U.S.A. - Senior economist with Rand Corporation in Washington, specialised in research on the activities of criminal organisations. He has completed a study for the U.S. Department of Defence on the possible effects of intensification of repression at the borders on the spread of cocaine in that country.

ABSTRACT: Should drugs be legalised or not? Would the legalisation of drugs promote consumption and lead to abuse? Legalisation does not only bring advantages to society. In this text, the author presents data which might be used both for and against the legalisation of drugs. He also correlates the social and monetary costs incurred by the American drug policy with those might be incurred through legalisation.

("THE COST OF PROHIBITION ON DRUGS", Papers of the International

Anti-prohibitionism Forum, Brussels 28th september - 1st october 1988; Ed. Radical Party)

INTRODUCTION

During the last five years, concern about the drug problem has increased in the United States. By l988, public opinion polls showed that problem to be the single most important issue; indeed, according to some polls it was even considered to be the single most important foreign policy issue.(1) And, even though experts noted that the levels of heroin and marijuana recruitment, were moving in the right direction, perception of rapid growth in the cocaine problem has continued to dominate the news.

A new element of public concern is the focusing not only on drug use itself but also on the adverse consequences of the programs being carried out to enforce prohibition. Violence around street markets, crime by drug users, the recruitment of younger and younger people for peddling drugs and the generation of large illegal incomes, which are the source of much of the current discontent, are not simply consequences of drug use but also of the highly punitive programs that aim to curb drug consumption. For the first time in a generation there has been some interest in the discussion of legalising drug use.(2) The debate, though still nascent, indicates that some non-libertarians believe that the social costs of our current policies may be higher than those associated with legalisation, even if the latter does result in substantially more use of drugs.

This paper will begin with a description of developments in U.S. drug policy since 1970. Though there was a shift to more emphasis on treatment and prevention in the late 1970s and more rhetorical emphasis has been given to prevention in the late 1980s, the general pattern has been a continued emphasis on enforcement, particularly aimed at dealers rather than users. The second section briefly discusses some of the political forces that have influenced these policy decisions, pointing out that the continued emphasis on enforcement has arisen partly from an uncertainty about what else might reduce drug use and a political concern about the consequences of not appearing to be "tough on drugs". The third section analyses some of the options before the nation, focusing on the two ends of the spectrum of options where much of the debate is taking place; legalisation and an intensification of current punitive policies. That section stresses the difficulty of discussing legalisation due to the uncertainty as to wh

at would happen if cocaine or heroin were legalised and thus the difficulty of making an informed choice.

RECENT TRENDS IN POLICY

All observers of drug policy have been struck by its cyclical nature (e.g. Musto, 1988). There has been considerable oscillation between strong intolerance for any use accompanied by severely punitive enforcement, and a more tolerant policy allowing for distinctions among drugs and more emphasis on treatment and prevention rather than enforcement. In this section the history of drug policy since 1968 is reviewed, mostly at the federal level. Even in that period that oscillation has been observed.

Pre-1980.

Use of heroin emerged as a problem in the U.S. in the late 1960s, for the first time since the turn of the century. Though there had been some concern about expanded marijuana use in the 1960s, particularly on college campuses, it was the rapid growth in inner-city heroin use that caused attention to be focused on the drug policy. Heroin addiction was viewed as a major factor in the urban crisis that had been a significant component of the political debate in the 1968 presidential election. At the same time, methadone appeared as a therapeutic drug which could provide some significant progress in the "curing" of heroin addiction or, in any case, in lessening the connection between heroin addiction and crime.

Federal expenditures on drug programs rose from $81 million in 1969 to $760 million in 1974 (Drug Abuse Council, 1980; p. 25). Most of the increase was initially for treatment and prevention programs. Expenditures on these programs rose from $54 million in Fiscal Year 1970 to $147 million in Fiscal Year 1971, while enforcement expenditures was estimated to have risen only from $43 million to $66 million. Methadone maintenance treatment became much more widely available with federal funding. But after President Nixon's June 1971 speech, proclaiming a "war" on drugs, there was a shift back toward enforcement activities. By Fiscal Year 1975, with a total federal drug budget of $684 million, supply side programs were receiving 45 percent of the funds, as compared to 30 percent in 1971.

President Nixon also made drugs a major issue in foreign policy, emphasising the Turkish opium control programme. His administration pushed for a strengthening of the major international treaty, the Single Convention on Narcotics, by adding psychotropic drugs to the list of those controlled under the treaty. In 1973, Mr. Nixon stated that "We have turned the corner in drug addiction in the United States" (Drug Abuse Council, 1980; p. 42). This reflected the downturn in some of the heroin problem indicators.

