DRUG WAR'S CRITICS DON'T EXCUSE ABUSE

A recent report in The New York Times took note of some strange
bedfellows pressing the case against America's wasteful war on drugs.
The report referred to "a small coalition of libertarians, liberals,
humanitarians and hedonists" forging a "low-profile but sophisticated
crusade to end the nation's criminal laws against marijuana and other
psychoactive drugs."

The story noted how this ad hoc coalition is campaigning for what
might be termed "soft" causes that could poke more holes in the
already porous bulwark of the drug war. There's support for medical
marijuana laws in various states, for instance, and for softening
penalties for minor drug crimes. The kind of things, in other words,
that a lot of people can get behind even if they don't question the
drug war overall.

Of course, as the Times account pointed out, that tack strikes the
nation's anti-drug authorities - especially in the federal government
- - as insidious. They see it all as a back-door attempt to weaken the
resolve of the nation's criminal prosecution of drug use in general.

Maybe those critics are right insofar as this alignment of drug-war
foes probably doesn't wish to stop at so muted a measure as, say,
permitting physicians to prescribe marijuana to alleviate pain in
chemotherapy patients.

Indeed, as one quoted exponent of the movement, Ethan Nadelmann,
acknowledges: "There never has been a drug-free society. We must learn
how to live with drugs so they cause the least possible harm and the
best possible good."

That's pretty sweeping.

Yet, that strategy - if indeed it is the cohesive strategy the Times
piece suggests - is insidious only if you view attempts to rethink
drug laws as tantamount to an endorsement of drug abuse.

To confuse those two ends, as Barry McCaffrey routinely did when he
was the federal "drug czar," is to assume that a call for liberty is a
call for irresponsibility. Liberty is no such thing.

There are myriad compelling, pragmatic arguments against continuing to
prosecute and imprison people for the sale and use of "controlled
substances." Think of the lives lost in street wars among drug
dealers, the lives squandered in prisons, and the epic backlog all of
this has created in our justice system.

Such considerations aside, though, where is the logic in our society's
stand against some mood- altering substances ... but not others?