Drug legalization is one of those topics, like the death penalty, on which minds seem to be made up. I have been debating both for years, and only two people have told me they changed positions afterward (both went from opposing to supporting the death penalty).
I thus present the rarest of finds, a libertarian, Robert VerBruggen, who, in light of the evidence of suffering and death created by the snowballing heroin and opioid epidemic, has taken a second look at his previous position favoring legalization. His essay is here. I can't say that he now enthusiastically shares my view that continued criminalization of drugs is the correct course, but he seems largely to have come around based on this key insight: If we legalize drugs, we lose one barrier to their use. With that barrier gone, more will get used. When more get used, the amount of damage they cause is likely to explode. Therefore, on balance, a decent regard for the well-being of our fellow creatures counsels that drugs remain illegal.
What makes the essay so powerful is VerBruggen's understanding -- common among libertarians -- that our present system has plenty of holes in it and plenty of costs. And what makes it so convincing is that he then asks the only adult question: Would the proposed alternative on balance be better? He now seems to think the answer is no.
It's a short essay, worth your time.
It is a good essay, but it seems to miss that there are some MAJOR drug pushers behind this --- aka Big Pharma and their "street level" dealers in the form of doctors. Big Pharma created very dangerous opioids and they continue to encourage their widespread use. And if we had marijuana reform, people who wisely recognize the severe addiction and harms that can come from opioids use would have another good way to reduce pain without potentially fatal consequences.
If you are really as concerned about heroin harms as you claim, Bill, are you open to considering marijuana reform as one tool (among others) to try to combat this modern scourge?
1. When, as an AUSA, I went after so-called pain doctors, my colleagues and I were accused by those on your side of being callous toward patients, and thinking that we knew how to practice medicine better than physicians. I sure wish you had been speaking up for us then!
2. Pot, bad as it is, is nowhere near as powerful as smack, and I think it's unrealistic to think that pain sufferers would give up strong opioids for a little weed.
3. I have a long-term disc problem that produces not a little pain now and again. In treating it, I don't use pot or heroin. I use (in moderation) legal drugs legally prescribed by an ethical doctor. Millions of others do the same; I am hardly unique. I am just not believing heroin OR pot is needed for pain. Indeed, my quite long experience tells me that so-called "medical marijuana" is, to be blunt, a fraud. Overwhelmingly, the reason people want pot is to get blasted, not to "heal." (Yes, there are exceptions, but exceptions should not dictate broad social policy).
4. I think you misconceive the nature of addiction. People do not go down from heroin to pot. They go up from pot to heroin. The quest is for higher high's, not lower ones.
5. Not having been born yesterday, I do not in any event believe that legalized pot will in any way, shape or form replace heroin. The whole drug legalization impulse takes root in the nature of what libertarians view as freedom, not in the nature of the particular drug under discussion. Once one drug is legalized, the movement will just pocket that and move on to the next drug.
1. I wish you had gone after the kingpins at the root of the problems ... Big Pharma who makes a fortune from addicting folks to powerful opioids.
2. We can only know if folks might try legal weed instead of opioids (legal and illegal) if we give people a chance to use legal weed. That is why I want to try in order to deal with the opioids problem. But you are unwilling to consider this option because.... ?
3. Ethical docs pushed to make money for big Pharma with potent opioids is a big reason why heroin is a new scourge and when overdose deaths have been rising in recent years. Nobody dies from OD on marijuana. If you really care about these drug problems, you would prefer drugs with much lower risks of addiction and morbidity. Do you really care, or do you just like excuses to grow the size of government in the criminal justice space because that is where you and your pals like to work.
4. I think you misunderstand the realities of drug substitution possibilities when society makes wiser choices.
5. You are right that libertarians prefer freedom to prohibition, in large part because we think what has made America great is our history of human freedom. America was less great, in my view, during alcohol Prohibition. But like many big government supporters, you seem to think America can be greater with more government and less freedom. I know a whole lot of socialists who agree with you.