Under President Ford there was a recognition that prior efforts had not made appropriate distinctions among drugs. The 1975 White Paper on drug abuse stated, "All drugs are not equally dangerous and all drug use is not equally destructive." President Carter made some further changes in the tone, if not the substance, of drug policy. He endorsed the decriminalisation of possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. "Penalties against the possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself." He broadened the scope of the drug effort beyond heroin, marijuana and cocaine to include licit drugs with abuse potential. Finally, his statements reflected less of the war mentality and a greater willingness to treat drug abuse as a chronic social problem.

At the local level the emphasis throughout the period was on enforcement, even for marijuana; marijuana possession arrests increased from 18,000 in 1965 to 188,000 in 1970, and to about 350,000 by 1975, a figure at which it stabilised for a decade. Heroin use was so strongly associated with crime that it seemed reasonable to deal with that drug primarily as a law enforcement problem. The emphasis was on incarcerating dealers; users were mostly dealt with through diversion programs that placed them in treatment. Some states passed statutes mandating extremely severe penalties for drug dealers.

The most prominent of these state efforts was that of New York, which in 1973 enacted a statute mandating a minimum prison sentence of 15 to 25 years for a seller of more than one ounce of heroin. Even street level dealers were liable to a minimum term of between one year and eight and one third years. The New York City Bar Association commissioned an evaluation of the effects of the new law and concluded that it had led to a decline in neither heroin use nor associated crime (Joint Committee on New York Drug Law Evaluation, 1977).

There was little systematic interest in drug prevention or in treatment outside of methadone maintenance during this period. As heroin use stabilised in the mid-1970s, local governments were under less pressure to fund large scale treatment efforts.

Federal Programs since 1980.

The 1980s have seen a massive expansion in U.S. expenditures on drug matters at the federal level of government. Federal expenditures on drug enforcement, treatment and prevention programs rose from $1.1 billion in FY 1981 to $3.3 billion in FY 1988; even after adjusting for inflation, this was a growth of 125 percent in 9 years. Through most of the 1980s, enforcement grew much faster than the other program sectors. Indeed, there was actually a decline in constant dollar expenditures on treatment programs from 1981 to 1986, although there has been a spurt in the last two years in those programs; prevention expenditures grew modestly until 1986. The recent increase appears to have been spurred (in the case of treatment) by a concern about the spread of AIDS through needle sharing. The chairman of President Reagan's Commission on AIDS called for the opening of 3,300 drug treatment centres at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion annually though the President did not endorse this recommendation (New York Times, F

ebruary 25, 1988).

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Table 1 - Federal Drug Policy Outlays Millions of Constant (1982 Dollars)

Fiscal Year 1981-1988

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988

Enforcem. 263 982 1138 1315 1498 1538 1943 2043

Treatment 221 162 176 171 171 166 313 303

Prevention 125 124 132 140 157 163 270 372

TOTAL 1209 1268 1446 1626 1826 1867 2526 2718

Using implicit deflator from the Office of Management and Budget;

Source : National Drug Policy Board, 1987.

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In the case of prevention programs, pessimism about the success of drug enforcement has led to a revival of interest in prevention as the most plausible and benign long-term remedy. Prevention programs still account for a small share of the total federal expenditures. In FY 1988, the figure was about $454 million, or 14 percent of the total.(3) Congress has also legislated more punitive sanctions for drug dealers convicted in federal courts. As implemented in the first guidelines of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, these new statutes lead to sentences of between 20 and 40 years for persons convicted of selling large quantities of drugs. The guidelines do not allow for parole and the Sentencing Commission projects that the federal prison population, already almost one third drug offenders, will be at least 38 percent higher in 1997 as a result of these sentences (U.S. Sentencing Commission, 1987).

State and Local Programs Since 1980.

Changes in program emphasis as the state and local level are less easily captured. Data on state and local expenditures on drug treatment and prevention are available only in combination with expenditures on similar alcohol programs. Table 2 provides an estimate of these expenditures for 1985 and 1986. It should be noted that the state and local figures include some federal funding of these programs. Indeed, most of the federal expenditures on treatment and prevention come in the form of block grants to state and local programs.

For expenditures on state and local enforcement we have only one study, estimating the figures for 1985 and 1986. Godshaw, Koppell and Pancoast (1987) surveyed a sample of state and local agencies; the responses led to an estimate of $4.9 billion in 1986, up from $4.l billion in 1985. The 1986 figure represented 18.2 percent of total state and local expenditures on police services, reinforcing the sense that drug enforcement has become a major activity for police agencies throughout the nation.

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Table 2 - state and local expenditures for alcohol abuse services by funding source, millions of dollars.

Fiscal years 1985 and 1986

1985 1986

State Alcohol/Drug Agency 59.1 751.7

Other State Agency 59.4 95.5

Alcohol/Drug Block Grant 236.8 256.9

Other Federal Government 25.4 43.5

Other Sources 294.6 339.9

TOTAL 1,364.6 1,641.0

Note: represents only programs which receive funding from the states' alcohol/drug abuse agency. source: butynski et al, 1987.

