by Gary E. Johnson
Cato Policy Report
November/December 1999, Vol. XXI, No. 6

Gov. Gary E. Johnson - click the image for the complete video of Gov. Johnson's speech at at the Cato conference "Beyond Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century"

I am a cost/benefit analysis person. What's the cost and whatÕs the benefit? A couple of things scream out as failing to meet cost/benefit criteria. One is education. Regrettably, all I have done since I have taken office when it comes to education is put more and more money into a system that by all measurement is just doing a little bit worse from year to year. So I am now pressing for school vouchers. Bring competition to public school systems, and it will make a positive difference.

The other cost/benefit disaster is the war on drugs. We are currently spending $50 billion a year on the war on drugs. For that amount of money, it is an absolute failure. The ÒoutrageousÓ hypothesis that I have been raising is that under a legalized scenario, we could actually hold drug use level or see it decline. That is debatable. But with respect to drug abuse, I donÕt think you can argue about that. Drug abuse would clearly decline under a legalized system.

Let me make something clear. IÕm not pro-drug. IÕm against drugs. DonÕt do drugs. Drugs are a real handicap. DonÕt do alcohol. DonÕt do tobacco. They are a real handicap.

ThereÕs another issue beyond cost/benefit criteria. Should you go to jail for simply doing drugs? I say no. People ask me, ÒWhat do you tell kids?Ó Well, you tell them the truth. You tell them that by legalizing drugs, we can control them, regulate them, and tax them. If we legalize drugs, we might have a healthier society. And you explain to them how that might take place. But you tell them that drugs are a bad choice. DonÕt do drugs. But if you do drugs, weÕre not going to throw you in jail for that.

Under a legalized scenario, there is going to be a whole new set of laws. You canÕt do drugs if youÕre under 21 years of age. You canÕt sell drugs to kids. Employers should be able to discriminate against drug users. Employers should be able to conduct drug tests. Do drugs and do crime? Enhance the penalty for the crime in the same way we do today with guns. Do drugs and drive? There should be a law similar to the law we have now for driving under the influence of alcohol.

Does anybody want to press a button that would retroactively punish the 80 million Americans who have done illegal drugs over the years? I might point out that IÕm one of those individuals. In running for my first term in office, I offered up the fact that I had smoked marijuana. And the media were very quick to say, ÒOh, so you experimented with marijuana?Ó ÒNo,Ó I said, ÒI smoked marijuana!Ó This is something that I did, along with a lot of other people. I look back on it now and I view drugs as a handicap. I stopped because it was a handicap. But did my friends and I belong in jail? I donÕt think that we should continue to lock up Americans because of bad choices.

Legalization means we educate, regulate, tax, and control the estimated $400 billion a year drug industry. We need to make drugs a controlled substance just like alcohol. Perhaps we ought to let the government regulate it; let the government grow it; let the government manufacture it, distribute it, market it; and if that doesnÕt lead to decreased drug use, I donÕt know what would!

A teenager today will tell you that a bottle of beer is harder to come by than a marijuana joint. The Partnership for a Drug Free America was bragging to me that it was responsible for the ÒHereÕs your brain, and hereÕs your brain on drugsÓ ad. Well, some kids believe that, perhaps three-year-olds, maybe even nine- or ten-year-olds. But at some point, kids have friends who smoke marijuana for the first time. Like everybody else, I was told that if you smoke marijuana, youÕre going to go crazy. YouÕre going to lose your mind. Then you smoked marijuana for the first time and none of those things happened. Actually, it was kind of nice. And then you realized that they werenÕt telling you the truth. I envision advertising that tells the truth, which says drugs are kind of nice and thatÕs the lure of drugs. But if you continue to do drugs, they are a real handicap. We need to have an honest educational campaign about drugs.

Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey has made me his poster child for drug legalization. He claims that drug use has been cut in half and that we are winning the drug war. I donÕt buy that for a minute, but letÕs assume that itÕs true. LetÕs assume that drug use has, in fact, dropped in half. Well, if it has, in the late 1970s we were spending a billion dollars federally on the drug war. Today, the feds are spending $19 billion a year on the drug war. In the late 1970s, we were arresting a few hundred thousand people. Today, weÕre arresting 1.6 million people. Does that mean that as drug use declines by another half weÕre going to be spending $36 billion federally and arresting 3.2 million people annually? To follow that logic, when weÕre left with a few hundred users nationwide, weÕre going to be spending the entire gross national product on drug law enforcement!

I want to tell you a little bit about the response that IÕve been getting to what IÕve been saying. Politically, this is a zero. For anybody holding office, for anybody that aspires to hold office, this is verboten. But what I want to tell you is that among the public, this is absolutely overwhelming. This is the biggest head-in-the-sand issue in this country today. In New Mexico, I am being approached rapid fire with people saying Òright onÓ with your statements regarding the war on drugs. And I want to suggest to you that the public reaction is 97 to 3 positive.

What I believe I have discovered is that the war on drugs is thousands of miles long, but itÕs only about a quarter-inch deep. I appreciate the work that has already been done by all of you. IÕve now been given the stage, and IÕm trying to make the most of it. IÕm trying to communicate what I believe in: I believe that drugs are bad, but I believe that we need to stop arresting and locking up the entire country.

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Gary Johnson Is Right

By David Boaz
Executive vice president of the Cato Institute.

