by Johann Hari
I have been trying for more than a year now to absorb what this fact means. When I discussed it with Danny one afternoon in the café at the British Library, he pointed out that most of us don’t object to drug use in and of itself. We worry about the harms caused by drug use. If I told you that your neighbor smoked a spliff or snorted a line of coke last weekend, I doubt you would be deeply concerned. But you would—rightly—be worried if she was a teenager, or if she became an addict, or if she overdosed. It is not drug use that worries us, but the harms caused by drug use.
And the evidence about these harms is quite striking. Legalization slightly increases drug use—but it significantly reduces drug harms.
Let’s start with teenagers. In the best available study, a large number of American teens in surveys explained that they found it easier to buy marijuana36 today than to buy beer or cigarettes. When I first read this, I found it puzzling. I only really understood why one afternoon on my travels when I was told about a road to Damascus that ran through a parking lot in New Jersey.
This story was told to me in the winter of 2012, when I went to Trenton, New Jersey—a concrete wilderness town that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Gaza Strip. In an office overlooking the wheezing city, Fred Martens told me a story about his past. One day in the early 1970s, he had been waiting in the lot outside a shopping mall, to buy marijuana, PCP, heroin, and meth, and then bust the dealer’s ass. This was the era of Dirty Harry, and Fred was an undercover cop who could easily have been Clint Eastwood’s character, packing a Magnum and a sneer. “I had no qualms,” he told me, “about putting a gun in an informant’s mouth and telling him, ‘If you’re fucking lying to me, I’ll blow your fucking brains out. Do you get it?’ ”
But something was about to happen that would make Fred rethink his support for the drug war.
A kid approached him. He seemed to be about twelve years old.
“Mister, mister,” he said, “do me a favor. Could you buy me a bottle of wine in the liquor store?”
Fred kicked him in the ass and snapped, “Get out of here.” He went back to waiting for a drug dealer so he could make his buy and make his bust.
But “that’s when the realization hit me,” he told me. “I’m saying to myself—this kid needs me to get him a bottle of liquor, when he can go get any drug he wants in the parking lot without me. What was better regulated—the liquor, or the drugs in this parking lot? It was . . . an epiphany. What is this all about?” The insight stayed with him as a source of doubt for years, and it made him come out,37 in the end, for legalization.
Nobody in my nephews’ schools, it occurred to me as Fred talked, is selling Budweiser or Jack Daniel’s. But there are plenty of people selling weed and pills. Why? Because the people who sell alcohol in our culture have a really strong incentive not to sell to teenagers: if they do, they lose their license and their business. The people who sell other, prohibited drugs in our culture have a really strong incentive to sell to teenagers: they are customers like everybody else.
If we legalize, there will be a barrier standing between our kids and drugs that does not exist today. This isn’t theoretical; the societies that have tried this have shown it to be the case. Some 21 percent of Dutch teenagers38 have tried marijuana; in the United States, it is 45 percent. I picture my nephews and my niece. If I decide to support legalization, it won’t be despite them—it will be because of them.
Addiction seems more worrying. It is common sense that if more people use drugs, more people will become addicted to drugs. During alcohol prohibition, fewer people drank—and fewer died of alcoholism and the diseases it causes. This weighs really heavily on me. If more people ended up like the people I love, the people who set me on this journey—desperate and broken—that would be a major reason not to change the existing policy.
But then I contrast this evidence with the evidence from Portugal. More people used drugs, yet addiction fell substantially. Why? Because punishment—shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable—traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to stop.
At the end of alcohol prohibition, they didn’t use the massive new tax revenues to invest in educating kids about alcohol, and turning the lives of alcoholics around. Portugal showed us there is another way.
But what about overdose? This, surely, is the hardest point to answer. If more people use drugs, more will end up accidentally taking fatal doses. It seems obvious.
But in fact—as I saw in Vancouver and Geneva—the places that have expanded legal access to hard drugs have seen an enormous fall in overdoses. Why? There are two big reasons. The first is that at the moment, if you buy a drug from a gangster, you have no idea what is in it. Imagine ordering generic “alcohol” from the bar, not knowing whether it is an alcopop or absinthe. You’d be far more likely to drink too much and collapse. In a regulated store, by contrast, you know what you are getting.
The second reason is the iron law of prohibition, which I explained earlier. When you ban a drug, it’s very risk to transport it—so dealers will always choose the drug that packs the strongest possible kick into the smallest possible space. That means that under prohibition you can only get the most hard-core form of a drug. Beer disappeared during alcohol prohibition, and moonshine shone; as soon as alcohol prohibition ended, moonshine vanished.
After drug prohibition, it’s reasonable to expect that the milder forms of drugs that were popular before prohibition will come back, just as beer did. So the rise in drug use will most likely consist not of an army of crack addicts, but of an increase in people drinking stronger tea and smoking weaker spliffs. Nobody has ever overdosed on coca tea.