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The Godshaw, Koppell and Pancoast estimates do not include figures on post-arrest costs incurred by prosecutors offices, the judicial branch and corrections system. Given that these components of state and local law enforcement accounted for total expenditures of $20.4 billion in 1985,(4) and that an increasing share of drug arrests are leading to prosecution and formal sanction, it is likely that the additional drug enforcement costs related to the non-police component of drug enforcement is substantial, perhaps $3.7 billion. Thus, at the state and local level, as at the federal level, it is clear that enforcement of drug prohibitions accounts for most of the government expenditures on drug policy efforts. In 1985, the only year for which we can make the comparison, state and local enforcement related expenditures were approximately $7.8 billion as compared to about $1.1 billion for substance abuse (alcohol and drug), treatment and prevention.(5)

Arrests figures show that the expansion in non-federal enforcement has been targeted at sellers rather than users and primarily against the heroin and cocaine markets. Between 1981 and 1986, total non-federal drug arrests rose by 50 percent. However, the number of arrests for sale or distribution of cocaine and heroin rose almost five-fold, from 23,500 in 1981 to 104,000 in 1986.(6) Marijuana possession arrests, which had accounted for almost 72 percent of all drug arrests in 1976, began to fall in the mid-1980s; in 1986 they totalled 279,000 (36 percent of all drug arrests), down by 20 percent from the previous year.

We do not have national data on the disposition of arrests, but the available fragments suggest that sentencing severity has increased. For example, in the District of Columbia, the average minimum sentence received by those convicted of drug offences rose from 5.5 months in 1981 to 25.5 months in 1986 (Reuter, Haags, Murphy, and Praskac, 1988). In the state of California from 1981 to 1986, the number of those arrested prosecuted for felony drug violations, as opposed to misdemeanours, rose over 140 percent, from 17,000 to 41,000.(7) Of those convicted in 1981, 73 percent were sentenced to serve time in jail or prison; in 1986, almost 95 percent of those convicted were incarcerated.(8)

In summary, the figures all point to a rapid increase in the commitment to drug enforcement and to making enforcement more punitive. Aggregate national expenditures on enforcement in 1985 were probably $10-12 billion compared to less than $2 billion on treatment and prevention.

INFLUENCES ON RECENT DRUG POLICY

Before turning to analysis of policy options, it is helpful to consider what determined the United States' drug policy. In particular, why - in the face of growing evidence as to the limits of law enforcement effectiveness - has the federal government persisted in expanding these programs?

The rapid growth in federal drug enforcement expenditures reflects an increasing concern about drugs at every level of government. President Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese have given many highly publicised speeches on the dangers of drug abuse and the need to increase the nation's efforts to stamp it out. Congress has also been consistently concerned that the executive branch is not doing enough about the problem.

These forces came together in 1986 with the passage of the Omnibus Drug Control Act, promising further massive increase in the funding of drug control programs of all kinds. Congress even attempted to make the military the primary interdiction agency; a House passed bill would have required the services to "seal the borders" against drugs within 45 days. The Senate rejected the bill, arguing that this was simply not a reasonable requirement and that it would impair the capacity of the military to perform its duties.(9)

Nonetheless, Congress substantially expanded the federal anti-drug effort. The timing of the bill was largely determined by two highly publicised deaths, from cocaine use, of two gifted young athletes (Len Bias and Don Rigers) and the upcoming elections.

In the 1988 election year, Congress returned to the issue. The House of Representatives again passed a bill that would have made the military the primary interdiction agency (Washington Post, May 6, 1988). The Senate again rejected this bill but did agree to expand the enforcement powers of the military. The Congress is currently in the process of assembling a package of proposals which the legislators hope to pass prior to the November election.

These recent Congressional actions have generated little debate, except with respect to the death penalty and military involvement. No elected official dares to appear soft on drugs, given the great public concern with the drug problem. This makes it difficult to fight proposals to devote yet more resources to drug enforcement, no matter how little these proposals might yield in terms of reducing the drug problem. A number of newspaper articles about the passage of the 1986 Omnibus Drug Control Act referred uncharitably, but accurately, to the "feeding frenzy" of many legislators, who did not want to seem any less fervent than their colleagues in the crusade against drug trafficking. With regard to that bill, the House of Representatives passed every amendment which would expand existing programs and authorise more funds for anti-drug efforts. Every amendment that threatened to cut authorisation was defeated (Quarterly Almanac, 1986).

The same enforcement emphasis manifested itself at the White House Conference for a Drug Free America held in March, 1988. Though the conferences included a number of the Congressional critics of the administration, there was no discussion of any policy that involved less punitive policies. Disputes were only about how to be punitive.

