DUYBA'S DRUG-WAR PIPEDREAM

They say there's no more strident a prohibitionist than an ex-drunk.

What that says about George W. Bush's attempt to tighten the thumbscrews in
the war on drugs is entirely up for debate. What isn't, according to the
April 17 Wall Street Journal, is that the administration is bucking for an
8.3 percent hike in federal funds for the Bureau of Prisons. Such an
increase would bring the allocation for federal pens to $4.66 billion,
making it the biggest pig in the Justice Department sty.

Considering how many folks are already doing time in federal facilities for
drug offenses, a big hunk of the money will go to house present residents
and the huge number of reefer rookies and narcotic newbies who will be
busted in the coming year, not to mention return visitors.

When the so-called crack epidemic of the mid-1980s hit the fan and federal
mandatory minimums for drug sentences were passed back in 1986, the
population of lawbreakers in federal prisons hovered around 40,000. Since
the drug-war hype of the Reagan years, that number has swollen to some
150,000 dope offenders behind Uncle Sam's bars.

"Thirty years ago," as Slate's Emily Yoffe notes in her April 18
"Explainer" column, "only 16 percent of the federal prison population was
in for drug charges." But as Bob Dylan sang, "The times, they are
a-changing." Today, according to Yoffe, the percentage is 60 percent in the
federal lockdown with drug convictions.

To house all those dope offenders, Bush is finding, costs big bucks --
hence the request for the budget bump.

Of course this is how's it been since Day 1 of the drug war. "Late in
1986," remembers Lewis K. Uhler, "everyone jumped into the drug battle. The
President and Mrs. Reagan led the fight. 'Just say no' was the watchword.
Congress was delighted -- another new spending opportunity."

Sure enough, a $6 billion hunk of change was approved that year to fight drugs.

"I fear this bill is the legislative equivalent of crack," said Congressman
Barney Frank in a rare moment of lucidity. "It yields a short-term high,
but does long-term damage to the system, and it's expensive to boot."

Expensive is the right word. Congress has been jacking up the dosage of
drug-war dollars at nearly every opportunity since the first shots were
fired by the Nixon administration. It ballooned under Reagan and kept
soaring through the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations.

"In every successive year, I have proposed a larger anti-drug budget,"
strutted President Clinton in January 1999, bragging in particular about a
30-percent spending increase between 1996 and 1999.

What Citizens for a Sound Economy said back in 1986 about the $6 billion
allocation is true about most drug spending. "The true problem resides in
Congress," concluded CSE. "It is addicted to spending. The measure is just
another opportunity for politicians to increase spending. If Congress wants
to kick its spending habit, it should just say NO."

Trouble is, Congress doesn't want to kick the spending habit. Despite cues
from every corner that the drug war is winnowing down any remaining
competition for recognition as America's social-engineering version of the
Vietnam War, with U.S. liberty and the Constitution suffering as the
chiefmost casualty, drug warriors press ever onward, allocating more and
more money every year to battle dope.

If the number of people eating prison food is how we measure success then
we seem to be doing pretty well, but by most any other standard we're
failing big time -- especially if you look at the fact that dope use
(which, I should think, a drug war would be trying to quell) hasn't gone
down regardless of how much money is intravenously injected into the
bloodstream of the body politic to support its campaign to control the
ever-growing chemical cornucopia.

Ecstasy use by military personnel, of all people, is even on the rise.
According to an April 16 report in USA Today, the designer drug is being
downed by 12 times more servicemen than it was in 1998. The increase comes
despite the fact that drug use can land a doughboy-turned-dopeboy in jail.

Looking back at Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough's Sept. 22, 2000, WND
column, military personnel putting the "war" in "drug war" is nothing new.
Use of Ecstasy was stepping higher then as well. According to a testing
officer in the Pentagon's Office of the Coordinator for Drug Enforcement
Policy and Support, use of the so-called "club drug" had "increased markedly."

Given the sociology alone, the level of drug use in the armed forces is
something that the general population should consider with more interest
and curiosity.

Wrap your cerebellum around these figures: Results from 2,273,998 urine
drug tests conducted by the Pentagon in fiscal year 1999 included:

Marijuana positives, 12,006 Cocaine positives, 2,839 Methamphetamine
positives, 807 Ecstasy positives, 432 LSD positives, 325

As I pointed out in my column following on the heels of Gertz and
Scarborough, the military is one of the most tightly regulated social
environments in the entire U.S. -- and drug use is still uncontrollable.
More than 12,000 tested positive for pot, despite the fact that this is a
stark no-no and the level of oversight and control in the military is
night-and-day more strict than it is in the civilian world.

Given that, what on earth makes the drug warriors think that they can
control drug use in the rest of society? They can't even control it in the
military, of all places!

Bush's request for more federal prison funds is just part of the ongoing
pipedream that somehow more money will result in victory in the drug war.
It won't. More money spent on fighting drugs will simply result in less
money in taxpayers' pockets and less liberty for the country as a whole.

By any standard, that's a bad trade.