LETTER: Anti-drug hysteria based upon ignorance of effects of abused substances, treatment of all drugs as singly bad

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by Conor Prischmann

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To the editor:

When determining the merit of legalizing drugs, one needs to keep a number of things in mind.

To start with, treating all illicit drugs as some sort of single entity is ridiculous.

To do so ignores the fundamental differences between the characteristics of the various psychoactive chemicals lumped together under the banner "illegal drugs" and leads to the type of confused logic exhibited in George Hatoun's article ("Legalizing drugs will lead to more addicts, crimes") in last week's Thresher, in which he considers a link between drug use and violent crime.

Obviously, someone who has injected heroin, which causes intense drowsiness, is much less likely to go rob a Kwik-E Mart than one who has imbibed a lot of alcohol.

It would be much more profitable to examine the statistics for specific substances.

Additionally, whether a drug is legal or not is often more a matter of political and cultural history than of its effects, which is why the highly addictive drug nicotine is perfectly legal, while a largely nonaddictive drug with some medicinal value, marijuana, is not.

Ignorance of the actual effects of specific drugs is only made worse by the prevalent anti-drug hysteria which makes honest discussion of nonabusive recreational and medicinal use impossible.

The actual dangers of drug use would be significantly reduced by legalization.

Many of drug users' problems are consequences of drug prohibition and resulting social conditions, rather than strictly being consequences of the use of a particular chemical.

These problems include paying artificially high prices, risk of physical harm in obtaining drugs, incarceration and the social and job-related effects thereof, health effects related to impure or indeterminate substances, limited medical assistance and risk of contraction of AIDS or other STDs due to difficulty obtaining clean needles.

Crime is never going to be eliminated, but under drug legalization it would be significantly reduced, mainly because organized crime obtains most of its funds through drug trafficking.

It is unlikely that any means by which organized crime partially takes up this slack would cause such devastating effects to society as result from the illegal drug trade.

The black market for drugs would shrink exponentially with relation to the number of drugs legalized.

Due to free market economics, drug prices would plummet, and crime among drug users would accordingly decrease.

Due to FDA standards, drug purity and quality would be assured. Lower prices, drug availability and purity and medical advice would diminish the risks of addiction.

Money formerly used for the war on drugs could be put toward education and prevention of abuse, at least partially offsetting any increase in drug abuse due to legality.

The only losers in this scenario would be the prison industry, the DEA, drug traffickers and organized crime. Otherwise, all of society would benefit.

I am quite alarmed by Hatoun's attitude concerning the govern-ment's supposed "duty" to protect "the weaker members of society" from themselves.

To say nothing of the adverse implications for personal liberty and freedom that we Americans take for granted, one can raise issue with why government should inter- vene in this instance but not others.

By the same logic, we should be prohibited from eating fatty foods, having a stressful job or dating people with a history of violence, as these activities all have deleterious effects for those "weak" enough to indulge in them.

Furthermore, no evidence is given to support the claim that drug use is "bad" in all cases.

Drug prohibition is bad for our society; the "badness" of drug use is situationally dependent, and no amount of moralistic proselytizing will change that fact.

Conor Prischmann

WRC '96

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the March 29, 1996 issue.

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