A fundamental problem faced by those who wish to change the nation's strategy is the lack of alternative opportunities for spending the large sums that are thought to evidence political resolve. The starvation of prevention programs in the past means that there are few working models to turn to when considering a massive expansion of prevention efforts. No programs have been tested on a large scale and there are very few professionals available to develop or implement programs for specific school systems. When the Federal government was required to spend $200 million in Fiscal Year 1987 on prevention programs, it had great difficulty in finding reasonable targets of opportunity to absorb that funding. Rapid expansion of new programs is always difficult, as has been demonstrated in many other fields.

Treatment is slighted for a different reason. Public treatment programs - at least until the mid-1980s - had a politically unappealing set of clients. Heroin addicts were - disproportionately - male, minority adults, who drifted in and out of treatment. Though minority community leaders have consistently been advocates of increased treatment funding, even for them the programs were not of the highest priority; the slashing of drug treatment funds with the shift to block grant programs in 1981 generated little backlash. The gains from treatment, in terms of reduced drug use, crime, and infection, are hard to quantify and in any case experienced relatively indirectly by the community.

Thus, with an imperative to do something, there has been a strong pressure to provide more resources to drug enforcement programs which produce immediate and visible effects, namely more imprisoned drug dealers and seized drugs. So long as more enforcement generates more convictions and seizures, it is hard to argue that still more enforcement is inappropriate, particularly given the kind of high level dealer arrested by federal efforts. We believe that this has imparted a significant bias to the allocation of funds among the different classes of programs.

POLICY OPTIONS

There is general dissatisfaction with the current situation with respect to drugs. The U.S. policies appear ineffective and costly, both as regards direct government expenditure and, more importantly, as regards the indirect costs they impose on society. Though we may be able to point out a number of indicators of positive change, such as reduced recruitment of adolescents to the heavy use of marijuana, the figures all seem very high, when compared either to other countries or previous eras.

In this section we deal with two ends of the spectrum of options before policy makers. Legalisation of drug use and sales, the most dramatic possible change in social policy with respect to drugs, is the one that has suddenly attracted a good deal of attention. At the other extreme is a move towards expanded efforts to identify and punish users of illicit drugs.

Legalisation

In the early 1970s, a number of states made significant changes in their criminal laws with respect to possession of marijuana. Simple possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use was now treated as a citation offence of the same order as a traffic offence. Conviction for this offence no longer created a criminal record. The "decriminalisation" movement had its origins in the Report of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse (1973), which had recommended just such a change. Though rejected by President Nixon, ever before final publication, the Report was highly influential.

The change was dramatic in some states. For example, in California in the years just prior to passage of the Moscone bill in 1974, marijuana offences accounted for between 20 and 25 percent of all felony arrests. The number of marijuana felony arrests dropped by 75 percent immediately after 1974, from 99,600 to 19,300 in 1976. The number of misdemeanour arrests involving marijuana rose substantially in the same time period, from 3,500 to 34,100, but the total number and average "severity" of marijuana offences processed in the criminal justice system declined dramatically (Aldrich and Mikuriya, 1988; Brownell, 1988). Between 1973 and 1978, 11 states, approximately one-third of the population, made similar changes in their laws. The available evidence indicates that decriminalisation had little impact on the prevalence of marijuana use (Brownell, 1988). After 1976, the decriminalisation movement came to an end. No state has repealed a decriminalisation bill, but public support for such measures has decline

d. In the last decade, the percentage reported in the Gallup polls in favour of criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use has risen for all age cohorts. And interestingly enough, the most marked increase resulted in individuals included in the eighteen to twenty-nine age group, where that percentage rose from 29 percent in 1977 to 44 percent in 1985 (Gallup, 1986).

Nonetheless, there has recently been an interest in discussion of more radical changes in drug laws. Though no major elected official has advocated the legalisation of drugs, a number have called for the examination of that option.(10) Their position is based less on any enthusiasm for legalisation than on dismay at the costs of current policies.

The difficulty in discussing legalisation is that we cannot, at the moment, describe even roughly what would happen if drugs were legalised. The only recent systematic analysis of the legalisation option is restricted to heroin (Kaplan, 1983).

We are not entering virgin territory when we discuss legalising drugs such as cocaine and heroin. There is no hard line to be drawn between alcohol and some of our prohibited drugs.(11) Alcohol is, for many people, highly addictive and dangerous to their health; for some sub-populations (e.g. certain American Indian tribes) who metabolise it poorly, alcohol is the prime cause of death among young males. Moreover, almost half of the criminal offenders self-reported having used alcohol just prior to committing their offence.

It is largely historical accident that alcohol is a legal substance in this nation and others are illegal. In some Muslim societies the opposite pattern of prohibition is found; hashish is legal and alcohol prohibited, occasionally with extremely harsh penalties for its possession.