1. I wish you had gone after the kingpins at the root of the problems ... Big Pharma who makes a fortune from addicting folks to powerful opioids.
2. We can only know if folks might try legal weed instead of opioids (legal and illegal) if we give people a chance to use legal weed. That is why I want to try in order to deal with the opioids problem. But you are unwilling to consider this option because.... ?
3. Ethical docs pushed to make money for big Pharma with potent opioids is a big reason why heroin is a new scourge and when overdose deaths have been rising in recent years. Nobody dies from OD on marijuana. If you really care about these drug problems, you would prefer drugs with much lower risks of addiction and morbidity. Do you really care, or do you just like excuses to grow the size of government in the criminal justice space because that is where you and your pals like to work.
4. I think you misunderstand the realities of drug substitution possibilities when society makes wiser choices.
5. You are right that libertarians prefer freedom to prohibition, in large part because we think what has made America great is our history of human freedom. America was less great, in my view, during alcohol Prohibition. But like many big government supporters, you seem to think America can be greater with more government and less freedom. I know a whole lot of socialists who agree with you.
I'll just take on the first one for now.
For what offense was I supposed to indict "Big Pharma"? Drug makers produce a legal product, and a highly useful one to millions of people.
The problem is not the production of opioids, or their legal distribution and sale. The problem (apart from flat-out heroin trafficking, which you seem to want to ignore) is crooked doctors who profiteer from running pill mills through the illegal, irresponsible, callous and profiteering sale of these things to bring in the big bucks. That is not the kind of activity engaged in either by the drug producers or the huge majority of pain doctors.
Those on your side often castigate prosecutors for stretching the law merely to expand their power. If I were to have followed your suggestion, I would have given credence to those claims. It would be a gross abuse of prosecutorial power to indict a company, no matter how big (or small) without a legally plausible theory of CRIMINAL liability.
You often chide me for wanting to increase the size and expanse of the federal government (which I do not want to do, but that's another point). Now, it's you who wants an indictment of legal drug companies for legally selling their product. Now THAT is an expansion of power we should fear.
Meantime, you simply decline to find the greed-driven pill-mill doctor (or the ever-unmentioned) heroin street dealer, responsible for his robustly illegal, and immoral, behavior. My goodness!!
But perhaps I misunderstand you. Do you want such people to serve substantial prison terms, or not?
With apologies for my double posting before, let me clarify my views/concerns about big Pharma as the source of some of our modern heroin concerns:
1. Just like Big Tobacco got in big trouble with government officials because of aggressive marketing and misreprentations of the potential harms of their products, so too do I wish Big Pharma would face some consequences based on aggressive marketing and misreprentations of the potential harms of their products. As in the Big Tobacco setting, this might be a civil action rather than a criminal one, but I think there ought to be some serious investigation of what Big Pharma knew about who was purchasing and prescribing their products at abusive levels.
2. I certainly believe greed-driven pill-mill doctors and heroin street dealers can and should be held criminally responsible for their misdeeds, but I am far less certain that making these folks "serve substantial prison terms" will do more good than harm. Especially if there is reason to believe that pill-mill docs, after serving short prison terms, might be effectively required to be involved in drug rehab programs, I think having the docs be productive indentured servants may do a lot more good for society than having them be costly wards of the state.
3. I hope you readily understand my (nuanced?) view here, Bill: though I do want illegal drug dealer to be held criminal responsible for their misdeeds, I am agnostic as to whether it serves society well to have that responsibility include "substantial prison terms" measured in decades. This is because we have been trying this approach to drug offenses, at the federal level, since 1986 and 30 years later I am still waiting and hoping to see tangible benefits when it comes to the harms of drug use and abuse. I asked in another thread for you and/or Michael (or Kent if he is following this debate) for any and all data you could cite to show that that tough sentencing of drug offenders works to reduce the harms of drugs.
