(1). . . The issue trailed me almost everywhere I went. "Why not legalize drugs?" became the familiar refrain. Given what I had seen after only three months on the job -- given what drugs were doing to our cities, to our communities, and to our children -- thought it was an astoundingly naive and ridiculous question. How could anybody be in favor of making drugs more accessible, cheaper, and morally permissible? Here again was this incredible gap between a select but influential group in favor of legalization -- and the great body of the American people. A foreigner visiting this country, listening to television newscasts and reading press reports, editorials, and columns, would think that the American people were about evenly divided between those who favored legalization and those who did not. In fact, the overwhelming majority (88 percent) of the American people reject drug legalization. Nevertheless, a tremendous amount of ink was spilled, commentary offered, and talk show discussions held on the merits of legalization. Some of the more prominent voices in favor of (or leaning toward) legalization included Ethan A. Nadelmann, a professor at Princeton University; Kurt Schmoke, mayor of Baltimore; U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet; Representative George Crockett (D-Michigan); New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis; The Nation; The Economist; and some writers and editors of National Review.
(2) The legalization debate presented me with a somewhat unusual situation. Throughout my public life, most of my battles had been against leading liberal voices. But on this issue, I drew criticism from the political right flank, including a number of prominent conservatives: William F. Buckley, free- market economist Milton Friedman, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and others. So legalization seemed respectable at both ends of the political spectrum.
(3) At first, I resisted getting heavily involved in this debate. As I told a congressional committee, I was hired to wage the war, not to discuss whether it was worth fighting. That issue had already been resolved.
(4) Some members of my staff and a few friends told me that the argument was impossible to ignore and that the more we engaged the debate, the more arguments we advanced against legalization, the more support we would get from the public. So I began to more directly and more publicly take on the issue of legalization in interviews, speeches, public forums, and even on national television.
(5) Appearing on CNN's "Larry King Live," I found legalization getting a very sympathetic hearing. But after three or four phone calls in favor of legalization, a man in Villa Park, California, asked, "Why build prisons? Get tough like [Saudi] Arabia. Behead the damned drug dealers. We're just too damned soft." I sensed that King thought the guy was a bit of a crank.
(6) In response I said, "One of the things that I think is a problem is that we are not doing enough that is morally proportional to the nature of the offense. I mean, what the caller suggests is morally plausible. Legally, it's difficult."
(7) I could see King's eyes light up. He asked for a clarification. "Behead?"
(8)"Yeah. Morally I don't have any problem with it," I said.
(9) "You would behead . . ." King began again.
(10) "Somebody selling drugs to a kid?" I said. "Morally I don't have any problem with that at all. I mean, ask most Americans if they saw somebody out on the streets selling drugs to their kid what they would feel morally justified in doing -- tear them limb from limb."
(11) King then asked what we should do.
(12) "What we need to do is find some constitutional and legally permissible way to do what this caller suggests, not literally to behead, but to make the punishment fit the crime. And the crime is horrible." During the program I strongly rejected the calls for drug legalization and endorsed capital punishment for major drug sellers.
(13) The next morning The Washington Post ran extended excerpts from the show. Newspapers from around the country ran headlines saying "Drug Czar Bennett: Beheading Fitting." The political cartoonists had a field day. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis ripped my "beheading" comments. Many newspaper editorial writers and columnists were critical. Even Dick Darman got into the act, sending me a "decision memo" comparing French technology (the guillotine) with Saudi Arabian/British technology (the scimitar or broadax).
(14) The reaction was illustrative. Many of the elites ridiculed my opinion. But it resonated with the American people because they knew what drugs were doing, and they wanted a morally proportionate response. The late Lee Atwater, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, had been traveling in South Carolina when the story hit the wires. An assistant of mine asked Lee what the reaction beyond the Beltway was. "Hell, Bill," Lee told us, "the people are saying, 'We've finally got somebody in Washington who understands what's at stake.'"
(15) I later used the incident in speeches to gauge the moral sentiments of my audiences. I would ask, "If you saw a drug dealer selling drugs to your children, what would your impulse be?" Most audiences responded that their impulse would be to do violence to the drug dealer. And that impulse is right; it is simply a matter of channeling that impulse into law, of civilizing our retribution into a proper sense of justice. "This war [on drugs] is not for delicate sensibilities," I said in a speech at the National Press Club. "This is tough stuff. We need to get tough, we need to get tough as hell, we need to do it right now." But many of the critics didn't agree, and they couldn't quite figure out why I; wasn't brought down, or even harmed, by my "intemperate" comments to Larry King. What they didn't recognize is that the moral sense of the American people is sound. They had had it with drugs. They had seen the devastation. And they wanted us to fight.