The experience of Prohibition and Repeal provides one much discussed analogy with drug legalisation. There is little doubt that alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition (Aaron and Musto, 1981; Burnham, 1968); per capita consumption is estimated to have fallen by between one half and two thirds. Interestingly, the medical indicators of heavy use, such as cirrhosis of the liver, declined even more dramatically (Aaron and Musto, 1981). It was not just the casual drinker who was deterred by Prohibition.

Nonetheless, Repeal was passed a mere 13 years after Prohibition with very little resistance (Kyvig, 1979). The perceived costs of Prohibition, in particular the political corruption, violence and the criminal organisations (notably the modern American Mafia) it spawned were seen as simply too high. The Wickersham Commission, headed by a former Attorney General, set the scene with its detailed report on the failure of enforcement. It may also be relevant that the perceived effectiveness of Prohibition enforcement had declined by the late 1920s.

In considering the relevance of Repeal, note first that we have no reason to believe that the nation made the right decision. In 1932, vastly less was known about the dangers of alcohol use; nor was it known that Prohibition had so drastically reduced consumption. The corruption, violence, etc., generated by Prohibition may still have imposed lower costs on society than did the increase in alcohol consumption following Repeal. But that corruption and violence was an immediate and visible cost, readily traded in for the more long-term and less visible costs of increased consumption. Second, the costs and benefits of prohibitions are drug and context specific. Though drug prohibitions have engendered significant corruption in some cities, that corruption appears to be much less systemic and to have reached less far into the political process than was the case during Prohibition. Then, the bootleggers actually controlled the selection of mayors in some cities; Al Capone's influence over the elections for the

mayor of Chicago in the 1920s is only the most prominent example. Nor was the corruption just local; it extended quite notoriously to the Treasury Department's Prohibition Unit and even to Federal prosecutors and judges. The gangs that grew out of Prohibition endured for decades afterward and were able to build on the political connections that they developed during it.

The corruption consequences of our current drug prohibitions have not reached that level in most of the nation. In the federal investigative agencies there have been only isolated instances of drug related corruption since the early 1970s, and scarcely even that among prosecutors and judges, despite intense scrutiny by many agencies. In some cities, notably Miami, there has been widespread corruption of police departments; in that city the homicide squad was involved in the killing of some dealers and in the re-sale of drugs taken from their victims. But there has been a notable absence of charges that corruption has extended beyond police agencies to the political structure more generally.

Some of this difference in corruption is due to the particular characteristics of the drug and its user population. Alcohol is bulky per unit value (when compared to cocaine, or even marijuana) and many users prefer to consume it in the company of others, both friends and strangers. Both these factors affected the demand for systemic protection by bootleggers. Even wholesalers could not move their loads inconspicuously, since they required heavy transportation. Retailers had to be able to provide fixed locations to which customers could come regularly, stay for a period of time and feel relatively safe from police raids. This required not just payment to an individual patrolman but he wholesale corruption of the police department, since almost any police officer could put the speakeasy at risk.

In contrast, cocaine is very compact and can be transported inconspicuously in private vehicles. Users buy it irregularly, in relatively large quantities (number of doses) and generally consume it in private settings. Neither the cocaine retailer nor the wholesaler needs to purchase broad protection. They may seek to corrupt the individual officer who catches them in the act, or pay a police officer for inside information about enforcement, but they can obtain only relatively weak protection by these means. Growth of state and federal enforcement agencies has also reduced the protection that can be offered by police officers. Drug corruption is a problem, but it should not be equated with that generated by Prohibition.

We cannot then generalise from Prohibition to all aspects of drug policy. Our current marijuana prohibition looks relatively ineffective. The drug is widely available, at least to the young; each year over 80 percent of high school seniors report that marijuana is available or readily available to them. Though it is presumably much more expensive than it would be if legal, it still provides a relatively cheap source of euphoria, perhaps $1.50 for an experience that lasts two hours or more. If it were legally available, consumption would certainly increase, but perhaps not by a great deal.

But if fairly ineffective, marijuana prohibition is also not very expensive. It is not for marijuana profits that the streets of American cities have become unsafe and, there is little reason to believe that marijuana use itself is criminogenic. Some will argue that the arrest of several hundred thousand people for simple possession of marijuana is a major social cost, since it penalises an activity little different from the allowed consumption of alcohol.

Our current heroin prohibition, in contrast, is both effective and expensive. The drug is extraordinarily expensive ($2,000 per gram, compared with less than $10 per gram at a pharmacy in Great Britain) and difficult to obtain. Users are required to search for the drug in dangerous neighbourhoods and to expose themselves to significant risk of robbery or violence. The number of users has not grown since the mid-1970s and there seems to have been very little recruitment of new users since then; the problem is essentially confined to an ageing cohort of urban, minority males.

