Home

A lesser task, however, will be necessary. It will be necessary to persuade the public to license use of drugs supplied to drug users by a public health agency. Licensed use of these legally dispensed drugs is a tactic essential to the following interposition objectives:

• to free drug users from the influence and control of the criminal syndicates of the illegal drug supply industry;
• to bring drug users into the sphere of influence of the drug dispensing agency and its programs for harm reduction, drug user education, counseling, and cessation assistance;
• to remove the economic-compulsive motive to drug crime; (As licensed drug users, indigent addicts would no longer be compelled to earn the price of a fix by selling drugs, prostituting themselves, or committing robbery, car-theft, or other crimes.)
• to curtail illegal drug sales and arrest the flow of profits to the criminal drug supply industry; (Licensed use of legally dispensed drugs would put an end to illegal commerce in drugs and to all of the corruptions surrounding that commerce.)
• to reduce health hazards of drug use and deaths from overdosing by providing drugs of assured quality and strength; and
• to eliminate the profit motive to seduction of new drug users.

The reader is invited to contrast the forgoing humane, socially conserving, and therapeutic objectives of interposition to the destructive ravages of drug wars.

* * *

At this point, a definition is in order. At the highest level of generalization, interposition can be defined as:

a strategy for drug control which employs market interventions under public health management. The selected interventions are directly beneficial and curative to drug users, but they are also typically designed to alter behaviors and social outcomes by changing the incentives that motivate all participants in the drug culture on both the demand and supply sides of the drug market. The power of interposition to control the drug/crime epidemic derives from its economic effects, curtailing both the demand stimulus to the supplying industry and the supplying industry's stimulation of demand.

Interposition neither criminalizes nor compels anyone. If we as a society so choose, we may implement interposition with a parallel, continued reliance on the current criminal justice measures, but drug-related problems will so quickly decline, under the influence of interposition, that police measures of drug control will as quickly be perceived as both irrelevant and dispensable.

* * *