Trechos selecionados do texto do Mark Kleiman, sublinhados e negritos por minha conta:
Dopey, Boozy, Smoky—and Stupid[...] Thirty-five years into the “war on drugs”, the United States still has a huge drug abuse problem, with several million problem users of illicit drugs and about 15 million problem users of alcohol. Illicit drug-dealing industries take in about $50 billion per year. [...]
On top of all that, we have a highly intrusive and semi-militarized drug enforcement effort that is often only marginally constitutional and sometimes more than marginally indecent.1 That enforcement effort keeps about 500,000 Americans behind bars at any one time for drug law violations, about 25 percent of the total U.S. prison and jail population. A larger proportion of U.S. residents is doing time for drug law violations than is behind bars for all offenses put together in any country to which we’d like to be compared.
[nota minha: se não me engano, os EUA tem cerca de 25% da população carcerária
mundial)
[...] But the first step toward achieving less awful results is accepting that
there is no one “solution” to the drug problem, for essentially three reasons. First, the potential for drug abuse is built into the human brain. Left to their own devices, and subject to the sway of fashion and the blandishments of advertising, many people will wind up ruining their lives and the lives of those around them by falling under the spell of one drug or another. Second, any laws—prohibitions, regulations or taxes—stringent enough to substantially reduce the number of addicts will be defied and evaded,
and those who use drugs in defiance of the laws will generally wind up poorer, sicker and more likely to be criminally active than they would otherwise have been. [...]
The FactsBasics Most drug use is harmless, and much of it is beneficial—at least if harmless pleasure and relaxation count as benefits. But drug abuse is a real problem all the same because some drug users—typically a fairly small minority among consumers of any given drug—lose control of their behavior when under the influence and do foolish or wicked things. Another overlapping and even smaller group loses control over drug-taking itself. [...] For most people who fall into its grip, drug abuse is relatively transient. [...]
Not all drugs are equally risky or abusable. But since different drugs are abused in different ways and have different harm profiles, there is no single measure of “harmfulness” or “addictiveness” by which drugs can be ranked. Moreover, the overall damage caused by a drug does not depend on its neurochemistry alone; the composition of the user base and the social context and customs around its use also matter.
Alcohol, for example, constitutes a major violence-and-disorder problem in Britain, but not in Italy. [...]
Among intoxicants (that is, excluding caffeine and nicotine), alcohol abuse accounts for more than three-quarters of total substance abuse in the United States, and for more death, illness, crime, violence and arrests than all illicit drugs combined. [...]
Laws and law enforcementTaxes, regulations and prohibitions can reduce drug consumption and abuse, but always at the cost of making the remaining consumption more damaging than it would otherwise be. Any rule restrictive enough to matter needs to be enforced, and enforcement is always costly and damaging to those punished. [...]
We have 15 times as many drug dealers in prison today as we had in 1980, yet the prices of cocaine and heroin have fallen by more than 80 percent. [...]
Aggressive enforcement against mass drug markets generates mass imprisonment. Imprisonment is necessarily horrible, and most imprisonment in the United States is worse than necessary. Dealers emerging from prison have limited economic opportunities outside the drug trade, forcing down drug-dealing wages and thus drug prices; that seems to have happened with crack. [...]
Prevention Drug-use prevention efforts are very cost-effective because they’re very cheap. But they aren’t very effective; even the best programs, combining school-based and community-based efforts, reduce the rate of initiation by no more than a quarter, with no assurance that spending more would produce bigger effects. [...]
Treatment[...]Most substance abuse disorders resolve “spontaneously”; that is, without formal treatment. (Of those who have met diagnostic criteria for substance abuse disorder during their lifetimes, fewer than a quarter still do, and only a tiny proportion of those who have recovered have ever been treated professionally.) [...]
