9 ~,~i - National Criminal Justice Reference Service

Neither Prohibition Nor Legalization 79
away from what might be a sensible center? Alcohol, for example,
has gone from being permitted, to being prohibited, to being permitted
again, without ever being tighdy regulated as proposed here.
Part of the answer may be technological; the information-processing
demands of, for example, a quantity-regulation system were
simply too great to make such a system feasible before recent
advances in computers and telecommunications. But most of it must
be ideological and organizational.
To regard a drug as at once safe (for most people under most
circumstances) and dangerous (in the wrong hands or at the wrong
times and places) puts a strain on individual and collective tolerances
for cognitive dissonance. Nor is it comfortable for citizens and
officials to think about the dangers of their own habits; it is far easier
to locate the "drug problem" entirely in the other person's (or class's,
or generation's) drugs. That is what creates controversy around what
ought to be obvious propositions, such as "alcohol is a drug" or
"nicotine is highly addictive."
Moreover, the strain between drug prohibition and ideological
opposition to state interference in private choices can be relieved by
asserting that any use of the banned drugs is harmful in itself, and
that therefore no valuable liberty is denied by their prohibition. Such
a claim would be much harder to square with a program of grudging
toleration. In particular, any system of personal licensing and quantity
limitation would require "bureaucracy" and "red tape." By
contrast, a strict prohibition , though far more restrictive, does not
require citizens to apply to officialdom for permissions of various
kinds and generates no lists of those who engage in lawful but
potentially embarrassing activity.
Any regulatory regime creates either a public monopoly or a
regulated industry. The employees of either one will not be happy
regarding themselves as purveyors of a vice, and as servants of either
taxpayers or stockholders they will have every incentive to increase
revenues by increasing the volume of consumption. Thus a program
of strict regu!ation short of prohibition may not be stable over time.
The state lotteries, with their relentless promotion, serve as a bad
example. 34
Finally, I must emphasize that grudging toleration does not hold
out the prospect of a "solution" to the drug problem. Even for those
substances to which it could be successfully applied, it would leave us
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