Suggested New Year’s Resolution for the USA 2019

Today, New Year’s Day, is a day for resolutions. Whether big or small, we make promises to ourselves that we will try to do concrete things to make ourselves, our lives or our community better. So I would like to propose a New Year’s Resolution for the USA: End the 105 year-long experiment of Drug Prohibition.

I’m sure many people would be shocked if the USA would send drug prohibition to join alcohol prohibition in the dustbin of history. Our government has done a very thorough job of propagandizing the population of the USA (and other countries) into believing that drug use causes such damage to individuals that drug use, as well as black market drug trade, increases the rates of crime and violence within communities. Surprisingly (at least to me), many people who support libertarian political views, small government and Constitutional originalism are in full agreement with continuing drug prohibition, despite its demonstrable history of expense ($1.4 billion since 1972 alone), bunny-like ability to generate big-government programs (I count at least 37 federal agencies), historical lessons that prohibition and black markets cause corruption of government and criminal justice, and of course, 104 years (and counting) of epic failure. The only drug that the drug warriors eliminated from the black market was the then still-patented methyqualone, that only one corporation had to stop manufacturing (with the side effect of removing this medication from the legal market as well). In recent years, drug warriors have succeeded in making the purchase of over-the-counter Sudafed as complicated as the purchase of a firearm, while methamphetamine availability remains unchanged, while the government has turned to the new project of convincing the public that opiates are uniquely deadly (See: Red Pill on Opiate Deaths, ). Perhaps the most startling evidence of the monumental failure of drug prohibition is the routine random drug screening of inmates in supermax prisons, and the positive results that turn up among such prisoners year after year.

Here’s how ending drug prohibition would be of benefit to Americans – and perhaps other parts of the world as well:

First, we would eliminate the potentially tremendous profits to foreign cartels that smuggle drugs, significantly reducing their current and potential income. We’d also cut our expenditures on interdicting drugs at the border, and on investigation and prosecution of simple possession and sales of currently-illegal drugs within the country.

Second, we would simplify the prosecution of other offenses – e.g., robbery, burglary, assault, murder – making irrelevant defense claims that the offense was the result of needing for money for drugs or being addled by drugs (or alcohol) that currently so complicate our criminal proceedings. Just as “tobacco addiction” is never entertained by a court as a justification for robbery or disorderly behavior, defendants’ drug use would stop taking up valuable court time.

It might be true that criminals consume drugs, but criminals consume cheeseburgers, too, and no one is suggesting that closing fast food restaurants would have any effect on crime rates.

Third, we could save lives. If something goes medically wrong after someone consumes a drug, there would be no reason to delay medical treatment. Drug prohibition means there is no incentive to accurately label contents in terms of the actual product (cartels manufacture pills that look like prescription oxycodone but are made of heroin or fentanyl), potency, doses per container, inactive ingredients (inactive ingredients, aka, “cutting agents,” of illegal drugs are often dangerous on their own), and none of the incentive to prevent contamination that exists in legally manufactured products.

In addition, black market trade would be removed from street corners and residential neighborhoods, with legal trade subject to zoning laws like any other commerce. Instead of having no options outside of intimidation and violence to settle disputes, drug commerce disputes would be addressed in civil court, like any other businesses.

Fourth, there would be some reductions in medical expenditures, and the difficulties many Americans have in getting proper treatment of chronic severe pain. Patients with chronic severe pain from conditions, illness or injuries, who until recently would have had their pain treated by the specialist treating the condition now have to see two specialists – one for the condition, and a “pain specialist”, as if pain is separate from the condition that causes it. Not only have we created a new layer of unnecessary expenses to the chronic pain patient and/or insurer, but there are also expenses associated with the procedures created to find and thwart “drug seeking patients.”

Fifth, we would be putting an end to many practices that are incompatible with the spirit and the letter of our Constitution. The First Amendment protects the citizen’s right to hold and publicize any belief or opinion and doesn’t distinguish based on how those beliefs and opinions were generated (from reading bronze age mythology, from swallowing a pill, from listening to someone else – doesn’t matter). Our Second Amendment protects a citizen’s right to own guns, trusting individual citizens to own deadly instrumentation (currently prohibited drugs, whether used for recreation, like mushrooms or LSD, or performance enhancement, like steroids or ritalin, are not designed to kill). The Fourth and Fifth Amendments would return to their full vigor in terms of protecting the citizen’s person and possessions.

Our country has been around for 243 years. Alcohol prohibition was admitted to be a failure and repealed after 13 years. Drug prohibition has only been around for just under 105 years. Drug prohibition has not strengthened our Republic.

Happy New Year to All!