In a political world where more and more politicians let their pollsters tell them what to think, it's refreshing to discover that the Great American West has produced another leader of courage and integrity. Like Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who opposed big government before it was popular to do so, and Mike Gravel of Alaska, who campaigned against the draft and the Vietnam War, Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico is a man who says what he thinks.

On such issues as school vouchers and the right to bear arms, Johnson has shown two strong tendencies: a commitment to individual freedom and a willingness to take a hard look at the evidence. Looking at the facts, he concluded that crime is reduced when law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry guns and that kids would get a better education if their families had a choice of schools.

Now Johnson has shown those same characteristics on another controversial issue. He's one of the first high-ranking elected officials to question the war on drugs. "I believe that our war on drugs has been a dismal failure. We are putting more and more money into a war that we are absolutely losing," he told the Taos Chamber of Commerce.

It's hard to argue with that. Futile efforts to enforce prohibition have been pursued even more vigorously in the 1980s and 1990s than they were during alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Drug enforcement cost about $22 billion in the Reagan years and another $45 billion in the four years of the Bush administration. The federal government spent $16 billion on drug control programs in 1998 alone and plans to spend $18 billion this year. States and local communities spend even more.

What good has it all done? Well, total drug arrests are now more than 1.5 million a year. There are about 400,000 drug offenders in jails and prisons now, and over 80 percent of the increase in the federal prison population from 1985 to 1995 was due to drug convictions. Drug offenders are about 60 percent of all federal prisoners, while those in federal prison for violent offenses are only 12.4 percent of the total.

But of course, all the arrests and incarcerations haven't stopped the use and abuse of drugs, or the drug trade, or the crime associated with black-market transactions. Cocaine and heroin supplies are up; the more our Customs agents interdict, the more smugglers import.

As for discouraging young people from using drugs, the massive federal effort has largely been a dud. Despite the soaring expenditures on anti-drug efforts, in 1995 about half the students in the United States tried an illegal drug before they graduated from high school. Every year from 1975 to 1995 at least 82 percent of high school seniors said they found marijuana "fairly easy" or "very easy" to obtain.

That's why more and more thoughtful people have been questioning the war on drugs and calling for decriminalization, from Kurt Schmoke, a former prosecutor and now the Democratic mayor of Baltimore, to George Shultz, who was Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, to Jesse Ventura, the Reform Party governor of Minnesota.

When a public policy isn't working, we should try something different. If spending more than $30 billion a year and arresting 1.5 million people a year isn't stopping drug use and abuse, then we should try a different strategy.

Gary Johnson has said that he doesn't want New Mexico to legalize drugs on its own, lest the state become a haven for addicts from the rest of the country. That's a legitimate concern. What we should be debating right now is federal policy, and we should start by remembering that the United States is a federal republic, in which the 50 states make most of the decisions. Congress should deal with drug prohibition the way it dealt with alcohol prohibition. The Twenty-First Amendment did not actually legalize the sale of alcohol; it simply repealed the federal prohibition and returned to the states the authority to set alcohol policy. States took the opportunity to design diverse liquor policies that were in tune with the preferences of their citizens. After 1933 three states and hundreds of counties continued to practice prohibition. Other states chose various forms of alcohol legalization.

Congress should withdraw from the war on drugs and let the states set their own policies, just as they already do for alcohol. For their part, the states should prohibit drug sales to children, just as alcohol sales to children are prohibited today. Driving under the influence of drugs should be illegal. But beyond such obvious restrictions, states should be free to set the drug policies that make sense to them, up to and including sales to adults by licensed stores, much as alcohol is sold today.

Federal withdrawal from the drug war would be an acknowledgment that our current drug policies have failed. It would restore authority to the states, as the Founders envisioned. It would save taxpayers' money. And over time it would allow us to develop an approach to drug use that abandons prohibition and massive incarceration in favor of a common-sense system in which the propensity of some people to use drugs is accepted and dealt with sensibly.

Whether or not we eventually adopt such a policy, we should certainly have an honest debate on the subject. Voters in every state should be glad that New Mexico has a citizen-governor who is not afraid to take on tough issues and challenge the status quo.

This article originally Appeared in the Albuquerque Journal on Monday, August 23, 1999.

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Gov. Johnson seeks to liberalize drug laws

National Public Radio (US)
Friday, March 16, 2001


According to NPR's "Morning Edition," the Republican governor of New Mexico is leading a legislative charge to liberalize drug laws in the state.  Among eight bills under consideration is a measure that would decriminalize possession of up to one ounce of marijuana. 

Gov.  Gary Johnson has been an outspoken advocate of reform, saying marijuana use doesn't necessarily harm other people.  If the measure passes, New Mexico would become the first state in more than two decades to decriminalize marijuana use, but opposition to the bill is solid. 

In "Gary Johnson Is Right," ( http://www.cato.org/dailys/09-03-99.html ) Executive Vice President David Boaz commends Johnson's leadership in putting an end to the drug war.  Johnson spoke at the Cato conference "Beyond Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century" last year and a video ( http://www.cato.org/realaudio/drugwar/con-10-05-99lad.ram ) and text
( http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v21n6/johnsonspeech.html ) of his speech are available on the Cato Web site.  Governor Johnson's also contributed a chapter to the Cato book "Beyond Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century."
( http://www.cato.org/cgi-bin/Web_store/web_store.cgi?page=afterprohibition.html&cart_id )

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For more information, check Gov. Johnson's website: http://www.gov.state.nm.us/

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