THE REAL COST OF THE NATION'S MARIJUANA WAR

It's that time of year again. Marijuana growers throughout the region
designated as the Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area
(HIDTA) are planting their illegal crop. For the next seven months,
anti-drug task forces will comb through remote areas of Kentucky,
Tennessee and West Virginia in search of Appalachia's No. 1 cash crop.
Ironically, it's the efforts of drug warriors that make marijuana
growing profitable.

Thanks to the drug war's distortion of basic supply and demand
dynamics, an easily grown weed is literally worth its weight in gold
in urban centers. With so much money at stake, almost all plants in
the field that are destroyed will be replaced by growers. The $6
million Appalachian HIDTA initiative is tantamount to a price support
for organized crime. Drug policies modeled after America's disastrous
experiment with alcohol prohibition have given rise to a thriving
black market. The self-professed champions of the free market in
Congress are seemingly incapable of applying fundamental economic
principles to drug policy.

Marijuana prohibition is an integral part of the larger drug war. In
1999, 46 percent of the 1,532,200 total arrests nationwide for drug
violations were for marijuana, a total of 704,812. Of those arrests,
620,541 were for possession alone. Filling America's prisons with pot
smokers and citizens responding to the financial incentives created by
drug laws is not cost-effective. Proponents of marijuana prohibition
claim that interdiction efforts protect children from drugs.
Unfortunately, the drug war only makes it easier for teen-agers to buy
drugs.

Prohibition was repealed in 1933 amidst concerns that the black market
was not only financing organized crime, but also exposing minors to
liquor at levels previously unheard of. The infamous mobsters of the
1920s and 1930s did not ID customers for age, nor did they add warning
labels to potentially lethal bottles of bathtub gin.

These days, protections are in place to keep liquor out of the hands
of children. No such protections exist when it comes to popular
illicit drugs.

The Monitoring the Future Survey, an ongoing study of the behaviors,
attitudes and values of young Americans, reports that for every year
from 1975 to 2000, at least 82 percent of high school seniors surveyed
find marijuana "fairly easy" or "very easy" to obtain. In 2000, 89
percent of high school seniors reported that marijuana was fairly or
very easy to obtain. Drug policies designed to protect children have
given rise to a youth-oriented black market in which marijuana, the
most popular illicit drug, is readily available, despite its illegality.

Marijuana is relatively benign compared to alcohol, which continues to
be the most popular recreational drug. According to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, 19,515 Americans died of
alcohol-induced deaths in 1998. In the thousands of years humans have
used marijuana, there has never been an overdose death attributed to
pot.

The same cannot be said of aspirin, much less a highly toxic drug like
alcohol.

There are cost-effective alternatives to the never-ending drug war.
The Netherlands has successfully reduced overall drug use by replacing
marijuana prohibition with regulation. Dutch rates of drug use are
significantly lower than U.S. rates in every category. Separating the
hard and soft drug markets and establishing age controls for marijuana
has proven more effective than zero tolerance.

Although marijuana is relatively harmless compared to deadly alcohol
and addictive tobacco, marijuana prohibition is deadly. As the most
popular illicit drug in America, marijuana provides the black market
contacts that introduce users to hard drugs like crack and heroin.
This "gateway" is the direct result of a fundamentally flawed policy.

Given that marijuana is arguably safer than legal alcohol, it makes no
sense to waste tax dollars on failed policies that finance organized
crime and facilitate the use of hard drugs.

Unfortunately for Americans, our politicians are more prone to
counterproductive preaching than cost-effective pragmatism.

Robert Sharpe

Note: The author is a program officer at the Lindesmith Center-Drug
Policy Foundation, a nonprofit group advocating drug policy reform.