Tobacco[...] Pipe and cigar smoking and the use of smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco and snuff) are much less addictive and much less damaging to health than cigarette smoking. Nicotine use could be made safer by moving users away from cigarettes, by reducing the toxic content of tobacco products (for example, formaldehyde and benzene), or by vaporizing the active agents in tobacco with external heat rather than by burning the leaves, thus delivering nicotine to the lung without the accompanying cloud of hot, toxic gases and particulates.
Hallucinogens[...] Some hallucinogens have been used for religious/spiritual purposes for centuries, if not millennia [...] A recent experiment at Johns Hopkins University showed that psilocybin, the active agent in “magic mushrooms”, when given under controlled conditions can safely and fairly reliably produce effects indistinguishable from classical mystical experiences, with apparently persistent positive effects on mood and behavior. The Native American Church, which claims a quarter of a million members, has had special legal permission to use mescaline-bearing peyote buttons in its services for more than half a century, and no apparent harm has resulted. The Supreme Court, interpreting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, has now ruled that other churches using other chemicals may do so lawfully if the religious motive is genuine and the practices reasonably safe.
[...]
A Practical Agenda[...] Don’t fill prisons with ordinary dealers. While prohibition clearly reduces drug abuse (otherwise there wouldn’t be several times as many abusers of alcohol as of all illicit drugs combined), and some level of enforcement is necessary to make prohibition a reality, increasing enforcement efforts against mass-marketed drugs cannot significantly raise the prices of those drugs or make them much harder to acquire. [...] Given the fiscal and human costs of incarceration, and the opportunity cost of locking up a drug dealer in a cell that might otherwise hold a burglar or a rapist, the current level of drug-related incarceration is hard to justify. We can reduce that level with arrest-minimizing enforcement strategies and by a discriminating moderation in drug sentencing.
Lock up dealers based on nastiness, not on volume. All drug dealers supply drugs; only some use violence, or operate flagrantly, or employ juveniles as apprentice dealers. The current system of enforcement, which bases targeting and sentencing primarily on drug volume, should be replaced with a system focused on conduct. If we target and severely sentence the nastiest dealers rather than the biggest ones, we can greatly reduce the amount of gunfire, the damage drug dealing does to the neighborhoods around it, and the attractive nuisance the drug trade offers to teenagers. [...]
If we’re already locking up ordinary drug dealers forever, locking up the nastier ones forever and a day won’t create much competitive disadvantage for violence-prone or juvenile-employing organizations. [...]
(sobre traficantes-usuários e usuários problemáticos)Pressure drug-using offenders to stop. The relatively small number of offenders (no more than three million all together) who are frequent, high-dose users of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine accounts for a large proportion both of theft and of the money spent on illicit drugs. Getting a handle on their behavior is inseparable from getting a handle on street crime and the drug markets.
Yet current policies for dealing with such offenders ignore everything we know both about addiction and deterrence. [...] Not every drug-using offender has a diagnosable substance abuse disorder, and insisting (as drug courts do) that every offender have a treatment-needs assessment and a personalized treatment plan sops up scarce capacity, sometimes to the point that poor drug users can’t get treated without getting arrested first.
[...] we should make the consequences of non-compliance and the rewards of compliance quicker and more reliable. Frequent testing, with automatic and formulaic sanctions for using or missing a test, greatly reduces drug use, and therefore crime, even among chronic user-offenders. Probation or parole revocation—putting the offender behind bars for months, or even years—should be reserved for those who commit serious new crimes or abscond from supervision. The sanction for continuing to use drugs should be no more than a few days in jail. If that threat is made credible, it will generally induce compliance. (Hawaii’s HOPE probation program, based on the “coerced abstinence” model, has reduced the rate of positive drug tests among its clients by 80 percent or more.) Delivering a relatively mild sanction swiftly and consistently is both more effective and less cruel than only occasionally and randomly lowering the boom.
[...]
Deny alcohol to problem drinkers. When someone gets caught drinking and driving, we take away his license: his driving license, that is. The “license” to drink—legal permission to buy and consume alcohol in unlimited quantities—is presumed to be irrevocable. But why?
