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.