State Regulation and Control of Psychoactive Substances: The Vision

The King County Bar Association supports a public health approach to the chronic
societal problem of substance abuse, stressing the need to shift resources into research,
education, prevention and treatment as an alternative to the continued use of criminal
sanctions, to achieve the objectives of:

• reducing crime and public disorder;


• improving public health;


• protecting children better; and


• using scarce public resources more wisely.

By any measure, current drug control policies have failed to achieve those objectives.

As a result of years of intensive study, the King County Bar Association recommends
the establishment of a state- level system of regulatory control over those psychoactive
substances that are currently produced and distributed exclusively in illegal markets.
The main purposes of this state-level regulatory system are:

• to render the illegal markets for psychoactive substances unprofitable,
  thereby eliminating the incentives for criminal enterprises to engage in the
  violent, illegal drug trade;


• to reduce access by young persons to psychoactive drugs and to provide
  them better education and prevention services; and


• to open new gateways to treatment, finding the hard-to-reach population of
  addicted persons who consume the bulk volume of drugs, drying up black
  market demand for those drugs and thereby reducing public disorder,
  economic crimes related to addiction, transmission of disease, accidental
  death, quantities of drugs consumed, initiation of use by young persons and
  drug addiction itself, as well as criminal justice, public health and social
  welfare costs.