DRUGS: ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH

About a month or so from now - on July 4, appropriately enough -
Americans with a knowledge of history, a taste for irony and an eye
for current events will have a double-barrelled opportunity to
celebrate their country's proud tradition of glorious hypocrisy.

Independence Day is, after all, the anniversary of America's
founding, the date when Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin
and an assembly of fellow slave-owners put their signatures on a
document that preached the universal equality of man.

This year, 225 years after the Founding Fathers gathered in
Philadelphia, President George W. Bush appears to be keeping the
tradition of hypocrisy alive with the appointment of a man called
John Walters. When he is confirmed in his new job, about the time
America celebrates its birthday, Walters will become the latest in a
long line of much-ballyhooed drug tsars.

In the eyes of his detractors, many of whom can quote the
Constitution's ode to liberty and personal freedom verbatim, Walters
is an arrogant autocrat blind to the lessons of history and the
implications of basic economic theory. It will be his job, they say,
to crack down on those manufacturers and distributors of
mind-altering substances who, unlike the liquor lobby, do not ply
politicians with campaign contributions.

The diehard drug warriors, the folks who have so far spent better
than $50 billion in futile attempts to wipe the dopey smile off the
country's collective face, see Walters as just the ticket. A
throw-away-the-key kind of guy, he is the quintessential hardliner
who believes that all drug users, even mere grass smokers, deserve to
do hard time. The evidence is that coerced treatment works at least
as well as voluntary treatment, Walters said recently when asked to
explain why he favors putting money into prison construction rather
than treatment programs.

What Walters doesn't seem to have noticed is that his preferred
solution has not only failed to work in the past, it also contradicts
the fundamentalist reverence for free markets to which Bush the
Younger and his team pay perpetual lip service. After all, if a
popular commodity is restricted, those with supplies to sell can
charge a premium price. In the case of cocaine, for example, that
means windfall profits for the narcotrafficantes of Columbia, Peru
and Mexico.

On the home front, the approach has seen the establishment of
something that might best be described as the Prison-Industrial
complex. The figures are chilling: according to the best estimates,
one in four black men under the age of 25 is either in jail, on
probation, waiting to appear in court, or has been convicted.

The reason: the anti-drug crusade. When Bill "I Never Inhaled"
Clinton left office, almost 450,000 people were in jail for drug
raps, a figure equal to the prison population in 1980. Now Walters
wants taxpayers to pay to put even more fellow citizens behind bars.

Up until the day Bush announced Walters' nomination, there had been
hope - even among Republicans - that the President might finally
abandon the drug war. Given that he has consistently refused to deny
using cocaine in his youth, Bush seemed likely to view the drug war
from a different perspective. Even as he mulled Walters' appointment,
New Mexico's Republican Governor Gary Johnson urged him to consider
legalising drugs, particularly marijuana, which he dismissed as
harmless.

Other Republican luminaries share Johnson's view. Economist Milton
Friedman, high priest of the Invisible Hand and a free marketeer
without equal, has said it is obvious that legalising drugs will
reduce crime and diminish corruption in the ranks of law-enforcement
agencies. Then there is William Buckley, the conservative columnist
and theorist, who has assailed the arrest every year of some 600,000
grass smokers as absurdity verging on evil. Even Dan Quayle,
vice-president to the original Bush, wants marijuana decriminalised.

Yet all those voices - along with Jesse Ventura, Mexico's President
Vicente Fox and Jimmy Carter - were ignored when Bush the Younger
tapped Walters. Like the generals of World War I, the drug warriors
can't bring themselves to abandon the absurd hope that one more push,
one more offensive, will achieve victory.

To Keith Stroup, who heads the national Organisation for the Repeal
of Marijuana Laws (NORML), the issue has nothing to do with whether
or not drugs hurt those who consume them. Alcohol, he points out, is
the catalyst for all manner of violent crimes and highway fatalities,
yet politicians are only too happy to accept money from liquor
manufacturers.

The real reason why drugs remain illegal, Stroup says, is that their
prohibition has created a symbiotic mesh of opposing industries and
interest groups. Legalise marijuana and other drugs, and the
rationale for a vast law-enforcement effort evaporates, he says,
adding that other industries, like privatised prisons, would also
collapse.

Every year, US employers spend better than a billion dollars testing
their employees' urine to see if workers have been using drugs. It's
a huge and growing industry which has been sanctioned by the courts
and endorsed by Congress, whose members receive a steady stream of
contributions from the grateful owners of those same testing labs.

That is one side of the Stroups equation. The other is represented by
an outfit going by the name of Clear Test, a company which promises
grass smokers and coke snorters a clean lab report the next time the
boss orders them to pee in a cup. For $149, Clear Test will mail you
a pair of battery-powered underpants equipped with a prosthetic penis
that can be filled with drug-free urine, which the company also sells
at $15 a vial.