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The Wall Street Journal Europe
2 August 2001,
©2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
State of the Union: The Case Against Legalizing Drugs
(re-edited version)
By Wayne J. Roques

The quest to liberalize drug laws in Europe is gaining steam. Inspired by the movie "Traffic" -- which portrays America's war on drugs as a Sisyphean struggle at best -- such prominent voices as the Economist magazine have now taken up the cause. According to the magazine's editors, the case for legalization rests, first, on John Stuart Mill's principle that the individual is sovereign "over his own body and mind" and so ought to be able to do with himself as he pleases. The editors also argue the practical benefits that would allegedly accrue from eliminating the black market in drugs and establishing a culture of "sensible drug-taking."
These ideas are nothing new; in fact, many of them have long ago been put into practice. Portugal has effectively decriminalized everything from marijuana to crack cocaine. Switzerland and the Netherlands have pioneered. radical approaches to the drug problem, from drug parks to marijuana decriminalization to needle exchanges to various other kinds of "harm reduction" schemes. If the results of these programs are anything to go by, the editors of the Economist have things badly wrong.
Consider Switzerland, which provides heroin to "intractable" addicts under the guise of a "scientific experiment." The program's boosters have claimed that the drug giveaway resulted in a reduction in crime, as well as in the misery and disease associated with hard-core drug addiction.
An evaluation of the Swiss experiment by doctors Sally L. Satel and Ernst Aeschbach gives the lie to this claim. The original intent of the experiment was to get addicts off drugs. Instead, within a year the experiment had to be abandoned and the subjects were simply "maintained on heroin." why? Says one recovering junkie: "Addicts want more than just to feel normal. They want to get high."
In fact, the Swiss trials seem to have accomplished little more than the feeding, sheltering, drugging and the keeping out of sight of addicts. Meanwhile, in the period during which the Swiss began distributing heroin, crime rates soared. According to the Interpol country reports, the Swiss crime rate per 100,000 inhabitants in 1993 was 5,402.12, the year before the experiment began. In 1999, the number was 7,029.68. Little wonder that in 1998 the Swiss voted by a 74% to 26% margin against the legalization of hard drugs.
Then there's the Netherlands. The Dutch began their journey toward becoming Europe's capital of drug production and distribution when they began to turn a blind eye to a so-called soft drug, cannabis, distributed in Amsterdam coffee houses. This policy, which daily attracts thousands of "drug tourists," combined with the long-standing Dutch mercantile tradition to make the Netherlands Europe's leading drug-distribution country.
According to law-enforcement sources, the Netherlands is one of Europe's primary sources for amphetamines, which are then destined for the United Kingdom, Germany or Scandinavia, and LSD, usually exported in blotter acid form to the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Italy and Germany. Holland serves as a principal redistribution point for Southwest Asian heroin, as a key European entry point for South American cocaine, as well as cannabis and hashish imported from Morocco, South Africa, Colombia, Jamaica, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Further, the Netherlands is the world's primary source of the drug ecstasy.
As in Switzerland, marijuana decriminalization has been accompanied by a large upswing in crime. The last Interpol report from the Netherlands for 1998 reported 7,807.66 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants. By contrast, the U.S. figure was 4,619.3 per 100,000. Then too, drug use among adolescents in Holland has increased by as much as 250% since decriminalization.
Betraying a discomfort with the results of its own policies, city officials in the Dutch town of Venlo are now planning to open two drive-through cannabis and hashish shops in Venlo to make it easier for German drug tourists to obtain their drugs. When such tourists linger, they draw dealers selling harder drugs, which creates an unsafe environment. Indeed, polls have found. that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the Dutch oppose their government's liberal drug policy and want authorities to tighten up laws for users and traffickers.
Despite all of this negative data, Dutch officials stay the course on their controversial drug policy. Why? Perhaps the answer lies in the results of a poll taken at a drug policy conference in Rotterdam in 1995. The conferees, including commissioners of police and policy makers, were polled as smoking cannabis and sniffing drugs remarkably more often than the average Dutchman.
Proponents of drug legalization argue that if all European countries frilly liberalized their drug laws (perhaps with an EU directive?) the Netherlands would no longer be an epicenter for drug distribution and the high concentration of crime might therefore be more evenly distributed. They also argue that in a legalized regime drugs could be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes to keep them out of the hands of minors.
These are canards. Drug crimes are not merely the result of addicts stealing in order to get their fix. About four times as often, it is under the intoxication of drugs that people commit criminal and violent acts. The regulation argument is even sillier: Do liquor laws prevent minors from obtaining beer? Have cigarette regulations prevented the huge smuggling rackets we see now in Britain and Spain? Even the Economist concedes that legalization would lead to a rise in drug use. Currently, "it is much harder and riskier to pickup a dose of cocaine than it is to buy a bottle of whiskey. Remove such constraints, make drugs accessible and very much cheaper, and more people will experiment with them."
Which brings us back to the first argument in favor of legalization, the argument that a sovereign individual is entitled to do with himself as he pleases. Taking account of this view, it was Mill himself who noted that "No person is an entirely isolated human being...It for example, a man, through intemperance or extravagance, becomes unable to pay his debts, or, having undertaken the moral responsibility of family, becomes from the same cause incapable of supporting or educating them, he is deservedly reprobated and might be justly punished.
Advocates of drug legalization had better find some other champion.