New directions in drug war

Some days in Connecticut it seems as if the “war on drugs” is being brought to an end. On other days the drug warriors are boasting about their latest offensive.

The most compelling reason to end the war, at least as manifested by the criminal law, is, of course, simply its failure. Use of illegal drugs is more common than ever despite the war’s many casualties — people hobbled by imprisonment and criminal records, families broken apart, and thousands of deaths and injuries caused by addiction and by addicts robbing to feed their addiction.

The least compelling reason to end the war is the reason that seems most persuasive in the General Assembly — the tax revenue that might be raised by legalizing and commercializing the sale of marijuana, as Colorado, Massachusetts and other states have done. Legislators have lots of ideas for the revenue, though there might not be as much as they think, since the higher the tax, the more illegal dealers will stay in business and offer lower prices by avoiding taxes.

City legislators are staking a special claim to tax revenue from legal marijuana. They argue that city residents have suffered most from the drug war, the cities having supplied disproportionate numbers of dealers, users and convicts. So city legislators contend that marijuana tax revenue should be devoted to the remediation of the cities — that it should provide more funding for all the urban policies that have failed as badly as the drug war itself.

No, if marijuana is legalized and commercialized, its tax revenue should be used for drug rehabilitation, for which legalization and commercialization will greatly increase the need.

But legalization for commercialization is not yet appropriate for marijuana. While Connecticut is free to repeal its marijuana penalties, the drug remains prohibited by federal law, so for the time being, licensing and taxing marijuana’s sale on the state level would constitute nullification of federal law — disunionism.

Legislators may be forgiven for their ignorance of this detail, but what is the excuse of state Attorney General William Tong and other state attorneys general who are urging Congress to pass legislation giving state-legalized marijuana businesses access to the banking system?

Without corresponding repeal of the federal law against marijuana, the banking legislation would make the legal code contradictory and incoherent.

Meanwhile Tong and other state attorneys general are escalating the drug war by suing Stamford-based pharmaceutical maker Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, accusing them of deceptive marketing practices, which, the lawsuit claims, caused the epidemic and often fatal abuse of the painkiller OxyContin.

But the primary responsibility for the abuse of OxyContin rests not with its manufacturer but with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which approved the drug 24 years ago, and with the doctors who have prescribed it without sufficient care.

It’s not as if the drug has no legitimate use. If it was not such an effective painkiller it would not have been prescribed so frequently and made so much money for Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers. They didn’t force anyone to take it any more than marijuana dealers forced anyone to light up. Both drugs can be abused and cause harm.

But suing the federal government and thousands of doctors for negligence would be a lot harder than suing a pharmaceutical company, which these days is always an easy scapegoat.