AMERICA'S DIRTY WAR ON DRUGS

Good to see that sanity can sometimes be as infectious as insanity. All it
takes, apparently, is one lucid moment on the part of one public figure,
and a whole realm of illusion can be dissipated. The Peter Lilley moment on
soft drugs, closely followed by the David Blunkett one, gives some reason
to hope that the American nightmare is not in our future.

Here is what happened in my hometown of Washington DC during the
Congressional elections of 1998. A local initiative was attached to the
ballot, proposing the "decriminalisation" of marijuana for medical
purposes. After the votes had been counted, it was abruptly announced that
the result would not be disclosed. The United States Congress, which has
ultimate jurisdiction over municipal government in the capital of the free
world, ruled that, though it could not prevent a vote being taken, it could
prevent the outcome from being made public.

Right away, I knew what I had already guessed - that the citizens had voted
overwhelmingly to allow the use of cannabis for the treatment of cancer and
glaucoma. But it took a protracted lawsuit to get the ballots counted and
the voters decision made known, only to be negated by Congress once again.

In every other state where this simple question has been mooted at election
times, it has carried the day by unanswerable majorities. In each instance,
Congress or the federal government has intervened to have the decision set
aside. The word for this, in commonplace vernacular, is "denial".

The domestic war against the enemy within, which was begun as Richard
Nixon's last desperate gamble for panicky popularity, is now in the same
shape as the rest of his legacy. It reeks of corruption, police brutality
and overweening bureaucracy. It also involves a demented overseas
entanglement, with off-the-record US military aircraft running shady
missions over Colombia and Peru, and high-level collaboration with ruthless
and unaccountable "Special Forces".

I simply cannot remember the last time, in public or private, that I spoke
with a single person who believes this makes the least particle of sense.
The opinion pages can occasionally drum up a lone, dull voice, but it's
almost invariably that of a paid spokesman for a "war" machine that enjoys
funding in inverse proportion to its victories. Again, I know very few
habitual drug users, but I also don't know anyone who would be more than
two degrees of separation from a reliable supplier, whether that turned out
to be a gangsta or a cop.

A striking fact is the predominance of honest and intelligent conservatives
on the sane side of the argument. The first editor with any "profile" to
call for legalisation was William F Buckley, the old lion of the rightwing
National Review. He has been joined by George Schultz, formerly Reagan's
secretary of state, and by Gary Johnson, the Republican governor of New
Mexico, among many others. The "libertarian" journals have been ahead of
the "liberal" ones for the most part. In an eerie way, this matches the
recent shift of opinion on capital punishment, where conservatives have
again been taking the most moral and political risks. (In both cases, the
common factor may be Bill Clinton, the Nixon of the liberals, who expanded
the drug war just as he increased the scope of the death penalty.)

Three decades of this grotesque, state-sponsored racketeering have led to
unbelievable levels of official corruption and to an unheard-of assault on
civil and political liberties. Colombia doesn't look any more like the US
as a result, but the US does look a lot more like Colombia. The actual
resources expended would have more than paid for national health care: the
potential revenue from legal, and therefore clean, narcotics would rebuild
the cities from the ground up.