MISGUIDED LAWS MAKE MARIJUANA DEADLY

Three people were killed and two were wounded in a $4,000-a-month apartment
five stories above New York's Runyonesque Carnegie Deli two weeks ago.
Among the dead was Jennifer Stahl, who had a bit part in the film "Dirty
Dancing." Her acting career never came to much, and she turned to singing.
And selling marijuana. That's what got her killed. According to news
accounts, Stahl was entertaining four guests who had nothing to do with
drug trading.

Her apartment buzzer sounded, she opened the door, and one of her guests
heard her say: "Sean, what are you doing here today?" There were two men.
Both carried handguns. One of the men took Stahl into a recording studio
she had in the apartment; the other started binding two of her guests'
hands and feet with duct tape. Stahl was heard pleading with her assailant:
"Take the drugs. Take the money. Don't hurt anybody." Then there was a
single shot. Two more of Stahl's guests emerged from another room, and they
were ordered to get down on the floor. They were bound. Like Stahl, the
four guests were shot in the head. Two survived.

When police arrived, they found six pounds of marijuana, with a street
value of $60,000, along with what authorities identified as psychedelic
mushrooms, and $1,800 in cash. Behind the apartment's front door was a sign
listing a half-dozen varieties of marijuana with prices ranging from $300
to $600 an ounce. Police believe that the motive behind the crime was
robbery and that the men left with a backpack containing marijuana.

This incident should lay to rest the myth that the marijuana trade is
nonviolent. It is corrupting police departments. Eventually, it could
corrupt our political system, as it has political systems in Latin America.
Drug dealers have an enormous stake in keeping their products illegal and,
therefore, desirable in this country.

Bridget Brennan, New York City's special narcotics prosecutor, describes
marijuana as a "highly profitable drug." She notes that money is the source
of most drug disputes and that the parties involved can't turn to the
courts to settle their arguments. And she warns that the cartels moving
marijuana are made up of some of the same people who are moving heroin and
cocaine.

Marijuana itself does not induce violence. People don't smoke a joint and
decide to shoot somebody. What produces the violence associated with
marijuana is that it is illegal. The same dynamic caused the murderous
Capone-style violence during Prohibition. And once Prohibition was
repealed, the violence associated with the bootleg trade vanished, although
the gangsters that it spawned did not.

Before any sensible discussion can take place about how to deal with
illegal drugs in the United States, we must make the distinction between
violence associated with a drug and violence associated with the drug trade.

Further, for any sensible discussion about what to do about illegal drugs,
you have to discuss different drugs separately. They are not all of a
piece. Heroin and cocaine are far more addictive than marijuana, for
example. You can overdose and die on heroin. You can overdose and die from
alcohol poisoning. You smoke too much marijuana, and the worst thing that
can happen to you is you'll fall asleep and maybe set the couch afire.

So let's take marijuana separately. Its illegality and its soaring cost are
causing an astonishing level of violence in our society. The day after the
triple slaying, New York's first deputy police commissioner, Joseph Dunne,
told reporters: "We've been saying this for eight years: There are guns and
violence in the marijuana trade."

One argument for prohibiting marijuana is that you don't want young people
to get it. We don't want them to get alcohol, either. One is legal; the
other is not. Alcohol, the legal drug, is much more heavily associated with
violent behavior than is marijuana.

"Nobody pretends we're going to get rid of these drugs," says Ethan
Nadelmann, executive director of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy
Foundation. "So one of the stated policies is we can make them more
expensive and fewer people will use them. There's no evidence that's the
way it works in drug markets. Sometimes a high price enhances the
attraction. Prohibition efforts in the last 20 years have entirely failed
to affect the price of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine. They are
cheaper and purer than at any time in the last 30 years."

He notes studies that have found that 80 percent of high school seniors
said they could easily obtain marijuana. High school kids tell you it is
easier to get pot than alcohol.

Nadelmann believes marijuana should be "taken out of the drug prohibition
system." He says polls show that about 35 percent of people say yes to
decriminalizing it and 25 to 30 percent say yes to legalizing it. But when
you ask people whether they want to tax and regulate marijuana -- and
educate people about it -- as part of legalization, support can rise to 40
percent. He's found support for legalizing marijuana among police,
prosecutors and conservative drug treatment programs.

About 700,000 people were arrested in the United States on marijuana
charges last year, 85 percent for possession, he says. Those arrests
account for half of the arrests in the drug war.

If marijuana were legalized, we would save billions we spend now on the
criminal justice system. If it were taxed, regulated and sold like alcohol,
that would generate legal income for governments. If it were controlled and
sold legally, the price would be reasonable. High profits associated with
marijuana's illegality would vanish, and so would the violence, just as it
did when Prohibition ended.

How many more killings will it take before we understand that?