I can feel, as I write this, that I am persuading myself that the full legal regulation of all drugs is a good idea—but then a set of prickly questions comes into my mind, and they won’t go away.
What about the most powerfully intoxicating drugs? Would you let people buy meth? Would you let people buy crack?
When it comes to a drug like crack or meth, what does legalization even mean? Are we suggesting openly selling it? If not, would doctors even be willing to prescribe it?
I keep putting this question to legalizers across the world. Their first response is usually to sigh and point out that those drugs make up 5 percent or less of the market for illegal drugs. So let’s start, they say, with the other 95 percent. Take the politically possible steps today. We’ll get to this conversation years from now, when it is no longer totally hypothetical.
But this, it seems to me, is to dodge the question. So when you push further and ask the question again, you find that legalizers fall into three broad camps on these drugs.
Some would leave a few drugs banned, as tiny islands of prohibition in a sea of regulation. They are aware that this would mean that small networks of drug gangs would persist, but there would be far fewer of them, because now they’d be meeting only a really small niche market for the most hard-core users.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, you find some pure libertarians. They say: You have a right to damage your own body. It’s your choice. If you are allowed to ski, or box, or race at 300 mph on a private track, you should be allowed to ingest whatever chemicals you want. The job of government is not to protect you from yourself. If people want to buy crack, let them buy crack. Sell it along with the other drugs, in regulated stores.
In between these two positions, there is a middle way: Build a third tier of regulation, beyond open sale or prescription. You’d establish safe designated rooms in our big cities, where people would be allowed to buy and use these more hard-core drugs, with doctors on hand, provided they didn’t leave until the drugs had worn off. It’d be like the safe injection rooms I saw in Vancouver and Switzerland, but with a broader range of drugs on offer, and tighter rules. The argument for this is that the hard-core users are going to take their drugs anyway: at least
this way they do it in a place where they can be kept away from everyone else, and where there are people to care for them, and patiently point the way toward getting help.
But I remained nervous, nonetheless, about expanding legal access to these drugs, for an obvious reason—one I had known since I was a child. Crack and meth contain such powerful chemical hooks that almost everyone who tries them will become addicted. I had learned this—without ever looking at the evidence. When I was shown the actual facts by real experts, I was startled.
As an experiment, I’d like to quickly test how well you know this. Can you stop for a moment and write in the margin of this book what proportion of crack users you think become addicts? Don’t read on until you’ve written down your estimate.
In April 2012, the brilliant drug reformer Ethan Nadelmann appeared on the MSNBC discussion show39 Hardball. The host, Chris Matthews, was clearly initially persuaded by Ethan’s case for change—but then he backed off. He explained his worry: “Ten people could have a glass of wine and maybe one in ten or one in a hundred would become quickly addicted to alcohol. But I’m told . . . if you try crack cocaine once, you’re liable to be addicted.” That is what I believed, too.
But then I interviewed Dr. Carl Hart, one of the world’s leading experts on this question, at his offices in Columbia University, and what he showed me was so surprising I had to keep going back to see him repeatedly over the course of a year before I really accepted what he was saying. He talked me through the best scientific evidence, which he later expanded on in his book High Price. He showed me that the evidence is that, of the people who have tried crack, just 3 percent have used40 it in the past month, and at most 20 percent were ever addicted at any point in their lives.
Look again at the figure you wrote down. Is the real figure higher or lower than your guess? My initial estimate would have been 90 percent. I was wrong by 70 percent.
Now I know that instead of the vast majority of users becoming addicted, as I and Chris Matthews thought, the vast majority of users—even of these substances—do not become addicted. When Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, was revealed to have used crack, and a month later Paul Flowers, the head of a major bank in Britain, was caught buying meth and forced to resign, there was general bemusement. This wasn’t our picture of a crack or meth user—people with responsible jobs, who appeared to have functioned for quite a long time. Clearly, we thought, they were freakish exceptions. But in fact, according to the best available data, they are actually more typical users of the drug than Marcia Powell or Chino’s mom, Deborah.
This feels strange to say. It seems intuitively wrong to me. But it is what the facts show. Why is this so surprising to all of us, me included? It took me a while to puzzle it out, but I think this is the reason.
We still think—as I discussed earlier—of addiction as mainly caused by chemical hooks. There’s something in the drug that, after a while, your body starts to crave and need. That’s what we think addiction is. But chemical hooks are only a minor part of addiction. The other factors, like isolation and trauma, have been proven to be much bigger indicators. Yet the drug war increases the biggest drivers of addiction—isolation and trauma—in order to protect potential users from a more minor driver of addiction, the chemical hook. If we legalize, somewhat more people will be exposed to the chemical hook in drugs—but the even larger drivers of addiction, trauma and isolation, will be dramatically reduced.
As I try to understand this, I keep picturing the women back in Tent City on their chain gang. Imagine if, instead, you used that money Portugal-style to put them in a lovely clinic, teach them how to cope with pain, and help them get a job. Now imagine that kind of transformation spreading across a society, even one in which more people use drugs. Would addiction go up, or down?