4. If there was good evidence --- indeed any tangible evidence --- that substantial prison terms for drug offenders make our society better off IN TERM OF THE HARMS OF DRUGS, I would likely be supportive of such sanctions. But, the drug problem in the US seems to be getting worse, not better, despite a long history of substantial prison terms being given to drug offenders. Until I see reasonable evidence that this long-tried strategy is working, I am eager to try something else.
5. Notably, Portugal is trying a very different approach to drug use and abuse, and some reports suggest that this is working pretty well. Marijuana legalization is another approach being tried in a few laboratories of democracy, and wish the feds would be more support of state effort to try a whole new paradigm. I understand, as a long standing federal drug warrior, that you think the old tough-sentencing paradigm is "good enough for government work," but I want to try out some alternatives and see if we might get some better results.
Douglas,
I am not going to get into all of your points (ahem), but will address a couple. First, number one,
IMO, this forever forbids you from identifying as a "libertarian." It goes even beyond nanny statism, to shameless lobbying for the enrichment of your fellow attorneys. Be honest and say it. "Big Pharma" has the REAL money, not some pill mill doctor in Appalachia. To be blunt, unless I am misunderstanding you, I find your position worse than appalling.
What "marketing and misrepresentations" are you talking about? Ignoring the fact that I have never seen a commercial on TV for hydrocodone or other pain killers, one cannot get tricked into thinking it is a great product and run down to the convenience store to pick some up. You must first go through an individual who went through almost a decade of training and whose job it is to tell you the product's benefits and limitations. You must then go to another person who spent five years training in the knowledge of the product's benefits and limitations to actually get your hands on the product.
Number 2. Let me get this straight. Your first move when a doctor is convicted of essentially being a drug dealer will NOT be to strip him of his medical license and ensure he never has the ability to prescribe these drugs again? What good would a doctor who may not even beleive he did anything wrong be working in a drug rehab program? Do you want killer cops to stay in police work? Sex offenders in day care facilities?
1. What exactly do you think forbids me from identifying as a libertarian, Tarls? Most libertarians generally want markets to be fair and transparent, and most also generally support tort suits and product liability to help ensure economic actors in the marketplace have to internalize the full costs produced by their products. So I think you do misunderstand me: I brought up the idea of government officials investigating big Pharma only after Bill extolled going after the the pill mill docs and locking them up for a long time. But these docs could only do their misdeeds because of the conditions created by the aggressive marketing of opiods by companies like PurduePharma.
Here is a (peer reviewed) article discussing what has long concerned me in this space: “The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy," Am J Public Health. 2009 February; 99(2): 221–227. Here are excerpts:
"When Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin in 1996, it was aggressively marketed and highly promoted. Sales grew from $48 million in 1996 to almost $1.1 billion in 2000. The high availability of OxyContin correlated with increased abuse, diversion, and addiction, and by 2004 OxyContin had become a leading drug of abuse in the United States....
"A consistent feature in the promotion and marketing of OxyContin was a systematic effort to minimize the risk of addiction in the use of opioids for the treatment of chronic non–cancer-related pain....
"Purdue trained its sales representatives to carry the message that the risk of addiction was 'less than one percent.'... [But] Prescription drug abuse in a substantial minority of chronic-pain patients has been demonstrated in [many] studies...."
2. I would generally strip bad docs of their licenses as part of their punishment, but I also would be eager to figure out ways to make other parts of their punishment more productive than just locking them away for decades if they did not pose a continued threat to public safety. That is the only point I was trying to make: I think we should only use the "substantial prison terms" mentioend by Bill when it is clear that such terms will significantly advance public safety. You may be right that some bad docs could/should not be trusted to do community service with addicted populations, but I think our entire criminal justice system could be well served by recognizing that many older, educated offenders are far less likely to recidivate and thus could be punished effectively without heavy reliance on making them "serve substantial prison terms."