Michael Lissack The people with the most to gain from our current drug policy are the drug lords. These people become rich as they sell drugs at artificially inflated prices. They can maintain exorbitantly high prices because of sub- stance scarcity imposed by the government’s only partially effective inter- diction efforts. The result is a black market economy exempt from taxation involving billions of dollars every year and which corrupts all levels of soci- ety from school children to international bankers. Those of us with the most to lose are bystanders to the direct action. We are the ones who pick up the pieces of our children’s lives after they are destroyed or damaged by drugs. We are the ones who pay the taxes; our money finances the high-tech tools of the law enforcement trade, pays the costs of the legal system and its accoutrements, then operates the countless jails needed to accommodate the war’s casualties. Incredibly important human and economic resources are wasted fight- ing our war on drugs. Anti-drug mandatory-minimum sentences have created dissension in the federal legal system, prompting many judges to seek early retirement. The prison systems in forty states are now operating under court order to re- duce over crowding. Violent criminals are sometimes being released early to provide cell space for nonviolent drug offenders whose mandatory sentences do not permit parole. The number of drug offenders imprisoned in America today is greater than the number of people imprisoned for all crimes in 1970. Since the latest war on drugs began, in 1982, the nation’s prison population has more than tripled. The United States now has the highest rate of incar- ceration in the world. No society in history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for purposes of crime control. One reason that the drug war is so persuasive in America is that most people see only two possible courses: Either a crack down on supply, which is expensive, often tragic for individuals, and actually increases the drug supply. Or legalization, which sends a message of social hypocrisy and impotence: “We don’t believe in a society with drugs, but we can’t do anything about it, so we’ll change our values: they’ll be acceptable from now on.” But there is a third scenario, suggested in 1989 in the Economist magazine. What if the
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