We know that someone who drinks and drives is a bad citizen when drunk, but not that he is a bad driver when sober. If someone is convicted of drunken driving, or drunken assault, or drunken vandalism, or repeatedly of drunk and disorderly conduct—if, that is, someone demonstrates that he is either a menace or a major public nuisance when drunk—then why not revoke his (or, much more rarely, her) drinking license? [...]
Eliminate the minimum drinking age. [...] against the benefits we must weigh the costs of making the vast majority of adolescents into lawbreakers. Nearly nine high-school seniors in ten report drinking.
Criminalizing statistically normal behavior trivializes lawbreaking by enacting a law that almost everyone breaks, and breaks without apparent harm:
Most teenage drinkers, like most adult drinkers, don’t have a drinking problem. The current drinking age has also normalized the acquisition and use of false identification documents, which seems like a bad idea in the age of terror. [...]
Say more than “No.” The current set of messages in most school-based prevention programs—that all drug use is abuse and that cannabis is as dangerous as any other drug—has three big defects. The first is that the messages are false, and lying to schoolchildren is bad. The second is that when the kids figure out that the messages are false—and they do—they won’t believe warnings against harder drugs (or other warnings from the government). The third is that once you’ve told kids that all drug use is abuse, it’s hard to go back and tell them how to keep watch over the circumstances and patterns of their own drug-taking to avoid the transition from non-problem use to abuse. Today, even responsible drinking is a taboo topic. It’s time for the prevention effort to grow up. [...]
Let pot-smokers grow their own. Marijuana is an outlier among currently illicit drugs. Its risks are markedly smaller, its consumption is enormously more widespread, and it leads to more arrests than all the others combined—mostly for misdemeanor possession. It is also the one illicit drug that consumers could practically produce themselves. [...]
Not that cannabis is harmless. While its “capture rate” to abuse and dependency is substantially smaller than comparable rates for alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin, and while the damage from abuse and dependency are usually much less drastic, the rate of capture is still high enough, and the consequences bad enough, to constitute a substantial problem, especially given that the median age of cannabis initiation is now about 15.
Full commercial legalization of cannabis, on the model now applied to alcohol, would vastly increase the cannabis-abuse problem by giving the marketing geniuses who have done such a fine job persuading children to smoke tobacco, drink to excess and supersize themselves with junk food another vice to foster.
However, if current laws were changed to make it illegal to sell cannabis or to exchange it for anything of value, but not to grow it, possess it, use it or give it away, the costs of the current control regime could be sharply reduced without greatly increasing the size of the marijuana consumption problem. Such a law could not effectively prevent private sales any more than a ban on gambling can prevent private poker games. Its goal would be to prevent mass marketing. [...]
Encourage problem drug users to quit without formal treatment. Some problem drug users need treatment; others do not. Making it widely known that most people with substance abuse problems can recover without professional help would increase the rate of “spontaneous” attempts to quit. Those who try often enough (five failures before success is the average for those trying to quit smoking) are likely to succeed. It won’t work for everyone, but not trying is the only approach certain to fail. [...]
Work on immunotherapies. Imagine stimulating the immune system of a cigarette smoker or a crack user to recognize molecules of nicotine or cocaine as foreign bodies and sop them up in the bloodstream before they reach the brain. It appears that such treatments, consisting of a single injection every month or every few months, are technically feasible for at least some drugs, including nicotine and cocaine. The social benefits of perfecting them and bringing them to market are much larger than the profits a manufacturer could hope to earn.
Immunotherapies should therefore be high priority for public drug-research dollars, especially compared to the expensive and so far largely futile search for drugs to ease the craving that comes from quitting cocaine. (Note that these treatments are technically “vaccines”, but their use is therapeutic, not prophylactic. Mass immunization makes no sense in this context.) [...][
Texto inteiro:
Dopey, Boozy, Smoky—and Stupid