Many of the dangers faced by heroin users currently are clearly the consequence of the conditions that have been created by enforcement rather than of the drugs themselves. Stringent enforcement has also led to wide variations in the purity of what is sold on the street and thus to a high overdose rate. Dosage uncertainty, possibly toxic diluents, and dirty needles are somewhat similar to the dangers faced by bootleggers' customers during Prohibition. Heroin users tend to be high-rate criminal offenders when they are using the drug; a significant share of urban crime can reasonably be attributed to the fact that heroin users must spend large sums to maintain their habit. Heroin use also is closely associated with the spread of AIDS because stringent enforcement has helped push heroin users in some cities to the sharing of dirty needles. If heroin were legally available, it might be dispensed in forms that removed all of these threats.

Thus, the costs and benefits of legalising are specific to the drug. Heroin legalisation may sharply reduce the level of street crime and mortality among heroin users, but could also sharply increase the addiction level.(13) Marijuana legalisation may not raise significantly the social costs arising from drug use itself, but neither will it achieve much in terms of reducing corruption, violence and gang power.

Some adverse consequences of drug use are not easily eliminated. Current cocaine users (14) report difficulty in dealing with the depression or "crash" which follows the euphoric high of cocaine. Sixty-eight percent of a sample of "Cocaine Hotline" callers reported using alcohol, marijuana, heroin or tranquillisers to reduce the stimulant effects of the drug or to relieve some of the post-use effects (Gold, Washton and Dockis, 1985). One consequence of cocaine legalisation may be a substantial increase in the heavy use of alcohol, with all the attendant consequences in terms of health and crime.

Thus, as with most other aspects of legalisation, there is a considerable element of uncertainty as to the consequences of expanded use. Even though some adverse effects of the consumption of cocaine, heroin and marijuana may be eliminated, others will remain and perhaps even be heightened.

Nor, surely, can one advocate the legalisation of all drugs. Phencyclidine (PCP), a common drug in a few cities, represents a very significant danger in a single use; like LSD, it may trigger psychotic reactions, bizarre and violent behaviour and permanent brain damage. Though peculiarly difficult to control, since it is produced domestically and requires limited technical competence, it is similarly difficult to foresee a setting in which the government would permit the legal dispensation of such a dangerous drug. Nor, given the nature of our civil liability system, is it likely that a legal distribution system would emerge. The potential liability of the distributors, to the victims of violent behaviour, would surely see to that.

We do not claim to have provided a complete analysis of the legalisation option. Too little is known about how many new users would be recruited if particular drugs were legally available, how well they would succeed in controlling their use of the drug, or how their behaviour would be changed by drug use. However, it is clearly an option to be explored with considerable care. Given the problems arising from our current policies, it cannot be simply dismissed; given the dangers of rapidly expanded drug use, it cannot be readily endorsed. And it cannot be treated as a single option; one may legalise some drugs and not others.

PUNITIVE OPTIONS

While legalisation advocates suggest a shift in policy towards a loosening of penalties for drug use, others have suggested movement in the other direction. Two such policy options are discussed below.

Zero Tolerance.

Increased severity of government policies as regards users is often described by the term, "zero tolerance". This is the label that has been put on such efforts as Customs and Coast Guard seizures of expensive vessels on the finding of small amounts of marijuana. For example, the Coast Guard seized a $60 million oceanographic boat when it discovered the end of a marijuana joint on the vessel. The vessel was later returned, as have been a number of others seized under this policy, and the policy has been made somewhat more restrictive. Nonetheless, there appears still to be enthusiasm for very heavy penalties against those (with large assets) caught with small amounts of drugs for personal use.(15)

Zero tolerance goes well beyond the seizure of large boats or planes. It also encompasses work-place testing and substantial penalties against those caught with small amounts for personal use. Some have proposed loss of driver's license or withdrawal of federal student loans following conviction for possession (Washington Post, July 26, 1988).

It is hard to find an explicit statement of the foundations of the zero tolerance policy, but there appear to be two components to it. One is symbolic, as summarised in Mrs. Reagan's statement to the White House Conference for a Drug Free America in March of 1988; the user is directly involved in organised crime (16) because the dealer cannot exist without the user. The imposition of serious penalties is intended to make that responsibility clear. The second element is deterrence. New users may be very sensitive to the possibility of loss of driver's license, etc., and thus not become regular users.

