WAR ON DRUGS IS FAILING

Congressmen regularly argue that the country can cut taxes without reducing
spending by getting rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal
budget. Well, they have a point there. There is approximately $170 billion
of waste, fraud, and abuse programmed into the federal budget over the next
10 years that could be eliminated with the stroke of a pen. It's called the
War on Drugs.

Federal spending on the drug war is currently running about $17 billion a
year. At that rate, about $170 billion will be poured down this particular
rat hole in the next 10 years, the planning period for federal taxing and
spending that's being used to generate the numbers in President Bush's tax cut.

During the same period, the states will spend about twice as much - about
$300 billion - but that's another story.

The $170 billion federal component of the drug war represents a substantial
part of the difference between the tax cut Bush asked for and the tax cut
he is likely to get out of Congress. Looked at another way, the money being
wasted in the War on Drugs represents the cost of the ballistic missile
defense system Bush wants to build, or the cost of the prescription-drug
benefit the Democrats in Congress would like to pass.

Any way you look at it, it is a lot of waste, fraud and abuse.

The War on Drugs is waste by the most elementary measure of waste - it
isn't working.

The drug war attempts to do two things: reduce the supply of drugs and
reduce the demand.

The easiest way to measure success in supply reduction is to look at the
price of drugs; if the supply goes down the price should go up. By that
measure, the drug war is a stunning failure; in the last 10 years the price
of marijuana, cocaine and heroin went down, not up.

(The decline started during the administration of George Bush,
incidentally, and continued during the Clinton administration. Drug war
spending during the four years of the George Bush administration was around
$40 billion; during the eight years of the Clinton administration it was
more than $ l00 billion.)

As for demand reduction, the major surveys that measure drug demand have
shown it remaining steady or going up for a decade.

It is inconceivable that anyone in the private sector would be allowed to
fail as miserably, and lose as much money, as the stewards of the drug war
have and still be allowed to keep their jobs. But Congress' only response
to the drug war's record has been to throw more money at it with no change
in policy, compounding the waste.

What about fraud, then?

The drug war is shot through with it. For example:

The reports that were used to criminalize marijuana in the 1930s
deliberately misrepresented its addictiveness and its ability to cause
users to become violent.

Later, the addictiveness of crack cocaine was deliberately overstated in
order to justify harsher sentences. The myth of the crack babies also
turned out to be a lie.

Reports of new more potent strains of marijuana also were shown to be a
myth. Toward the end of his life, the late John Ehrlichman, one of Richard
Nixon's closest advisors, flatly stated that Nixon began the War on Drugs
as a way of attacking his enemies in the counter-culture, not out of any
concern about the harmful effects of drugs.

In addition to the intellectual fraud that underlies the drug war, there is
the plain old corruption that it engenders, both in the criminal justice
system and throughout society.

And abuse?

There is not enough room in this paper to begin to chronicle the abuses
that have been committed in the name of the drug war. Ever, year about
three quarters of a million Americans are arrested for drug use, about
400,000 for using marijuana (a "crime" which at worst is about as serious
as drinking beer). As a result of the drug war, the United States has the
highest rate of incarceration in the developed world. Most of the crime
that is attributed to drug use turns out to be attributable not to drugs
but to drug prohibition.

In addition, a huge amount of casual repression and distrust has been
introduced into American society - from urine testing, to road blocks, to
the shredding of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search
and seizure and Fifth Amendment protections against property seizure, to
encouraging children to denounce their parents to the authorities. And on
and on.

If this isn't abuse, what is?

Prohibition used to be called the Noble Experiment. The characterization is
overly generous, but at least America had the wit to realize after 15 years
that the experiment was a failure and ended it. Well there is nothing noble
about the War on Drugs, and its end is long overdue.