Draft Three, Conclusions

5. Conclusions

“With apprehension as well as relief the public asks: What shall replace national prohibition?” -- Fosdick and Scott, 1933, page 5.

One of the barriers to ending drug prohibition is the breadth of the possible meanings of “legalization.” The purpose of this paper is to explore two elements of regulatory systems – buyer licensing and self-exclusion – that can be helpful components of drug control and offer some assurance that drug legalization does not imply free availability. These types of regulations provide assistance to those who are worried about self-control problems with drugs, while not being significantly constraining upon those who are informed and satisfied drug consumers.

What shall replace national drug prohibition? For softer drugs, I suggest something like the current alcohol system, along with mandated and voluntary exclusion provisions. For harder drugs, my preference is for an alcohol-style system, supplemented with buyer licensing as well as mandated exclusions. The legal regulatory structures can be used to promote, in relative terms, milder forms of drug use: opium tea instead of smoking, opium instead of heroin, and so on. License tests can help make sure that users are informed of drug dangers and procedures for dealing with problems of overdose or addiction, and license revocation can provide an additional sanction for drug-related misbehavior. In short, relative to prohibition, licensing and self-exclusion can be part of a drug regulatory structure that is much more finely tuned to the risks of harm.

My confidence in the suggestions put forth here is limited – your confidence is probably even more limited! After 50 years of global drug prohibition, it is hard to predict with assurance the consequences of various legal regulatory regimes for drug control. Unfortunately, we do have good information on the consequences of prohibition, and that information is the best case for legalization. While within a prohibitory regime there can be adjustments at the margin, the prison terms, arrests, violence, and corruption are part and parcel of what prohibition brings, foreseeable but highly undesirable consequences of banning drugs. While we cannot be sure of what licensing and exclusion will bring, that uncertainty, combined with the all-but-intolerable status quo, is a good reason to experiment. “In a country as large as ours, with so great a variety of local conditions, there is room for many types of experiment. Indeed, the …states will constitute a social science laboratory in which different ideas and methods can be tested, and the exchange of experience will be infinitely valuable for the future…”[i] as we move Toward Drug Control.

[i] Fosdick and Scott (1933, p. 150); the elided words are “forty-eight.”