REGULATING DRUG TRADE MAKES SENSE

With the laudable goal of knocking the props out from under international
terrorism, House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced last month that he has
formed a task force to combat drug trafficking.

"The illegal drug trade," Hastert said, "its the financial engine that
fuels many terrorist organizations around the world, including Osama Bin
Laden."

Unfortunately, the 48 member "Speaker's Task Force for a Drug Free America"
will be led by drug war hawks whose instincts are almost certain to make
matters worse. Hastert and his co-chairmen are staunch supporters of
current drug policy even though three out of four Americans believe that
policy has failed.

Ironically, most of these lawmakers are champions of free-market capitalism
and they'd be the first to admit that you can't mess with the law of supply
and demand. But in this on arena, drugs, they believe they can somehow
repeal the most basic law of economics.

History, logic, and recent experience suggest otherwise. If, for example,
we were somehow able to actually dent the drug supply, something we have
not managed so far with a $50 billion annual effort, the price will just go
up and so will the profits.

For 80 years we have been trying to wipe out illegal drugs by eliminating
the supply, and year by year we have compounded the problem.

When we began this crusade in 1914 we set out to rid the world of the
scourge of addiction, and after an incalculable expenditure of money and
lives we have managed to increase the rate of addiction by 1,500 percent.

It turns out you cannot alter the fundamental equation of economics, no
matter how much money, force, or firepower you throw at it.

Daredevil entrepreneurs, attracted by unimaginable profits, will find ways
to corrupt the system and expand their markets.

It will be fairly easy, however, for Hastert and his colleagues to make
things worse.

Consider Colombia, one of our major partners in the war on drugs, a country
that is literally going down the drain right in front of us as
revolutionaries, death squads, and corrupt army officers fight for control
of the drug trade. Back in the 1980's Colombia went through a horrifying
bout with terrorism when the U.S. was chasing the notorious drug lord Pable
Escobar.

Like Osama bin Laden, Escobar considered human life expendable and he liked
to blow people up to get our attention. In his time, he killed hundreds of
innocent people before the U.S. put together a secret Colombian commando
force to track him down.

But men in charge were so terrified of Escobar that they invited his
underworld competitors to join the hunt, another classic example of "the
enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Today, despite our best efforts, drug production in that luckless country
is raging out of control.

Colombian High Court Justice Gomez Hurtado has some shrapnel in his leg
from one of Escobar's bombs and he has something to tell us about
terrorism. At a drug policy conference in Baltimore nearly a decade ago,
Gomez Hurtado gave a chilling snapshot of the trouble we're in.

"The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense
budget," he said. "With this financial power they can suborn the
institutions of the State and, if the State resists, they can purchase the
firepower to outgun it. We are threatened with a return to the Dark Ages."

As we stand transfixed at the specter of 21st century vandals assaulting
the governments of one country after another, it's important to remember
that this particular plague could be terminated with the stroke of a pen.

The vast illegal enterprises that the U.N. says are raking in some $400
billion a year, the powerful, murderous combines that threaten to overwhelm
the rule of law itself, all could be cut off instantly by simply taking the
drug trade out of the hands of the gangsters and putting it in the hands of
government regulators, just as we finally were forced to do with alcohol.

Those who argue that the cure would be worse than the disease should take
another look at the disease.