The assertion of individual user responsibility, a common element of most 1988 political statements about drug policy (see e.g. the statement issued by the Senate Democratic Task Force on Drug Policy, June 1988), is significantly different from the user oriented enforcement efforts of the 1960s and early 1970s, which led to the marijuana decriminalisation movement. It is in part an effort to find punishments which impose little cost on the government but represent a substantial penalty to the user. There is no longer talk of felony prosecutions and prison terms for persons caught with modest quantities of marijuana for personal use. It is impossible to say anything about the general deterrent effect of these policies on users; they are simply too new, and our measures of drug use insufficiently refined, to permit measurement of the effects of any policy change. Those users most likely to be deterred are, as always, those who use drugs least often. Regular users, even if not addicted, will be more committe

d to use; they are more likely to have a circle of regular drug using friends, who add to their commitment to use.

Abandoning drug use may mean changing friends and life-style.

In the short-run, this means that the policy may look fairly ineffective, since it will do little to reduce the number of regular users. In the long-run, it may be more effective, as fewer occasional users become regular users. Regular use is promoted by contact with other regular users.

Regular use is behaviour developed in adolescence, frequently by the age of 16; it is important to have a set of penalties that are likely to appear important to this age group. Withdrawal or denial of a drivers license is just such a penalty. Some of the other suggested penalties, such as withdrawal of government guarantees for student loans may also strike close enough to that age group to be effective, though they require that parents also be involved.

One attraction of user oriented penalties is that, unlike dealer penalties, they unambiguously reduce dealer incomes. They work directly on the demand side of the market; dealer penalties may actually raise dealer income, depending on the price elasticity of demand and the risk elasticity of the supply of dealer labour.

A major concern, however, is the equity of these penalties. Though more of a civil than criminal nature, they impose severe penalty on users. Is there a justification for doing so, beyond the hoped-for deterrence?

Determining the appropriate sentence for any offence is difficult. The standard view invokes three principles; the perceived seriousness of the offence, deterrence, and incapacitation (i.e. the reduction in the danger to the community brought about by the imprisonment of the individual). Occasional use of marijuana is now perceived as a minor offence, more comparable to a speeding violation than to theft or violence. The evidence for deterrence in penalising users is quite negative; the great expansion of marijuana use in the period 1960-1975 came when simple possession was subject to high penalties.

The argument for these penalties must rest on the contribution that the offenders make to the broader drug problem. This could come from either or both of the following two elements. First, purchase supports a long chain of criminal activities, from growth in the source countries through smuggling to the U.S., to distribution within the community. Thus, the user must pay for his share of the social cost of those activities. Second, the user has some probability of recruiting others into use; certainly use would cease without such recruitment, even though it is for social rather than financial purpose. User penalties then might be based on the risk that a user will "infect" others, to take the epidemiological model to its limit.

We offer these rationales without endorsing them. They clearly represent controversial value judgements, which many persons will reject. We suggest though that judgements of this nature must be reached if the zero tolerance policy is to be justified.

Work-place Testing.

Along with the zero tolerance policy has come pressure for drug testing in the work-place. It is relatively easy to find the basis for testing of workers in certain settings; the stoned aircraft mechanic can put many persons at considerable risk and detecting marijuana inebriation appears to be more difficult than detecting alcohol inebriation.

However, there is also a strong movement to have broader testing, aimed not a protection of others, but at discouraging drug use in the employed population. For example, the Secretary of the Interior in 1988 imposed random testing requirements on 17,000 employees of the Department; among those subject to testing were fork-lift operators and recreational assistants.

Again, we need to ask whether these testing programs are effective or equitable. Clearly, a great deal depends on how the testing is conducted and on the consequence of a positive result for the tested individual. It has been alleged that in some firms tests have been used by managers to harass union members whom they wish to dismiss. If work-place drug testing is to become generally accepted, it must be seen as fairly administered. Similarly, the response to a positive test must be appropriate; dismissal on the basis of a single result would probably not meet that criterion. Rather, the worker might be referred to a drug treatment program, though programs might be unwilling to deal with clients who see themselves as having not so much a drug problem (if they are occasional users) than an employment problem.

Testing is now being carried out, at least for employment candidates, in many large corporations, and there is pressure to extend it to current employees as well. What effect will this have on drug use?

Assuming that the tests cannot detect drug use more than a few weeks prior to the time of the test, it is unlikely to have much effect on use by those still enrolled in school. Rather it will strike at the drug use of the employed adult population. Survey data do not permit statements about the distribution of drug use in this population, but it seems likely that a significant share of regular users fall in this group. Thus, if drug testing were indeed made a condition of continued employment in a broad range of work settings, it might have a substantial effect on the prevalence of such drug use.

However, it is likely that there will be substantial gaps in the coverage of work-place drug testing. At the upper end of the social scale, professionals, such as lawyers and accountants, are likely to resist testing as an insult to their integrity. At the other end, seasonal workers and those in low paying jobs in small firms may not be tested simply because their employers have no interest in incurring the cost of testing, the results of which would in any case not be used for any treatment or sanction. Thus, testing may be confined to the work-forces of large corporations and the federal government (l7), not necessarily a high risk group.

