Michael Lissack If drugs were legal and relatively cheap, users would have no more rea- son than anyone else to steal, kill, become dealers, or consort with the crimi- nal elements that traffic in these drugs. Pushers would lose their profits, with which they corrupt law officials and purchase assault rifles to outfit their private armies. Given a choice between stepping over a few more nodding users, on the one hand, and having their children shot at by a swarm of Uzi- toting gang warriors or getting mugged by crazed addicts foraging for drug money, on the other, many people who actually have to live in drug-infested neighborhoods would choose the former. Legalizing drugs is the quickest way to end violence and substantially slow the current epidemics of AIDS and hepatitis B now spreading like wildfire in urban ghettos through the sharing of needles used to inject drugs intravenously. To decriminalize drug use by no means implies tolerance of behavior destructive to others; rather, community controls of a behavior like drug use are vastly more efficient than criminal-law controls, which work only when a very small minority of the community is breaking away. American policy can shift from trying to reduce drug use to ending the incentives for violence and creating drug-free schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces without evolving into a police state. Will the other people with much to gain from our current drug policies the politicians, who use fear of drugs to gain office, and the bureaucrats and law enforcement agencies, the people who investigate, litigate, and then incarcerate the countless low-level pawns caught up in this war -- the insti- tutions of war allow society to make this change? I doubt it. Their vested interest is in preserving the battle -and in the process eroding your quality of life. Take the war on poverty. Boosted by the unseeing but hardly innocent eye of the media, the poverty industry has become a veritable fifth estate. Acting as stand-ins for actual poor people, they mediate the politics of pov- erty with government officials. This estate’s a large and ever-growing power bloc that routinely and by whatever means necessary trades off the interests of poor people to advance its own. Millions of dollars are regularly dis- pensed in contracts to virtually useless “nonprofit” agencies. Shelters. Soup
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