COLUMN: Legalizing drugs will result in more addicts, crimes

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by George Hatoun

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I WOULD like to thank Jean Claude De Bremaecker for his call for a campus-wide debate on the national policy on drugs ("Cur- rent nation- al policy on drugs deserves campuswide discussion," Thresher , March 15).

Let me add my voice to his in challenging the Rice Program Council through its Issues and Intellect Committee to host a debate on the topic of drug decriminalization.

As De Bremaecker points out, the university now has the nation's former drug czar, Lee P. Brown, on its faculty.

As a prelude to the debate, I will briefly present another side to the arguments De Bremaecker made in his letter.

Decriminalizing drugs would only lead to an increase in drug use, a likely increase in crime and long-term social problems.

The correlation between crime and drug use is difficult to understand.

On the one hand, it is clear that a lot of crime is generated by the sale of drugs.

Decriminalization proponents suggest that the crime rate would be cut if drugs were legalized.

This assumes that the black market in illicit drugs would go away.

This is not necessarily true: If, for example, drug sales to persons under 21 were illegal or only certain drugs were decriminalized and not others, a black market would still exist.

However, even assuming that the black market in drug sales could be eliminated by legal drug merchants in your community's shopping center, crime syndicates, thugs and thieves will not just disappear like good chocolate cake.

Just like lifting the prohibition on alcohol did not end organized crime, there is no reason to think that a permanent fix to the crime problem will result from drug decriminalization.

Syndicates will simply concentrate on something else they can make a buck off -- perhaps selling machine guns, stolen cars or even nuclear weapons.

Likewise, an underclass of drug addicts will persist.

Cheaper drugs resulting from decriminalization will result in more addicts and more serious addictions.

The addictions will still have to be supported, probably by criminal activities as they are today.

Further, while I am not aware of studies showing a causal relationship between drug use and criminal activity, 28 percent of violent offenders (according to the Drug and Crime Data Center and Clearinghouse) reported that they had used drugs at the time of their offense.

This alarming statistic leads me to wonder whether such a relationship might exist.

However, in my mind, the most compelling argument against decriminalization is that, as a society, we have the right and duty to protect the weaker members of society from themselves.

Through the laws of the land, we establish and reinforce the baseline morality of our society.

Clearly, drug use is bad for our society: Whether or not we tell people that drug use is bad, if we do not buttress that position with the moral authority of the law, we will lose the war on drugs in a more costly way than we are losing now.

That having been said, I think there are a number of problems with our nation's current strategy in punishing drug offenders.

De Bremaecker may be right that prison is not always the best way to rehabilitate drug addicts.

At the least, that point is also worthy of discussion.

Let the debate begin.

George Hatoun is a news editor and a Sid Richardson College junior.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the March 22, 1996 issue.

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