OUR MODERN PROHIBITION FAILS US

The crime was "drug-related." That's the expression the police always use
in cases like this one. And here we were again.

Five bloody victims, shot execution-style.

Hands bound with duct tape. Bullets to the head.

A couple of pounds of marijuana were still sitting in the apartment-and
more cash than normal people tend to have around.

What could it be but another "drug-related" crime?

You read about this one, I am sure. It was a fifth-floor walk-up above the
most famous delicatessen on Earth, the Carnegie. Three of the victims were
dead in a hurry. Two are hanging on. And as the week gave way to the
weekend, the detectives were still staring into grainy frames of videotape,
trying to make out the faces of two men who hurried from the building and
up Seventh Avenue toward the subway station at 57th Street.

"There was a dispute in the apartment over money and marijuana," Police
Commissioner Bernard Kerik said on the sidewalk Thursday night.

But what if marijuana were legal?

What if pot were sold like alcohol?

Would we have all been out on this dreary sidewalk, as the paramedics
rolled the bodies out?

Good questions to ponder, all of them.

It wasn't drugs exactly that got these people shot. It was the fact that
the drugs are illegal. It was the fact that there is so much money to be
made selling these illegal drugs. It was the fact that this illegal trade
draws the kind of people who tend to shoot each other when things go wrong.

Change the laws, end the violence. It really may be as simple as that.

Isn't that the lesson that Prohibition taught?

Back when alcohol was illegal, the rum runners and their murderous ilk were
shooting up the city. Fighting for territory. Corrupting decent people.
Funding organized crime.

Common sense finally prevailed. The laws got changed. And when was the last
time you heard about a killing over beer sales?

Now look at what our modern Prohibition has achieved.

We spend $40 million a year in the so-called War on Drugs. Yet drugs are
more plentiful, more pure and easier to get than they've ever been.

Half of the high-school kids in America say that marijuana is more
accessible than beer. Unlike the tavern owners, the dealers don't demand ID.

We have half a million people behind bars on drug charges. That's up from
50,000 in 1980, with absolutely no impact on the prevalence of drugs.

In New York State, 94 percent of drug inmates are black or Latino, even
though study after study shows that drug use is roughly equal from race to
race, from neighborhood to neighborhood. The real difference is that police
don't do too many buy-and-bust operations on the Upper East Side.

But we can't expect much leadership here from Washington. On Thursday, just
a few hours before the carnage over the Carnegie broke out, George W. Bush
was trying to forget we've learned anything. He named a new national drug
czar who insists on living in the past.

The man is John Walters, a conservative protege of Bill Bennett, the drug
czar during Bush's father's presidency. Both men are firmly enrolled in the
school of "lock 'em up."

It's punishment over treatment, interdiction against education, jail cells
over everything else.

In the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, Walters was railing not long
ago at the "therapy-only lobby" he said is making America soft on drugs.
Long prison sentences, he said, are key to winning this war.

The call for more drug treatment, he said, is "the latest manifestation of
the liberals' commitment to the 'therapeutic state' in which government
serves as the agent of personal rehabilitation."

It's the future of the drug war, as the bullets are flying again.

The future is looking a whole lot like the past.