(16) In Alaska -- where personal possession of marijuana was legal -- Senator Murkowski and others implored me to weigh in on behalf of a new initiative seeking to recriminalize possession of marijuana. Not surprisingly, the percentage of high school students using dope in Alaska was much higher than in the rest of the nation.
(17) When I accepted the invitation, the prolegalization forces went into action. The "pothead lobby," as I called it, distributed fliers in Anchorage and Fairbanks saying "Confront the Drug Bizarre." But when I arrived, there was very little opposition. A few bedraggled sixties types (including one woman who introduced herself as "the Dragon Lady") asked me mostly incomprehensible questions at an assembly in Anchorage. But there was no major confrontation. It later became apparent why. When the "pothead lobby" passed out fliers announcing my visit, they had put the wrong date on them. I had been saying for a long time that marijuana makes people inattentive and stupid. I rested my case.
(18) The legalization debate is for all intent and purposes over. But even to call it a "debate" suggests that the arguments in favor of drug legalization are rigorous, substantial and serious. At first glance some of the arguments sound appealing. But on further inspection one finds that at bottom they are nothing more than a series of unpersuasive and even disingenuous ideas that more sober minds recognize as a recipe for a public policy disaster.
(19) Legalization removes the incentive to stay away from a life of drugs. Some people are going to smoke crack whether it's legal or illegal. But by keeping it illegal, we maintain the criminal sanctions that persuade most people that the good life cannot be reached by dealing drugs. And that's exactly why we have drug laws -- to make drug use a wholly unattractive choice.
(20) One of the clear lessons of Prohibition is that when we had laws against alcohol, there was less consumption of alcohol, less alcohol-related disease, fewer drunken brawls, and a lot less public drunkenness. And contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused big increases in crime.
(21) I am not suggesting that we go back to Prohibition. Alcohol has a long, complicated history in this country, and unlike drugs, the American people accept alcohol. They have no interest in going back to Prohibition. But at least advocates of legalization should admit that legalized alcohol, which is responsible for some 100,000 deaths a year, is hardly a model for drug policy. As the columnist Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, the question is not which is worse, alcohol or drugs. The question is, should we accept both legalized alcohol and legalized drugs? The answer is no.
(22) If drugs were legalized, use would surely soar. In fact, we have just undergone a kind of cruel national experiment in which drugs became cheap and widely available: that experiment is called the crack epidemic. It was only when cocaine was dumped into the country, and a three-dollar vial of crack could be bought on street corners, that we saw cocaine use skyrocket -- mostly among the poor and disadvantaged.
(23) The price that American society would have to pay for legalized drugs would be intolerably high: more drug-related accidents at work, on the highway, and in the airways; bigger losses in worker productivity; hospitals filled with drug emergencies; more students on drugs, meaning more dropouts; more pregnant women buying legal cocaine, meaning more abused babies in utero. Add to this the added cost of treatment, social welfare, and insurance, and welcome to the Brave New World of drug legalization.
(24) To listen to legalization advocates, one might think that street crime would disappear with the repeal of our drug laws. But our best research indicates that most drug criminals were into crime well before they got into drugs. Making drugs legal would subsidize their habit. They would continue to rob and steal to pay for food, for clothes, for entertainment. And they would carry on with their drug trafficking by undercutting the legalized price of drugs and catering to teenagers who (I assume) would be nominally restricted from buying drugs at the corner drugstore.
(25) In my travels around the country I have seen nothing to support the legalizers' argument that lower drug prices would reduce crime. Virtually everywhere I have gone, police and DEA agents have told me that crime rates are highest where crack is cheapest.
(26) If we did legalize drugs, we would no doubt have to reverse the policy, like those countries that had experimented with broad legalization and decided it was a failure. In 1975 Italy liberalized its drug law and now has one of the highest heroin- related death rates in Western Europe. One Italian government official told me that the citizens of Italy are eager to recriminalize the use of drugs. They had seen enough casualties.
