Last week, the New Hampshire state Senate passed a bill to legalize medicinal marijuana in small and heavily regulated quantities. Once the bill re-passes the New Hampshire House of Representatives, Gov. John Lynch should and probably will sign the landmark legislation into law. This measure, however, is woefully inadequate. For too long, our nation has hidden behind a racist and pathetically ineffective drug policy that has filled our jails to the brim without even coming close to eliminating the cancerous drug trade. After decades of enduring the painfully inept War on Drugs, it is time for a more drastic solution.
The operative theory behind the War on Drugs is that if we strictly criminalize the possession and sale of illicit substances and back that up with enough money and law enforcement, citizens should be rationally deterred from seeking or selling illegal drugs. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that it isn't working.
As of 2002, nearly a quarter of all inmates nationwide were being held for drug offenses. Clearly, we've been doing a decent job of putting people in jail. However, with recidivism nearing 50 percent in some states, it is equally clear that criminalization efforts haven't deterred or rehabilitated nearly as many people as we might hope. Half of all inmates were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of their incarceration, and three quarters were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of their arrest. We are catching the people who use and sell, but prison isn't stopping them from going right back to those habits once they leave. The big picture looks ever worse when we subdivide the effects of the War on Drugs by race.
As of 2001, about 6.6 percent of Americans could expect to spend time in prison during their lifetime. That number jumps to an astonishing 32 percent for black men, and 17 percent for Hispanic men. In 2006, 4,789 out of every 100,000 black men were imprisoned. To give perspective, in 1993, immediately prior to the end of the apartheid, 851 out of every 100,000 black men in South Africa were imprisoned. Somehow, our society manages to throw more black men in jail than one of the most racist societies in recent memory. Even if we assume that the rate of imprisonment for drug crimes of black and Hispanic men is the same as that of the aggregate inmate population and anecdotal evidence suggests that may be rather fanciful -- black and Hispanic men are still disproportionately imprisoned under our drug policy.
It's imperative that we stop shipping poor minority men to prison and pretending that such measures solve our drug problem. Any readers who have been to a public high school know how mind-blowingly easy it is to acquire drugs, and how rarely users are actually caught. For criminalization to be effective, we would need to spend a socially crippling amount of money on law enforcement, a move that would be both impractical and irresponsible. In this era of economic crisis, where nearly every state faces major budgetary constraints, we can't afford the muscle to make the War on Drugs work, nor the cost of housing hundreds of thousands of nonviolent inmates in a vain attempt to avoid the conclusion that we've wasted an astronomical amount of time chasing the wind on a bicycle.
It's time for us to get real and consider the only feasible solution left. We must legalize all but the most catastrophic drugs, in heavily controlled and regulated doses, and tax these substances punitively. The tax revenues raised from the sale of these substances should be used to provide education and law enforcement to assure that the social consequences of the legalized use of these substances becomes no more meddlesome than those caused by alcohol -- the money saved from no longer having to incarcerate drug criminals should prevent states from making further cuts to essential entitlement programs.
None of this is meant to ignore the moral, social and ethical dilemmas associated with individual drug use. There is something wholly disturbing about our cultural obsession with substances that never make us better friends, parents, citizens or leaders, and quite often make us significantly worse at these duties. Even so, all of the moralizing in the world won't get us any closer to a real solution to this problem, meaning that our hypocritical reliance on failed programs must cease, starting with the passage of incremental measures such as New Hampshire's medicinal marijuana bill.
