There is No Ideal Drug Policy
people are always going to want to get high and some of them are going to die
I have a (paywalled) election postmortem up at The Free Press, making my same old case: the Democrats cannot consistently win as Republicans Lite, and must become a truly left-wing party to win elections and to counteract the negative effects of Republican political power. The only way to be a successful political party is to have an identity, and the ongoing Clintonite era of the Democratic party leaves them with none.
On his podcast, Ezra Klein interviews Charles Fain Lehman, a Manhattan Institute fellow who’s been busily trying to roll the country back to Reagan-era drug attitudes. We’ve finally seen a little policy movement rising from the backlash to a century of catastrophic drug prohibition laws in this country, and in the modern information economy where there is backlash there is backlash to the backlash. That’s how the pundit market works.
It’s a deeply frustrating interview in a way that’s common to the chummy world of podcasting, which is that Lehman says a number of tendentious and unsourced things that Klein does not challenge. For example, at one point Lehman suggests that’s what’s necessary for marijuana decriminalization to work is very harsh enforcement against the black market trade; that is, the legal market can’t compete against the black market, so you have to have particularly muscular enforcement against the black market. What he doesn’t say, and what Klein doesn’t bring up in response, is that very harsh enforcement of the black market in a larger decriminalization environment entails all of the ills of drug prohibition that we’ve lived with for too long - locking people up for possession, taxing our criminal justice system in an inevitably doomed effort, deepening racial inequality and the destruction of already-impoverished communities, and dramatically expanding the infrastructure of the drug war, which already amounts to one of the most horrifically misguided wastes of blood and treasure in the history of the country. Lehman admits that this is all very politically unpalatable, but doesn’t mention the obvious reasons why: because Americans lived under such a regime for the better part of a century and it failed! Voters are rejecting prohibition, slowly and in pieces, because prohibition produces horribly unjust outcomes. That’s sensible. And setbacks at the ballot box this past Tuesday are not going to magically make prohibition work.
Klein is an avatar for solutionism, the perspective that implies that every problem has some ideal fix, that if we tweak the levers and dials effectively we can get an ideal policy on drugs or anything else. Because our (minor and halting) efforts at drug decriminalization have come with negative repercussions, the solutionist impulse is to pull back, reverse course. But drug prohibition still doesn’t work; criminalizing drug use does not prevent drug use, creates perverse incentives like the ones that led to the popularization of fentanyl over the much-safer alternative of heroin, and creates second-order harms in terms of enforcement. Which is all a perfect distillation of what solutionism/wonkism can be so destructive: the refusal to accept that some things in life are bad but can’t be changed prompts fresh harms. And it’s a fact that human beings want to get high, have always wanted to get high, and will always want to get high, and some of them are always going to ruin their lives or die in that pursuit. That cannot be changed.