If, as these stories suggest, the cause of property crime that has put so many of our citizens into fear is the need of drug users to acquire money or property in order to get drugs, then some interesting ideas suggest themselves.
Try to follow this logic: If drugs were free or inexpensive, most of these crimes would not occur. A reason for the high costs of drugs is that there has developed a huge and illicit market in which illegal dealers, who take great risks to acquire illegal drugs, keep the price of illicit drugs very high. Those who engage in this traffic create additional crimes of fear, intimidation and violence.
This illicit market could be eliminated or sharply reduced if the dissemination of drugs were controlled and regulated by the government, as is the case with alcohol. Not only could supply be controlled, but the demand could be reduced by diverting some enforcement money into prevention, treatment and education. There would no longer exist any reason for drug users to rob or burglarize innocent citizens in order to buy drugs.
How to achieve this goal admittedly raises some difficult and controversial questions, some of which are made more difficult by the fact that the federal government has its own drug laws and its own "war on drugs;" the states cannot therefore act unilaterally. However, there is spreading recognition across the country that the "war on drugs" has failed and that it has not only not prevented drug use but that it has caused the crime rate to soar and the prisons to burst their seams.
It is not just "crazies" who cry for reform of our drug laws. Intelligent people from the entire political spectrum - William Buckley, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, Walter Cronkite, Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, Mayor Shmoke of Baltimore, and many professionals in Hawaii - have spoken in favor of reassessing the policy of prohibition of drugs. This prohibition, like the prohibition of alcohol, which the American people long ago reversed, has failed to do anything but make a rotten situation worse.
With regard to marijuana, which the federal government inappropriately treats as a highly dangerous drug, the voters of Arizona and California have now taken the lead in moving toward a rational policy of allowing the use of marijuana to ease the symptoms of seriously ill persons.
What is needed now is open, democratic discussion of the issues of drug use and abuse and of the appropriate, cost efficient and most rational responses. In this discussion, the real costs of prohibition, which according to the best evidence hasn't worked and will not work, and which has produced the horrible crime rate which has put an entire population in fear, must be compared with the real costs of alternative strategies, those that fall under the heading of "harm reduction." The reorganized Drug Policy Forum of Hawaii, formerly the Hawaii Drug Policy Options Group, will be encouraging such discussion in the coming months.
Perhaps the ultimate question for all of us is this: Which is worse, the current drug policy, which produces a continuing and unabated crime rate in which no one's home, property, or person is safe, or a new drug policy in which dependent drug users - who are already getting drugs through illicit sources and by criminal means - could obtain their drugs at low cost and in controlled circumstances, as well as treatment where needed, under carefully planned government control and regulation?
Richard S. Miller is professor of law emeritus at the University of Hawaii School of Law and a board member of the Drug Policy Forum of Hawaii. The opinions in View Point columns are the authors' and are not necessarily shared by the Star-Bulletin.