Why not legalize drugs — all drugs? It’s not a new idea but, amid the unending debate over how existing laws should be enforced, it merits renewed consideration in California and beyond.
If drugs were legalized, overdoses and property crimes would plummet. The black market for drugs would largely dry up, emergency services would be freed up, police officers could be repurposed, and jails and courtrooms wouldn’t be stuffed with low-level offenders.
Meanwhile, users stabilized on legal drugs could get off the street-hustle hamster wheel that consumes their time. Absent this underground lifestyle, many would get bored and either quit using outright or go to rehab. Not incidentally, the number of homeless would decline.
Even those who continue using would do so in a regulated environment that obviates the need to obtain money criminally and frees time to pursue more constructive ends. As for illegal drug sellers, legalization would make many of them obsolete (not to mention the impact on international organized crime).
Legalization, as opposed to decriminalization, doesn’t just mean not arresting people for possession but actually supplying the drugs through a legally-regulated institution to people who are addicted.
Drug legalization for addicts is not without precedent. In the United States, we practice a form of it by providing methadone and suboxone — although these opiate substitutes are often ineffective and can be even more difficult to kick than heroin.
There are currently several countries — including Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands and Canada — that in varying degrees allow addicts to obtain prescription heroin. Where legal heroin is easily obtainable, statistics show not just a reduction in crime but significant drops in addiction itself.
In Switzerland, which made legalized heroin available in 1994, the number of new heroin users declined 80 percent by 2010, according to the Stanford Review. Another study by the University of Lausanne in Switzerland found that, among those who joined the program at its inception, there were reductions in property crimes and drug selling of over 50 percent within six months.
Legalization does not appear to encourage drug addiction. If anything, it seems to discourage use overall by removing the enticement (as it is for some) of a free-wheeling life outside the law and replacing it with boring old institutional support.
I would legalize synthesized versions of heroin, cocaine and amphetamines. These drugs are already widely available anyway, both on the street and through the internet.
Besides that, they have long had prescription-legal, pharmaceutical equivalents — opioids (such as Fentanyl and Oxycontin), Adderall, Ritalin and Desoxyn (prescription methamphetamine) among them.
The narcotics could be provided, cheap or free, by clinics or pharmacies to people who are medically registered, just as with suboxone and methadone. To get them, you would have to make a conscious decision to see a doctor or field worker, have an interview, sign paperwork and enter the system as a drug-dependent person.
The same system can then support addicts with services around employment, housing, rehab and therapy — which will work better when addicts have the stability and time to exit the street life.
A 2008 study in Germany found that, among participants who received legal heroin over 24 months, there was a 76% increase in employment, 20% increase in stable housing and 84% drop in crime, according to the journal Addiction.
Why not at least start the conversation around legalized drugs here — or try a ballot measure? Consider that, until a few decades ago, the legalization of marijuana was, to many people, unthinkable.
Legalization is a solution long hidden in plain view among the litany of policy contortions trying to make prohibition workable. Time to end the obsession with fighting drugs — along with the manifold consequences of their illegality — and turn more attention toward other problems.
Joe Rosenheim, who grew up in San Francisco, was an opiate addict for 11 years, has been in recovery for six years and is director of Inscape Recovery, an addiction treatment center near Mexico City.
Source: www.mercurynews.com