Work-place testing may have some effect on drug use. Again, it will probably only affect a portion of the population of users, and its impact depends on the policies adopted for those who test positive.

CONCLUSIONS

The striking feature of drug policy over the last decade has been its lack of flexibility. The response to perceptions of a worsening problem has been ever harsher policies. Moreover, despite the flurry of interest in legalisation, the dominant stand of criticism has been that the policies fail to be adequately punitive; too many smugglers escape capture, too few of those convicted of drug distribution go to prison, and too few users are penalised at all.

Nor has this criticism come only from the political right. During the 1988 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, seen as the most liberal of the candidates, stressed the need to be more punitive towards dealers. Though Jackson also urged an increase in the funding of prevention and treatment programs, this was in the context of more intense and severe enforcement. There has been a very broad political consensus for tougher enforcement.

Is there any justification for this? We have seen a scaling up of enforcement efforts at many levels but, focusing attention on cocaine, there is nothing to suggest that this enforcement has had the desired effect. Not only has the market apparently grown, at least in terms of the quantity consumed, but the price has fallen at every level of the distribution system. If recent history has taught us anything, surely it should be skepticism about the efficacy of enforcement as a method for controlling mass drug markets.

The United States faces not a single drug problem, but a multiplicity of related drug problems. Similarly, there exists a multiplicity of policies and programs which can ameliorate these problems. The nation fights not a war with respect to drugs, but a set of chronic social problems, which are related to many others, such as poverty, quality of schooling and community strength. Progress will be measured over years.

If this view is correct, then the current policy process looks inappropriate. The imagery of a drug war, a commonplace of speeches at every level of government, misleads; it generates inconsistency, the strike for quick victories and the searching out of enemies. What is needed instead is the creation of stable institutions capable of implementing long-term policies and programs.

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(1) An April 1988 New York Times-CBS Poll showed 48 percent of respondents reporting drug trafficking as the most important international problem facing the United States.

(2) See Nadelmann (1988) for a recent advocacy statement.

(3) In the early years of the Reagan administration, officials, in off-the-record statements, would justify lack of federal spending on prevention with the argument that prevention was more appropriately a private sector effort, involving churches and other voluntary organisations. The federal government, they J (#K suggested, should not interfere with these efforts. This argument is no longer offered, even off the record.

(4) This figure is estimated by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). It should be noted that BJS estimated total state and local law enforcement expenditures for 1985 to be $19.2 billion as opposed to the estimate of $22.5 billion of Godshaw, Koppell, and Pancoast.

(5) We have subtracted from the state and local expenditures those items which are pass-throughs from the federal government to state and local governments (e.g. block grants for treatment and prevention).

(6) The Uniform Crime Reports do not separate out cocaine and heroin arrests; while we suspect that most of the growth in the combined total comes from growth in the number of cocaine arrests, there are no data for estimating the separate figures.

(7) A felony arrest is an arrest for a charge that has a maximum penalty of more than 1 year in prison. All other arrests are classified as misdemeanour arrests.

(8) The percentage of those convicted who are sentenced to serve their sentences in the state prison rose, from 6 to 14 percent. Those sentenced to prison usually serve sentences of more than 1 year in duration, as opposed to those sentenced to local jails, which are generally for incarcerations of less than a year.

(9) Senator Nunn of Georgia argued that it was "the equivalent of passing a law saying the President shall, by Thanksgiving, devise a cure for the common cold."

(10) As of this writing, the list includes the mayors of Baltimore and Washington and congressmen from Maryland, New York and California.

(11) Tobacco, the other dangerous and addictive substance in common use, can be segregated from alcohol and other illicit drugs, simply because it does not alterbehaviour in alarming ways.

(12) At that time, internal investigations uncovered the fact that agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (the predecessor of DEA) were granting licenses to informant dealers in exchange for information about other dealers; see Epstein (1978).

(13) In the short run, the increase might be quite limited, since the current users are much older than potential recruits and offer very negative role models.

(14) The psychological effects of a drug are not uniform. The user population under legalisation may not only be larger than the current user population, but it may be systematically different in ways that affect responses to the drug.

(15) The actions are carried out under a federal law which permits seizure of assets used in the transportation of drugs. Prosecutors are thought generally to be unenthusiastic about what might be described as "long reach" cases, particularly against owners who my have had no knowledge of the carriage of drugs on their vessels.

(16) In referring to the murders of an American drug enforcement agent and the Colombian Attorney General, Mrs. Reagan said that cocaine users "bought those bullets", and that "if you're a casual drug user, you're an accomplice to murder" (New York Times, March 1, 1988).

(17) Federal employee unions have appealed government testing programs. As of this writing, the courts have generally ruled in favour of the programmes, but a Supreme Court ruling is expected shortly.