Thinking Clearly

Kathleen Frydl on the drug war: ‘Here we have total and complete failure.’

  click here for full article by Dylan Matthews

 

 ... "The Harrison act actually introduced the idea of prescription drugs. Until the 1950s, and this is a story I tell in my book, narcotics were the only prescription medicine. And it was a very different thing when they added other medicines to this category of prescription drugs. The government tried to discipline and police first the medical profession, and then the pharmacists, and tried to discipline the dispensation of narcotics. Prescription-only drugs were, for a long time, only narcotics, and then the FDA added different classes of drugs.

One of the parts of the book I hope gets some attention is the way that the drug lobby is behind the current structure of our drug war. Looked at from a political perspective, Schedule I drugs represent a regime of trade protection."....

 ... It’s time to step back and look at the forest. In 1968, a dime bag of heroin cost $5 and was about 15-40 percent pure. Today, without adjusting for inflation, it costs $5 and it’s 15-40 percent pure. That’s a crude measure, but that’s the definition of failure, right there.  ...

...I’m glad the marijuana policy portfolio is moving forward. I support the legalization of marijuana and I say so in the conclusion of my book.  Right now, I’m more interested in other drug reform efforts. Race and class bias created and sustained the drug war, and I would hate for that race and class bias to be replicated in drug reform efforts.

The thing I have been suggesting, at the top of my list, is some kind of National Academy of Sciences study to formally model different approaches to the regulation of illicit drugs, including the way that we used to do it under Harrison, and also to address how costly the transition between one regime and another would be. We’re at the point where we want the hard social science and formal modeling to come in.

For example, if you’re negotiating trade agreements, as we are doing right now, what would it mean to include illicit narcotics reduction in those talks rather than requiring crop dusting for eradication? Which is more effective? There’s a lot of things I suggest that are traditional tactics of agriculture and trade policy, that I’d like to see assessed by neutral scholars.