DRUG WAR IS CHANGING

Can the recent sentencing of actor Robert Downey Jr. to rehabilitation
instead of jail - thanks to California's new law promoting cure over
punishment - signal a change in the drug war.

In Britain, debate over marijuana legalization is now taking place, with
such stalwart warriors as Sir Keith Morris, former ambassador to Colombia,
now totally disenchanted with enforcement and advocating outright
legalization of all drugs. Canada's Joe Clark, former Conservative prime
minister, is now calling for decriminalization of marijuana. Mexico's new
president, Vicente Fox, drops similar hints. The Netherlands, with shops
licensed to sell pot and hashish in small amounts for a generation already,
is opening two border drive-through stores to accommodate German
purchasers. In many European countries, soft drugs such as marijuana are
already decriminalized, i.e., they don't make arrests for personal use.
Only the United States is still stuffing its prisons with nonviolent users.

I suppose it's to be expected that we'll be the last to change. We started
the drug war and cajoled and bribed and bullied the rest of the world into
accepting our definitions of hard drugs and how to suppress their use by
eliminating their production and distribution. Instead, as we did earlier
with alcohol prohibition, we handed the criminal underworld control of a
contraband market spawning the most lucrative profits in history and the
goriest trail of addiction, death, corruption and destruction ever seen in
peacetime. The answer is as obvious as the naked emperor, but still civic
leaders and the people in this country - if we're to believe the polls -
are still cheering him on.

One despairs that Hegel was right in his lament that "all we know about
history is that it teaches us nothing!"

Jack Lange

Florence