(27) And what about our children? If we make drugs more accessible, there will be more harm to children, direct and indirect. There will be more cocaine babies and more child abuse. Children after all aren among the most frequent victims of violent, drug-related crimes -- crimes that have nothing to do with the cost of acquiring the drugs. In Philadelphia in 1987 more than half the child-abuse fatalities involved at least one parent who was a heavy drug user. Seventy-three percent of the child-abuse cases in New York City in 1987 involved parental drug use.
(28) And it would be disastrous suddenly to switch signals on our children in school, whom we have been teaching, with great effect, that drug use is wrong. Why, they will ask, have we changed our minds?
(29) The whole legalization argument is based on the premise that progress is impossible. But there is now incontrovertible, unmistakable evidence of progress in the war on drugs.... Now would be exactly the wrong time to surrender and legalize.
(30) The legalization argument also revealed something troubling about some intellectuals. I elaborated on this point at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School on December 11, 1989:
America's intellectuals -- and here I think particularly of liberal intellectuals -- have spent much of the last nine years decrying the social programs of two Republican administrations in the name of the defenseless poor. But today, on the one outstanding issue that disproportionately hurts the poor -- that is wiping out many of the poor -- where are the liberal intellectuals to be found? They are on the editorial and op-ed pages, and in magazines, telling us with a sneer that our drug policy won't work.... One would think that a little more concern and serious thought would come from those who claim to care deeply about America's problems.
(31) John Jacob, president of the Urban League, has said, "Drugs kill more blacks than the Klan ever did. They're destroying more children and more families than poverty ever did." But many of the same intellectuals who strongly supported a "war on poverty" were AWOL in the war on drugs. I talked about this the next day on "Good Morning America."
The intellectuals are way out of sync with the American people. The American people have seen the drug problem. They've seen it up close, unfortunately, and don't have any tolerance for the idea of legalization. The problem with intellectuals -- the reason that it's worth making a speech and making a point -- is that they do form a lot of opinion. What they say affects what gets said on the editorial pages, what's regarded as respectable and reliable views on this. And right now, by their objections or their intransigence or disagreement, they're keeping us from moving ahead. And again, the thing I don't understand is why those who say they speak for those worse off in society aren't just full-fledged in this effort. Nothing is destroying poor communities in this country so effectively as drugs and yet we have people balking at the idea of waging a full-scale effort.
(32) Legalization is a fine position for those who wish to stand out from the crowd and who have the luxury of speaking from a safe distance. But instead of sophistication, advocates for legalization should seek out a clearer connection with reality. They should take a close look at the devastating effects of drugs.
(33) James Q. Wilson, Collins Professor of Management and Political Science at UCLA, has written:
. . . Even now, when the dangers of drug abuse are well understood, many educated people still discuss the drug problem in almost every way except the right way. They talk about the "costs" of drug use and the "socioeconomic factors" that shape that use. They rarely speak plainly - - drug use is wrong because it is immoral and it is immoral because it enslaves the mind and destroys the soul. It is as if it were a mark of sophistication for us to shun the language of morality in discussing the problems of mankind.
(34) In the end drug use is wrong because of what it does to human character. It degrades. It makes people less than they should be by burning away a sense of responsibility, subverting productivity, and making a mockery of virtue.
(35) Using drugs is wrong not simply because drugs create medical problems; it is wrong because drugs destroy one's moral sense. People addicted to drugs neglect their duties. The lure can become so strong that soon people will do nothing else but take drugs. They will neglect God, family, children, friends, and jobs -- everything in life that is important, noble, and worthwhile -- for the sake of drugs. This is why from the very beginning we posed the drug problem as a moral issue. And it was the failure to recognize the moral consequences of drug use that led us into the drug epidemic in the first place. In the late 1960s, many people rejected the language of morality, of right and wrong. Since then we have paid dearly for the belief that drug use was harmless and even an enlightening, positive thing.
(36) Drugs undermine the necessary virtues of a free society -- autonomy, self- reliance, and individual responsibility. The inherent purpose of using drugs is secession from reality, from society, and from the moral obligations individuals owe their family, their friends, and their fellow citizens. Drugs destroy the natural sentiments and duties that constitute our human nature and make our social life possible. As our founders would surely recognize, for a citizenry to be perpetually in a drug-induced haze doesn't bode well for the future of self-government.
(37) When all is said and done, the most compelling case that can be made against drug use rests on moral grounds. No civilized society -- especially a self-governing one -- can be neutral regarding human character and personal responsibility.