaine and heroin are the biggest causes of crime and violence among illegal drugs, not marijuana. He also said that although alcohol is legal, it should be included in the discussion.
Kleiman listed three sets of problems related to drugs: drug abuse/ dependency, drug-related crime, and incarceration for drug offenses. Authorities need to break up known drug markets and enforce swift and predictable punishment for repeat/chronic users, he said.
The problem of illegal drugs entering the country should not be seen as fighting a war, he said, but rather as a kind of flood-control effort. “We have to ask,” he said, “What is the least-destructive channel through which that quantity of drugs could flow into the U.S.?”
View the Nov. 19 webcast of “Cannabis, Cartels and Crime: Would Legalization Help?“