Officials in Seattle are reporting a small outbreak of botulism caused by contaminated black tar heroin:

In late August, a King County woman with a history of “black tar” heroin injection arrived at a hospital with slurred speech, double vision and drooping eyelids….

If the symptoms are slurred speech, double vision, and drooping eyelids, then it must be pretty hard to diagnose the disease among heroin addicts.  That’s pretty much a description of how they are most days.

Things like this just make me shake my head. First and foremost, because someone would do that to themselves and take the risks of hepatitis, HIV, and a myriad other diseases above and beyond the corrosive effects of the heroin itself.  Oh, and don’t forget the risk of a quick and ugly death when Skeeter cut your fix a bit too fine.  Another reason I shake my head is that the continued forcing of narcotics into the shadows by prohibition almost invites things like this.  If Big Pharma was making consumer grade narcotics and selling them through liquor stores or pharmacies, I’m pretty sure that things like this would be exceedingly rare due to quality control measures and the threat of a lawsuit.

I hope this is as rare as the article leads me to believe. I also hope that someday we become rational about the use and manufacture of intoxicants, but I’m not holding my breath.

The Obama administration is attacking a report that calls for changes in how the global trade in illicit drugs is handled. Their contention is that following the recommendations of the study, including some legalization of drugs, would make the drug problem in the United States worse.

While I have mixed feelings about drug use (I’ve never tried them, nor do I want my kids using them, but I don’t want the government to tell me or any other adult what they can or can’t put in their bodies), I’m willing to admit that our current approach isn’t working.  Before President Obama and Drug Czar Kerlikowske dismiss suggestions to change our approach, they should answer the following questions:

Since President Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971:

1. Has the number of people in the United States who regularly use illegal drugs gone down, either as a percentage of the U.S. population or in total numbers?
2. Have illegal drugs become harder or easier to get in the United States?
3. How many American lives have been saved by the current policy of prohibition?
4. How many excess deaths have occurred in the United States that can be tied to drugs or drug related crime, controlling for criminals who would have been killed anyway as a consequence of other crimes?
5. What else could have been done with the billions of dollars spent on incarceration and interdiction that would have had a positive impact on drug addicts, to include education, prevention, and treatment?
6. How many American citizens have been incarcerated as part of drug prohibition who broke no other laws?
7. How many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia have had what passes for a functioning government destroyed by the corruption of drug money?  
8. How much time, blood, sweat, and treasure have we spent trying to stop Americans from using drugs, and what value have we gotten for those expenditures?

I’m not saying that anyone, of any age, should be able to get whatever they want at the local package store, but the current approach is not working.  All we have done is make drug use something that is done in the shadows.  Even casual users of drugs take their lives in their own hands since they don’t know what their intoxicant of choice has been mixed with.  The amount of money that narcotics brings to traffickers has given them power to rival a nation state. 

Add to that the corrosive effect that drug enforcement has had on the relationship between police and the American population.  Were stories of people being shot in their own homes during raids, which even the police admit would not have led to arrests, common prior to 1971?  Did police regularly troll the interstate highway system looking for motorists who were carrying too much cash and impounding it?

Our failed policies on drugs need to change.  We need to admit that prohibition is not working, and allow adults to legally purchase and use whatever intoxicant they want and let them live with the consequences.  The safety of these intoxicants will go up as their production moves from Skeeter’s garage to an inspected and regulated factory and their sale moves from a corner in a bad neighborhood to the local pharmacy or liquor store.  Our police will be able to concentrate on something other than drugs for the first time in a generation. Once the profits from narcotics trafficking dry up, the drug cartels will also dry up.  Money that would have been spent on interdiction, prosecution, and incarceration can be spent on education, prevention, and treatment, or not spent at all.

Yes, there will still be people who ruin their lives and the lives of others with drugs.  But the same happens with alcohol, gambling,  and other non-wholesome parts of our society.  Prohibition of alcohol was an unmitigated failure, and so is prohibition of drugs.