How, in the end, can you decide whether you support drug legalization, and for which drugs? I can’t decide that for you. It comes down to what you, personally, value more. What I did was draw up a balance sheet, and try to figure what I personally value more.
I urge you to draw up your own balance sheet. Here’s mine.
In the column arguing against legalization, I wrote that drug use will probably go up. It won’t be massive—we know that from both of the historical precedents—but it will be real. Some people today refuse to take drugs because it is a crime to do it, and because they fear either getting arrested or buying from criminals in alleyways. The day after legalization, this reason for reservation will no longer be there. That is a significant drawback.
I searched very hard for other arguments to put in this column. I couldn’t find any, but you may have some: please e-mail them to me.
In the column next to it, arguing for legalization, I found myself writing out the following arguments:
Across the world, armed criminal gangs selling drugs will be financially crippled, from the Crips to the Zetas. The survivors will be pushed into much less profitable markets, where they will be able to do much less harm. As a result, the culture of terror that currently dominates whole neighborhoods and countries—from Brownsville, Brooklyn, to Ciudad Juárez—will gradually abate. (This happened after the end of alcohol prohibition.) The murder rate will significantly fall. (This also happened after the end of alcohol prohibition.) Enormous amounts of police time will be freed up to investigate other crimes. Trust in the police will begin to come back to poor communities. (This happened in Portugal.)
Teenagers will find it harder to get drugs. (This happened in the Netherlands.) Overdoses will significantly decline, and the rate of HIV transmission will fall dramatically. (Both happened in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Vancouver.) The drugs people use will, in the main, be milder than today. (Remember the iron law and the end of alcohol prohibition.) There will be a lot more money to spend on treating addicts and dealing with the underlying causes of addiction. Many addicts who currently get worse behind bars will get better in hospitals and then in new jobs. This means addiction will fall. (This happened in Portugal.)
Millions of people who are currently imprisoned for nonviolent offenses, at great expense to the taxpayers and to their communities, will walk free. Huge numbers of African American and Latino men who are currently locked out of the workforce, student loans, and public housing will be allowed back in. Shaming addicts will be replaced by caring for addicts.
Once I had drawn up my list, I compared the pros and cons of each side. Your calculation of the benefits may well vary from drug to drug. Mine did. When it comes to marijuana and the party drugs like ecstasy, up to and including cocaine, I think the harm caused by a small increase in use is plainly outweighed by all these gains. That’s why I would sell them in regulated stores, like alcohol. And with drugs like crack and meth? I am inclined to the middle option—allow safe regulated spaces where users can buy and take them, supervised by doctors.
I can’t support a policy that sacrifices people like Chino Hardin and Marcia Powell and Marisela Escobedo in order to prevent people who want to use drugs from taking them. I don’t want to live in that world
When Danny and Steve arrived in Uruguay, they showed President Mujica how to begin to build this better path.
Their blueprint—along with the advice offered by other drug reform groups—showed Mujica how to set up a legal, regulated framework for selling marijuana. After all the controversy, the proposals were pretty straightforward. In 2014, a legal structure was set up to let pharmacies across Uruguay sell marijuana to people over the age of twenty-one who produce a valid ID. The crop will be grown legally across the country, and taxed. Each home is also allowed to grow a small number of marijuana plants for personal use.
Nobody will ever be imprisoned for using this naturally growing plant again. Adults will be free to choose marijuana or alcohol on a Saturday night without any risk of punishment. Maybe, Mujica tells me, this policy will fail—but what we are doing now under prohibition “is a failure every day.” It is hard to see, he says, how the new policy could f
ail worse.
Seen in the long sweep of human history, Danny says, it’s not this new wave of legalization of drugs that is radical. “The radical move,” he tells me, “was prohibition”—the experiment that lasted a century and was based on the idea that it could eradicate entire plant species from the face of the earth and stop humans from getting high.
When Danny launched Transform in the mid-1990s, he named 2020 as the year he believed would mark the end of the global drug war. He always said presidents would be coming to his door, asking how to do it. People laughed. They’re not laughing now.
On the sunlit winter’s day when I visit the presidential shack, the first thing I noticed is President Mujica’s underwear, flapping in the wind on a clothesline. His wife, Lucia, is standing by the door. There is not, she explains, much to see. It is, indeed, a shack, with a rather rickety-looking iron roof. There are three rooms: a tiny bedroom, a tiny kitchen, and a narrow living space that connects them, with some books, a small wood fire, and a painting that was given to them by Evo Morales, the Bolivian president. That’s it. The tour of the Uruguyan equivalent to the White House takes all of ninety seconds. It occurs to me that my own prime minister, David Cameron, would not keep his shoes here.
Mujica “would be different if he weren’t kept prisoner,” Lucia tells me, “because he had so much time to think, it became clear to him what was important in life.” He learned “to live with light baggage in jail. He learned that happiness doesn’t come from what you have, but from what you are.”