From: Jim Rosenfield 
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Subject: Legalization, Cruel Hoax? NYT
Message-ID: 
Date: Tue, 03 Jan 1995 14:14:27 -0800 (PST)

On My Mind
A. M. ROSENTHAL
The Cruelest Hoax
(NY Times Op-Ed Page, Jan. 3, 1994)

The campaign for drug legalization grows in wallet and prestige.
But, as it picks up Journalistic and academic endorsement and
foundation money. one thing stays constant. It remains now, as it
always been, one of the most cruel and selfish movements in
America.

The great majority of Americans are against legalization. So ate
the politicians they elect to office.

And Americans who believe in using government power and public
opinion to fight narcotics are drowsily inclined to believe that to
pay attention to the legalization movement would strengthen It. so
let's not.

While we slumber, the movement becomes  respectable.  The Soros
foundation recently gave pro-legalIzers at least $6 million, to
study legalization and decriminalization.

Meanwhile, the struggle against drugs is long and wearying.
Achievement does not always hold steady. People who say they have
a cheap and fast solution get a bearing their logic would never
earn them.

Far more important, it is clear that the legalizers can make
important headway without passing laws. They strive to weaken the
essential national resolve that the drug war must be fought with as
many weapons and for as long as It takes.

This is backdoor drug acceptance, almost as dangerous as
legalization. The U.S. is still paying in broken lives, fear,
violence and damaged newborn for the tacit decriminalization won by
the counterculture in the 60's.

Last month the University of Michigan lnstitute for Social Research
reported that illegal drug use among secondary school students is
rising. The study traced an expansion of drug use among young
people into the late 1970's, a decline through 1991 and since then
a resurgence.

The warning from the study group was that as children heard less
disapproval and more glamorization or approval of drugs. their own
use went up. You don't really need a law.

It is time to state the truth, as often as the message is heard in
the academy. the press, the movies or TV. The legalization movement
is cruel because it would create more addicts, more abused
children, more victims of muggings and robbery, millions more every
single year.

It is selfish because it wou14 move the entire burden of fighting
drugs from the totality of society to neighborhoods that already
suffer most. It is both cruel and selfish because it glides over
the ruined lives of those who abuse drugs, legally or not.

The movement claims that legalization would drive drug mobsters out
of business, which would cut down on crime so us nonaddicts could
live in peace. But nobody has demonstrated how it would reduce
crime or addiction, because it will not.

Mayor Rudolph Giullani and the New York police have shown the way
at least to cut down on drug-mob shootings. Go after them, arrest
gunners, pushers and their customers; don't look away, put them
away.

The police have done their Job well enough in Washington Heights to
force the mobsters indoors. That cuts down on street
assassinations.   

But it has not cut down on drug abuse, or on crimes by addicts. 
Most drug crimes are not carried out by addicts frantic for drug
buying money, but after and because of drug use, by addicts who
take to cold-blooded crime as the only way drugs leave them fit to
make a living.

If legalization made drugs purchasable without penalty - or gave
them away - there would be more addicts, therefore more crime. That
is the root hoax of legalization.

To fight drugs and drug crime takes a combination of interdiction
at home and abroad, well funded drug therapy and a resolute anti-
drug national consensus enforced by tough, constant parent, police
and neighborhood pressure. A combination.

Americans who support legalization are not looking for an up or
down vote. They know they could never win. But they also know,
because America has seen it happen that if the public stops caring
about cenforcing the drug laws, that is just as good as taking them
off the books, and a lot less trouble.

Americans who support drug legalization or decriminalization may be
otherwise decent people. But to the extent they succeed they are
responsible for what is wrought, even though they be lovely to
their own children and house plants, whether They contribute one
dollar or six million, in coin or embrace.