Renewing a lawyerly pitch for ending drug prohibition

Thanks to this postat TalkLeft, I see that the New York City Bar Association's Committee on Drugs and the Law has issued this interesting five-page document titled "A Wiser Course: Ending Drug Prohibition, Fifteen Years Later."  Here are snippets from the start of the report:

In 1994, the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on Drugs and the Law concluded that the societal costs of drug prohibition are too high to justify it as a policy and called for a national dialogue on alternatives.  Fifteen years later, that dialogue has not occurred, we are no closer to a drug-free society, and the problems associated with the illegal drug trade are worse than ever....

On June 10, 1994, the Committee on Drugs and the Law (the “Committee”) of the New York City Bar Association released a report (the “Report”) entitled “A Wiser Course: Ending Drug Prohibition.” It is available at http://www.nycbar.org/pdf/report/94087WiserCourse.pdf

The Report argued in detail, inter alia, that drug prohibition strains the judicial system with no apparent diminution in drug trade or drug use, fills prisons at great expense to the taxpayers, disproportionately punishes racial minorities, corrupts police and erodes constitutional rights, subsidizes organized crime, drafts poor children into the drug trade, causes violence by engendering competition over the lucrative illegal drug market, fails to decrease demand for drugs, facilitates the spread of disease and impairs the health of drug users, and diverts resources from prevention and treatment to law enforcement.

In short, the Report argued that U.S. drug control policy is the cause of, rather than the solution for, many social problems associated with drugs, and it identified several alternatives to prohibition proposed by members of the federal judiciary (including repeal of all federal laws banning drug sales and possession in favor of state-level drug control, a policy of reduced arrests, and sale of drugs through state stores) without advocating any specific policy....

Today the Committee makes a renewed call for a serious discussion of U.S. drug policy through a focus on the medical paradigm and the Controlled Substances Act.

Some recent related posts:

• Thoughtful academic thoughts on ending marijuana prohibitions
• "Time For Marijuana Legalization?"
• Terrific commentary and assessment of the war on drugs
• More calls for an end to the drug war and legalization of marijuana