Mr. Moderate

I’ve been approached at various times by people who advocate removing all bars to the illegal use of drugs. Some advocate having the government become the monopoly supplier in order to keep the purity up and the price down, while eliminating the crimes of the current supply chain. If drug abuse were a victimless crime, then I might tend to agree that an economic solution of this sort would probably eliminate the evils of drug trafficking.

But nobody can convince me that drug abuse is entirely a victimless crime. There are just too many facts that go against that claim, with no rational way to avoid the conclusion that drug abuse causes evil. Whether it is one person who has too much to drink on the way home from work and gets into a minor automobile accident, or whether it is somebody who gets so high on crack cocaine that they kill whoever happens to be unlucky enough to get in their way in such a state, the list of evils caused by abuse of drugs, legal and illegal, is just way too long to accept the arguments of those who would advocate making all drug use legal.

Depending on just how you define the terms for your statistical studies, I would estimate that somewhere between 50% and 90% of all property loss, personal injuries, and premature deaths are caused by the use and/or abuse of addictive chemical substances (alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, illegal drugs, and/or combinations of any or all of these). This is definitely not “victimless crime.” My own father died of lung cancer that was probably caused by my mother’s smoking habit. I consider my father to be a victim of tobacco addiction, even though he was never a smoker at all. My first wife was addicted to anything and everything she could get her hands on at any given point in time. She was in several automobile accidents and many other destructive incidents that all had their root cause in her addiction. Her inability to kick her addiction forced me to divorce her. After our marriage was over, she went on to build up a criminal rap sheet of tremendous length, filled with petty misdemeanors for which she was in and out of jail on a regular basis. So far as I know, she managed to avoid getting caught for any of the felonies she committed (and I’m sure there were many). Her addiction led her to commit 100 to 1000 times as many crimes as she was ever caught for committing. She could not get up in the morning or go to bed at night without feeding her addiction to illegal drugs. In between using drugs, it is all about getting cash to buy more, and as she could not hold anything resembling a paying job, she could only earn money with criminal activities of various kinds. I would say that she was a one-woman crime wave, but she was also very typical of everybody like her, and there are very many of them in any major city and lots of smaller towns across the nation.

We could make 50% to 90% of all crime in the United States today disappear tomorrow if we locked up all of the drug addicts as of midnight tonight. This is a personal estimate, but I believe it is correct. I would frankly argue for the higher end of the range given (above), but I’m willing to admit that it would be difficult to lock everybody up so perhaps we can’t be too aggressive about implementing this. But we should do something!

Perhaps we could just implement a “three strikes” law for misdemeanors. Three similar misdemeanors within a 5-year time span and the third one is prosecuted as a felony with a minimum of 2-years in prison upon conviction. Those felonies could be used along with existing “three strikes” laws to get somebody sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum of 20 or 25 years before you come up for parole. Or maybe everybody who is arrested for anything is tested for illegal substances in their body and, if anything is found, any misdemeanor is automatically raised to a felony prosecution.

Maybe we need a program where once anybody gets out of jail or prison for any conviction where they have tested positive for drug use should be sent not back out into the community, but to a prison-hospital type of environment where they then receive treatment and counseling for their drug addiction problem. They do not get let out of this program until they convince the authorities that they will keep themselves clean and not re-offend. They go from this environment to a halfway house where the state still keeps an eye on them while they try to reintegrate themselves into society. Regular (minimum weekly) drug use testing would be part of any release program for anybody who was convicted of having a positive drug test. Any positive test would be grounds for revocation of parole.

Drug addicts are, by and large, not going to learn or be deterred by short stints in jail. A substantially large percentage will never learn at all. Perhaps the success rate for former drug addicts is better than the success rate for former child molesters, but I suspect that they are closer in recidivism rates than most people would like to admit. We need to start treating drug addicts more-or-less the same way that we treat child molesters. We don’t want them living anywhere near our kids.

I can sympathize with the first-time or second-time offender who might possibly benefit from drug diversion programs, etc. But at some point society needs to draw a line and say that if you step over that line, you are a career addict, and to protect the rest of society, we will put you in some sort of a box (jail, prison, hospitals, other institutions, or parole with severe restrictions on where you can live) for a long enough time that you will either prove yourself to be reformed or else you will rapidly earn your way to permanent incarceration.

Yes, taxes will need to be raised to build more jails, prisons, and prison-like hospitals. But insurance premiums and many other economic costs of addiction would go down, and we would all be an awful lot safer if we could eliminate the drug addicts from our midst.