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A Summary of the Major Tenets of PUBLIC INTEREST INTERPOSITION IN THE MARKET FOR ILLEGAL DRUGS, As that Strategy Has Evolved to November, 1994 By Donald C. Smart

Interposition is a comprehensive public health strategy to reduce drug use, to reduce the harm consequent to ongoing drug use, and to abate drug-related crime. In formulating this strategy, a guiding purpose has been to bring together the most successful experience from around the world, synthesizing it into a theoretically unified, internally consistent general program for effective and efficient public intervention against the drug/crime epidemic.

Although first conceived as an answer to the problem of controlling illegal drugs, interposition is now seen to be a useful guide to interventions against legal drugs as well. Since the salient features of interposition appear to be more readily grasped in the legal context, let us commence with an example of an interposition against a legal drug, tobacco. Such an interposition might include measures:

• to block the tobacco industry's seduction of new smokers; (This can be done in various ways, perhaps most effectively, by excluding advertising and promotional expenses from the costs tobacco manufacturers are allowed to deduct from income for corporate taxation.)
• to diminish the health detriments of smoking; (This too can be done in many ways, including aggressive merchandising of cigarette substitutes and safer cigarettes manufactured and sold by, or for, the interposing agency.)
• to help smokers shorten the period of their addiction and overcome tobacco dependency. (This can be accomplished through programs of tobacco education and negative advertising against tobacco products--as the State of California is now brilliantly demonstrating--and by increasing the availability of cessation counseling and support groups.)

Clearly, interpositions of the sort just sketched can dramatically reduce tobacco consumption without prohibiting either commerce in, or use of, tobacco products. Compulsion and punishment are not necessary. In the case of illegal drugs, compulsion and punishment have proved to be both excessively costly to society and ineffective as deterrents to drug use. Interposition against the illegal drugs would employ means generically similar to those used in the above example, to the benefit of users of illegal drugs, rather than to their punishment and disgrace. The cost to the public would be vastly less than the currently employed, failed measures.

Libertarian proponents of drug legalization define drug prohibition, with its excessive reliance upon police measures, as futile. Interposition defines such measures as both futile and counterproductive. Nevertheless, interposition can be effective in control of the illegal drugs, even in the environment of current prohibitionist policy measures. Consequently, it can no longer be argued that society must legalize drug commerce in order to abate the high costs and social wreckage of prohibitionist drug wars. Interposition can abate both those high costs and that social wreckage while avoiding the difficult (if not impossible) task of persuading the public to legalize drug commerce.