I'm glad that Ryan wrote in his first post that drug policy cannot be separated other areas of public policy. "Drug policy," Ryan wrote, "attempts to isolate a phenomenon that can't be taken in isolation. Economic policy is drug policy. Healthcare policy is drug policy. Foreign policy, too, is drug policy. When approached in isolation, drug policy almost always backfires, because it doesn't take into account the powerful economic, social, and cultural forces that also determine how and why Americans get high." But I wonder if there is a lot to learn by separating (and comparing) drug policy with other areas of public policy, particularly as we're in the midst of a national discussion on healthcare. As Bob Somerby wrote on Monday "Our entire discussion about health care costs is built around defense of the baseline."

The baseline on healthcare that Somerby refers to--an exorbitantly inexpensive yet profoundly inefficient healthcare system--is quite similar to the drug policy baseline and to debates on drug policy which almost always defend the baseline.

We have the most prisoners of any country in the world as well as the highest per capita rate of prisoners in the world, and we have extraordinarily punitive punishments for drug related offenses at the federal and local level, all at an enormous moral and financial costs. African Americans are incarcerated at six times the rate of white Americans and budgets for prisons and jails punch gigantic holes in the budgets of states which can ill-afford such spending during our current economic downturn. As Mike Krause wrote in the Colorado Daily recently, "the current opportunity cost of Colorado's extreme prison spending spree is a quarter billion dollars that could have been spent on health care and higher education."

Yet the baseline continues, with, sadly, with very little discussion from the liberal world. Worse, when a moment arrives for drug policy to be debated on the national stage--such as Senator Sessions attempting (badly, I admit) to propose to Judge Sotomayor that we change sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine related offenses the opportunity is squandered. I fumed while reading the Drudge-ified coverage of Sessions' comments -- because the gaping disparity between sentences for crack and powder cocaine is a profound injustice that is only now being rectified. It is also a profound civil rights issue deserving of a lot more attention than it receives.

(A side note: I think the attempt to gauge potential increases in drug use that legalization might bring is much more speculative than academics like Mark would like to think--Mark even managed to confuse himself in one attempt at legalization math.)

Also: the speculation about increases in drug use that may occur with legalization is particularly unhelpful as there is no parallel attempt to measure the positive outcomes of legalization (what sort of reduction in drug use would we see if we allocated the billions we spend on prisons and jails and fighting the drug war in Mexico or Colombia to rehabilitation programs?; what would a legal market for drugs mean in terms of taming the Mexican drug cartels) or the damaging effects of prohibition (generations of African American children growing up with parents in prison). Indeed, a staggering 25% of African American children born in 1990 grew up with their father in prison). How do measure the "cost" of that?

Back to Somerby. Somerby argues that we rarely--if ever---read in the newspaper or hear on the news, or even read on liberal blogs the very simple fact that we spend far more on healthcare than countries like Britain and get much, much less in return. The same, I think, could be said for drug policy: awareness is very low of just how expensive, ineffective, and unjust our drug policy is and how badly we compare with other countries in this respect. So: how do we change the baseline or at least alter the drug policy debate so we do not defend the baseline, which is inherently indefensible and unjust?