Pete Hamill - Piecework

But if the death penalty is to be employed to solve the drug problem, why should it be limited to the few foreign wholesalers who are extradited and tried here? To be fair, you would have to attack every participant in the production and distribution systems. That is, you would have to do more than fry a few thousand pushers; you would have to execute every crooked cop, every corrupt banker who launders drug money, every politician who is on the take. You would also have to lock up all members of the CIA involved in the contra drug-running scheme (persuasively described in Leslie Cockburn’s Out of Control) and strap them into the electric chair, along with their bosses and whoever in the White House collaborated in these operations. The death penalty for drug-dealing is a slogan, not a solution. Even if exceptions were made for ideological zealots, the state would have to kill several hundred thousand people. And the drugs would continue to flow.

One night a year ago, I had dinner with a Mexican diplomat and asked him about the drug problem in Mexico. He said, “You have to understand something: If thousands of North American yuppies suddenly decided tomorrow to get high by shoving bananas up their noses — and they were willing to pay $10 a banana — Mexico would bloom in bananas.”

His point was a simple one: The drug problem in the United States is one of demand, not of production. Poor countries are like poor people — in order to survive, they will sell whatever the market demands. In our time, in this country and this city, the market demands hard drugs.

There have been a variety of suggestions about dealing with the insatiable appetite that Americans have developed for cocaine and heroin.

1. Willpower. This is the Nancy Reagan plan, beautifully described by a recent beauty contestant as “Just Say Don’t.” It is primarily directed at teenagers, imploring them to resist the peer pressure that could lead to using drugs. A few weeks ago, I asked some New York street kids about this program. They just laughed and laughed.

2. Education. This is getting better. In the past, the country paid a heavy price for lies told in the name of education (marijuana will lead to heroin, etc.). Television has been playing a more responsible role lately, with a variety of series and programs about the cost and consequences of drugs (4 8 Hours on Crack Street; the two Peter Jennings specials on ABC). If this effort is sustained, we may begin to see a slow, steady decline in drug use (the way cigarette-smoking began to wane after the truth was told about its connection to lung cancer and heart disease). The great risk is that education about drugs will merely provoke curiosity and lead to wider use. Kids al ways think they are immortal.

3. Treatment. I visited a drug-treatment center in Suffern a few weeks ago. The facilities were secure, the 28-day program tough, the staff dedicated. There were exactly 28 beds for junkies. There are 250,000 smack addicts in New York State alone. Around the state, there are about 5,000 beds available to treat heroin addicts. Obviously, not everyone who wants treatment can get it. Those who have summoned all the desiccated vestiges of their pride and hope in order to enter a treatment program should be able to do so. But this, too, will cost many billions if all the country’s addicts are to be handled by such programs.

4. More Draconian measures. This would follow examples set in China, Singapore, and a few other places. It would attack both dealer and user, supply and demand. All would be subject to heavy prison sentences (or the electric chair, if the death-penalty advocates had their way). The user would be considered as guilty as the seller.

Again, those good old Draconian measures make better rhetoric than reality. In New York, the Rockefeller drug law was one such measure. Put into effect in 1973, this was the“nation’s toughest” drug legislation: For possession of two ounces of heroin, the minimum sentence was 15 to 25 years in prison; the maximum was life. A repeat conviction for possessing any stimulant or hallucinogen “with intent to sell” sent a felon to jail for one to eight and a half, again with a maximum of life. Probation, alternate sentences, and plea bargaining were forbidden. Yes, a lot of bad guys did go to jail, and by J9755 9 1percent of convicted drug felons were serving maximum prison sentences.

But these measures also helped cause the current crisis. The courts were soon jammed with accused drug felons demanding jury trials. The spending of many additional millions on judges and new courtrooms didn’t ease the problem. And it was also now worth killing cops to avoid doing life in Attica. The old mob did respond to the new laws. Many of them got out of the smack racket (with the usual exceptions), but that only opened the way for the Cubans and Colombians. Judges began releasing first offenders and low-level dealers for the simple reason that there was no room in our prisons: They were already packed with druggies. And as cops became more cynical about the justice system, corruption became more possible.

New Yorkers are already the most heavily taxed Americans. It’s unlikely that they would agree to billions of dollars in additional taxes to pay for another 30 prisons or an additional 500 judges to deal with all the users and pushers in the state. Nor would anybody be happy paying even more for welfare to handle the women and children left behind by the imprisoned druggies.

After watching the results of the plague since heroin first came to Brooklyn in the early fifties, after visiting the courtrooms and the morgues, after wandering New York’s neighborhoods to see for myself, and after consuming much of the literature on drugs, I’ve reluctantly come to a terrible conclusion: The only solution is the complete legalization of these drugs.

I did not originate this idea, of course. In the past year, the mayors of Baltimore, Washington, and Minneapolis have urged that legalization be looked into. Various shapers of public opinion, including such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. and Milton Friedman, have done the same. Many have cited articles in such publications as The Economist, Foreign Policy, and the British medical journal The Lancet, all suggesting that the only solution is legalization.

Legalization doesn’t mean endorsement. Cigarettes, liquor, and prescription drugs such as Valium are now legal, though neither government nor society endorses their use. Any citizen can now endanger his health with cigarettes (and 300,000 people die each year from smoking-related illnesses). Or make a mess of his life with whiskey (alcohol abuse costs us more than $100 billion a year). Or take too many Valiums and die. These drugs, however, have become respectable over the years. State banquets are often marked by the drinking of toasts, in which the drug called liquor is offered in honor of the distinguished visitor. Business, politics, and love affairs are often conducted with the lubricant of alcohol. I have no patience anymore for drunks, and I can’t abide the company of cokeheads and junkies. But every sensible citizen must recognize that the current system under which some drugs are legal and others are not is hypocritical.

I think a ten-year experiment with legalization is worth the risk. If it doesn’t accomplish its goals, legislators could always go back to the present disastrous system. And we might learn that we can live without hypocrisy.

The strongest argument for legalization is economic. We simply don’t have the money to deal with eliminating supply or demand. Too many Americans want this stuff, and we are again falling into the trap created by Prohibition: We try to keep people from buying things they want, we cite moral reasons as our motives, and we create a criminal organization that will poison all of our lives for decades. The old mob was the child of Prohibition. A new mob, infinitely more ruthless, is certain to come out of the present crisis. That can be prevented by eliminating the illegal profits that fund and expand the power of the drug gangs.