Legal, but Well Regulated
March 30th, 2009 by Nick SaintPete Guither of Drug WarRant, a drug policy blog hosted by Salon, has this to say about my last post on legalization:
There are many kinds of legalization. And different ones would be appropriate for different drugs. Legalization does not preclude regulation - even severe regulation (I sometimes think we need a better universal understanding of the word “legalization”). The advantage of legalization of some kind for each drug is to remove (to the extent possible) the black market control.
Sure, legalization of heroin in the tobacco model might have more adverse effects than positive effects, while legalization in an adaption of the Swiss model (free or low-cost heroin maintenance in clinical setting, removing both the sexiness of it and the profit for criminal dealers) could actually reduce the negative affects through legalization.
The point about different forms of legalization is well taken. Hard drugs in Switzerland are not as freely distributed as marijuana in the Netherlands, which in turn is more regulated than alcohol and tobacco here, and even those are regulated and kept artificially expensive through taxation. Personally, I’d like to see restrictions on even the most dangerous drugs reduced to levels substantially lower than those in Switzerland, but this doesn’t mean that you’d be able to buy heroin at the corner store.
On the other hand, I think Guither’s hypothetical is wrong: regulating heroin like tobacco almost certainly wouldn’t be a net negative change from our current system. I don’t think it’s the way to go by any means, but I don’t see how it could do enough damage to outweigh the potential for a sane Afghanistan policy (though it seems we’re about to take a few baby steps in the right direction), a huge boost in tax revenues, and the elimination of the illicit drug trade. There are plenty of paths toward legalization that might make us all worse off in the short-term, but I don’t see how any end-state that can honestly be called ‘legalization’ could actually be worse than the system we have in place now.
