Legalize All Drugs? The 'Risks Are Tremendous' Without Defining The Problem

By NPR Staff

Published March 27, 2016 at 9:31 AM EDT

Police officers search a suspect for heroin on March 14, in New London, Conn. Police say an increasing number of suburban addicts are coming into the city to buy the drug, which is much cheaper than opioid painkillers.

Opioids are becoming the latest serious addiction problem in this country. Among these drugs manufactured from opium, heroin is the most serious, dangerous, cheap and available everywhere.

In April's edition of Harper's Magazine, Dan Baum has examined a new response to this latest addiction problem: the legalization of drugs.

NPR's Linda Wertheimer asks Baum about how he began to delve into the topic of America's war on drugs and why he calls attempts at legalization a big risk based on our approach to solving the widespread problem.

Interview Highlights

You go back, covering the war on drugs, I wonder if you could tell us the story which kicks off your article.

I was starting a book on the politics of drug enforcement. And in 1994 I got word that John Erlichman was doing minority recruitment at an engineering firm in Atlanta. Well, I'm 60. Erlichman was one of the great villains of American History, a Watergate villain. And he was Richard Nixon's drug policy advisor. And Richard Nixon was the one who coined the phrase, "war on drugs."

We have demonized racial and ethnic groups by the drugs that they do or don't use for a long time.

And he told me an amazing thing. I started asking him some earnest, wonky policy questions and he waved them away. He said, "Can we cut the B.S.? Can I just tell you what this was all about?" The Nixon campaign in '68 and the Nixon White House had two enemies: black people and the anti-war left. He said, and we knew that if we could associate heroin with black people and marijuana with the hippies, we could project the police into those communities, arrest their leaders, break up their meetings and most of all, demonize them night after night on the evening news. And he looked me in the eyes and said, "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

If that really was the beginning of the war on drugs — if it rose out of politics, not out of need or concern for people's health or safety. If Mr. Erlichman was serious about what he said, then obviously the results of that decision have been enormous.

Catastrophic. And, you know, he's not the first and Richard Nixon was not the first. The first drug laws in America were the opium laws in San Francisco in 1912, obviously passed to punish the Chinese. I found transcripts of state legislature debates from the 1930s where legislators in the South were talking about the menace of "cocainized negroes" threatening the white womanhood, terrible language against Mexicans and marijuana going back to the 30s. We have demonized racial and ethnic groups by the drugs that they do or don't use for a long time. Nixon brought it to a high art. The drug war that we are suffering under now really begins with him.

Do you think that the "drug industrial complex," the production and distribution of drugs, and the incredibly big law enforcement effort to contain it — do you think that actually could or should be backed down by making illegal drugs legal?

The push to legalize marijuana has grown in recent years across states, but many have been slow to agree on how to regulate the drug. Dan Baum warns that "we could do a better job of living with these dangerous substances if we changed the way we think about them."

I do. Look, we're Americans. We know how to do regulation. We know how to do taxation. Thank goodness we're not very good at repression — and that's what we've been trying to do for a long time. Drug use is not the problem, it is the Americans who become dependent on them that is our drug problem ... It is tragic for the people involved, it is tragic for their family members, but it is a small problem.

What do you mean it's a small problem? I think everyone in this country is accustomed to thinking that this is a huge problem.

Depends how you define the problem. If you define the problem as drug use it's big. But I don't define it that way. I define it as problem drug use — people who can't handle it, people who become dependent. And we're talking about maybe 4 million people in a country of 319 million people. I am not being flip about this, this is not something to ignore, this is something to manage better than we do precisely because it's so serious.

Do you think we are headed toward more attempts at partial legalization?

... Marijuana is a pretty dangerous drug. A person can do himself a lot of harm with marijuana and I think we need to acknowledge that.

Legalizing drugs though, you say in your magazine piece that it's a terrible risk.

Of course. As a very smart guy in the piece says, look at our alcohol distribution system. We would not call it a total failure because we have some drunk drivers and because some teenagers get ahold of alcohol. It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than prohibition — none of us wants to go back to that. Problems are hard to solve, they are easier to ameliorate. We could do a better job of living with these dangerous substances if we changed the way we think about them.