LEGALIZATION WILL WIN U.S. 'WAR ON DRUGS'

It's been approximately 1,400 days since President Bush stood proudly
on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a gigantic "Mission
Accomplished" banner and announced to the world that "Major combat
operations have ended ... and in the battle of Iraq, the United States
and our allies have prevailed."

Despite this bold declaration on May 1, 2003, this real war - against
enemies who can be captured or killed - is still occurring.

When or how it'll end is anyone's guess.

And if that's the case with this war, you can only imagine how well
our fake wars are going.

The United States is embroiled in another war of ideals, a war that
the country's been fighting for 20 years. This "issue" war can be
lumped together with all the other ones - the war against poverty,
against hunger, against AIDS and against crime.

But the biggest "issue" war that we fight - and the easiest to win -
is the war on drugs.

Unfortunately, it's also our most hypocritical war.

Think about how idiotic the concept of a war on drugs is in the first
place. Which drugs do we fight? Not alcohol. Not cigarettes. Not any
of the thousands of pharmaceuticals being advertised every day.
Certainly not caffeine - or maybe it's just a coincidence that another
new Starbucks just opened in the time it took you to read this
sentence. We're already a nation of addicts, just on the so-called
"legal" stuff. We delude ourselves into thinking that these drugs
aren't as harmful as the illegal ones because they can be purchased at
a store.

We rationalize.

We get on our high horses against the "pushers" and the "junkies."
We're a bunch of overweight people ordering a Diet Coke with our
double-bacon cheeseburgers and extra-large fries.

Just this once, let's be realistic about an "issue" war. It's
virtually impossible to get rid of illegal narcotics. The demand is
too great and the profits are too tempting for the desperate. Have you
ever met one addict - whether the drug of choice is marijuana,
cocaine, heroin, crystal meth or anything else - who seemed genuinely
concerned about where to find what they wanted? Having the means to
pay for it, maybe, but finding it? No.

Our inner cities are in ruins partly because of gang warfare over
drugs. Elementary school kids are exposed to this dark world. Lives
are wasted before they even begin. The black market's capitalist
supply and demand is at the root of the problem.

But while the demand is killing America, the supply is killing
Colombia.

Colombia produces approximately 90 percent of the cocaine sold in the
United States and is also a major supplier of heroin, according to the
CIA World Factbook. Competing drug cartels ravage the country,
corruption plagues the highest levels of the government and President
Alvaro Uribe Velez must cobble together a legal export economy based
on coffee, oil, fruit and little else.

He has to keep his people from killing each other over their most
exportable crops - crops that don't even benefit the citizens
economically. Meanwhile, the most popular solution that the American
and Colombian governments have jointly agreed on is to spray poisonous
herbicides over fields of coca plants and poppy crops. Of the economic
aid the U.S. has pledged to Colombia, 70 percent is earmarked for
military supplies to combat the drug cartels. Nobody seems to care
that people are starving and that their regular farm crops are being
poisoned in the process.

Hasn't the U.S. done enough to impoverish South American countries
already? If it really wants to end the violence, hunger and illness,
all it has to do is legalize all drugs and let them sell their crops.
The black market will collapse and the farmers will be allowed to
farm. And over here, the gangs will have to disband because they'll
have nothing to fight over.

If a kid offers you crack on the street, you'll be able to tell him
that it's on the shelves at Walgreens and that he should really be at
school right now.

And the resources we save not fighting against drugs can be used to
educate people about their dangers.

At the very least, people will stop murdering one another over them.
Talk about mission accomplished.