Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 17, 1993 TAG: 9401140029
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A23 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Nowhere is this better demonstrated, outside the theocracies of latter-day Islamic puritanism, than in the American South, or for that matter in Virginia, where hayseed messiahs blossom like goldenrod and bring such faithful as those lapping at the boots of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to tears of righteousness. We like to cast out the devils of unorthodoxy.
This brings us without further ado to the curious case of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who had the gall to suggest the other day, and in public at that, that maybe the time has come to consider the legalization of drugs ruled illegal now.
The reaction across the nation would have made an alien wonder if he had stepped onto a planet where everything is known and settled and nothing more needs to be investigated, weighed or argued.
Everyone from President Bill Clinton on down, including nobly-spoken senators and congressmen calling for her dismissal from the nation's highest medical post, condemned her for even raising the idea. Conspicuous among the outraged, I am sorry to have to add, were the owlish commentators of my own profession, most of whom felt a solemn duty to step forward on Sunday-morning television to say how foolish she was and to reassure the public that no, they'd never even been around an illegal drug themselves.
This sanctimonious piffle, hypocritical and self-serving though it obviously was, drew the usual pieties from the clergy and editorial press, who averred in subsequent days that it was a heresy tantamount to advocating child molestation for Elders to have brought it up at all.
Permit another sinner to say, then, that two considerations seem to have been overlooked in the scramble to trumpet the majority line:
Why shouldn't selective legalization be considered?
Has the United States reached the point where only the ``politically correct'' may be spoken aloud?
To take the first point first: Surely it is obvious by now that heavy moralizing over drugs has had precisely the same sorry results in diminishing the social catastrophe drugs are causing as, to take only a few examples, Nancy Reagan's ``Just Say No'' wisdom, the invasion of Panama and the capture of Manuel Noriega, and the killing of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Nothing much has worked, in fact, whether it is the expenditure of $100 billion in tax monies between 1981 and 1992, the ``interdiction'' of drug smugglers nabbed at American borders and on American streets, ``stepped-up'' law enforcement or the ``no-parole'' policies urged by none other than Virginia Gov.-elect George Allen.
Nothing has worked or will work, almost everyone who knows the drug scene agrees, until and unless the demand for drugs in America is reduced at the root - which is not only the streets and projects of urban ghettos but the comfortable suburbs inhabited by the ``law-abiding'' white yuppies who keep cocaine, heroin and marijuana alive.
Meanwhile, of course, the nation finds itself swamped in violent crime, an immense portion of it caused by the drug trade, and with the costs drug use is imposing on American society.
If ``legalization'' - or at least ``decriminalization'' - took the profit away from street dealers, mightn't it follow that street dealing would fall?
As to the second point: America was built on the principle that any idea, however radical or obnoxious, deserves its fair hearing. If we are a ``cockpit of ideas,'' as Mill and other 19th-century libertarians argued, then how can any idea be beneath or beyond discussion? To consider legalization is not to admire drugs but to weigh alternative solutions to a horrendous problem. It is deeds that are killing us, not the ideas behind them.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB