Two Takes: Drugs Are Too Dangerous Not to Regulate—We Should Legalize Them

Drugs are bad. So let's legalize them.

It's not as crazy as it sounds. Legalization does not mean giving up. It means regulation and control. By contrast, criminalization means prohibition. But we can't regulate what we prohibit, and drugs are too dangerous to remain unregulated.

Let's not debate which drugs are good and which are bad. While it's heartless to keep marijuana from terminally ill cancer patients, some drugs—crack, heroin, crystal meth—are undoubtedly bad. But prohibition is the issue, and, as with alcohol, it doesn't work. Between 1920 and 1933, we banned drinking. Despite, or more likely because of, the increased risk, drinking became cool. That's what happens when you delegate drug education to moralists. And crime increased, most notoriously with gangland killings. That's what happens when you delegate drug distribution to crooks. Prohibition of alcohol ended in failure, but for other drugs it continues.

Law enforcement can't reduce supply or demand. As a Baltimore police officer, I arrested drug dealers. Others took their place. I locked them up, too. Thanks to the drug war, we imprison more people than any other country. And America still leads the world in illegal drug use. We can't arrest and jail our way to a drug-free America. People want to get high. We could lock up everybody and still have a drug problem. Prisons have drug problems.

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The war on drugs is not about saving lives or stopping crime. It's about yesteryear's ideologues and future profits from prison jobs, asset forfeiture, court overtime pay, and federal largess.

We have a choice: Legalize drugs, or embark on a second century of failed prohibition. Government regulation may not sound as sexy or as macho as a "war on drugs," but it works better.