LEGALIZATION: THE DRUG WAR'S BEST WEAPON

LONDON -- In Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland it is
practically impossible to get arrested for buying or using "soft
drugs." In the Netherlands, users may buy up to five grams of
cannabis or hashish for private use at 1,500 licensed "coffee shops,"
and they are opening two drive-through outlets in the border town of
Venlo to cater to German purchasers. Even in Canada, Conservative
leader and former Prime Minister Joe Clark is openly calling for the
decriminalization of cannabis. But that is still far short of what
Sir David Ramsbotham, the outgoing chief inspector of prisons,
suggested last Sunday in Britain.

"The more I look at what's happening, the more I can see the logic of
legalizing drugs, because the misery that is caused by the people who
are making criminal profit is so appalling and the sums are so great
that are being made illegally. I think there is merit in legalizing
and prescribing, so people don't have to go and find an illegal way
of doing it," he said.

You will note that he said "drugs," not just "cannabis," and that he
talked of "legalizing and prescribing," not just "decriminalizing."
Most British politicians are afraid to go that far in public yet, but
over the past week two former home secretaries and outgoing British
"drugs czar" Keith Hellawell have all called for a debate on
decriminalizing "soft drugs." And the new home secretary, David
Blunkett, has given his support to a local experiment in the south
London district of Brixton, where police will simply caution people
found with cannabis.

Others, like Mo Mowlam, until recently the Cabinet Office minister
responsible for the Labour government's drug policy, and Peter
Lilley, former minister for social security and Conservative deputy
leader, are now going further. "It strikes me as totally irrational
to decriminalize cannabis without looking at the sale of it," said
Mowlam. "It would be an absurdity to have criminals controlling the
market of a substance people can use legally."

Lilley quoted a study in the respected medical journal "The Lancet"
that concluded that "moderate indulgence in cannabis has little ill
effect on health, and decisions to ban or to legalize cannabis should
be based on other considerations." For Lilley, banning cannabis is
indefensible in a country where more harmful drugs like alcohol and
tobacco are legal and he went the distance in accepting the
implications of legalization.

Magistrates should issue licenses to local shops for the sale of
limited amounts of cannabis to people over 18, Lilley said. Like
tobacco, it would be taxed and carry a health warning -- and the tax
yield on an estimated annual British consumption of 1,500 tons of
cannabis a year has been calculated at about $23 billion if the
cannabis were produced and marketed in exactly the same way as
tobacco.

That is a pipe dream, of course. Many people would grow their own,
and given the pre-existing black market, too high a rate of taxation
on cannabis would simply push consumers back into the hands of the
private dealers. Most experts think the highest practical rate of
taxation would be around $3-$4 per gram, which would yield a mere
$7-8 billion a year in extra tax revenue. But it would also cut law
enforcement costs -- and it would keep cannabis users out of contact
with "hard drug" dealers.

Opposition to legalizing cannabis has dropped from 66 percent to only
51 percent in the past five years, and the nay-sayers are
overwhelmingly in the older age groups. It is a welcome outbreak of
sanity, and even mere decriminalization in a major English-speaking
country would have a profound effect on the debate in the United
States, the heart and soul of the prohibitionist movement. But
legalization of cannabis in Britain is unlikely because the U.S.
government strong-armed all its allies into signing three
international conventions that define cannabis as a dangerous drug.

To break out of those treaties would involve a larger effort of
political will than any government with many other items on its
agenda would be willing to undertake. So millions of individual
Britons may benefit from the decriminalization of cannabis and an end
to harassment, but the potentially large social and tax benefits of
outright legalization are likely to be lost.

The bigger problem, however, is that most British advocates of
decriminalization or legalization are too ignorant or too timid to
extend the same argument to "hard drugs" like heroin and cocaine.

Nobody should use heroin, a highly addictive substance, for fun.
Nobody should smoke cigarettes either, since they are even more
addictive and a grave health hazard to boot. But quite apart from the
civil rights considerations, nobody in their right minds would
consider making cigarettes illegal.

The consequences of banning tobacco, in terms of creating a huge
black market, expanding the field of operations of organized crime,
bringing the law into disrespect, and criminalizing millions of
harmless addicts, are simply unthinkable. So how can so many
intelligent, well-educated people miss the analogy?

By making heroin and cocaine illegal, around $450 billion a year, or
8 percent of world trade, has been handed over to professional
criminals. As a result, they have become rich enough to subvert
entire countries.

Heroin addiction, before it was demonized by American lawmakers, was
an undesirable but relatively low-cost affliction that had no adverse
health consequences and left its victims free to lead a normal and
productive life.

That's how it used to be in Britain, in fact. Only two years after
the U.S. Congress, fresh from banning alcohol under the Volstead Act,
imposed prohibition on the heroin family of drugs in 1924, the
Rolleston committee in Britain concluded that non-medical heroin use
was a problem needing help, not a crime needing punishment. So
Britain adopted the policy of providing heroin on prescription to
registered addicts -- and over the next 40 years, the number of
addicts in Britain scarcely grew at all.

Then in 1971, largely in response to intense U.S. pressure to fall in
with U.S. plans for global prohibition, British doctors were
forbidden to prescribe heroin to addicts, and the black market came
into being. The market then worked its usual magic, relentlessly
expanding the customer base: since 1971, the number of heroin addicts
in Britain has grown from fewer than 500 to around 500,000.

And because the black market charges them such a huge mark-up, most
users can only support their habit by crime. It also provides them
with a highly adulterated product of unknown strength, often mixed
with lethal substances. So they spend a lot of time in jail, and die
young.

As late as the 1990s, one British doctor in Liverpool was allowed to
go on prescribing heroin to his addicted patients under a special
Home Office license as an experiment. In the 10 years of the project
none died, their arrest rate for property crimes dropped to close to
the average for the area, and most managed to find jobs and stabilize
their lives.

But then CBS television did a report on the project, infuriating the
U.S. drug warriors so much that pressure from the American embassy in
London forced the British government to shut the project down. The
former patients were driven back onto the black market, and over the
next two years 41 of them died.

It is not a war on drugs. It is a war on drug users, especially those
from underprivileged and minority groups, driven by ignorance and
fear and waged with lies. It kills the addicts, it destroys respect
for the law, it creates huge criminal empires, and it undermines
whole societies. It's crazy, and every year thousands defect from the
futile struggle to "stamp out" drugs.