TRY A LITTLE EDUCATION ON DRUG MARKETS

USA TODAY commentary writer Amy Holmes apparently didn't understand either
the movie "Traffic" or her experiences on Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)
raids. What she saw and disliked in both cases was the black-market system
for distributing pleasure drugs. It's a bad system. What she missed was
the fact that prohibition policies cement the black-market system firmly in
place by guaranteeing profits to traffickers ("Pessimism shouldn't thwart
war on drugs," The Forum, March 30).

Despite their paramilitary heroics, drug enforcers' raids perpetuate the
very black-market system they're attacking. Furious efforts to eliminate
all production, distribution, and use of certain pleasure drugs simply
drives it all underground and minimizes society's control over it. 85 years
of drug-prohibition history shows that the government can never enforce
total drug abstinence on all citizens, no matter what mix of
supply-reduction, demand-reduction, treatment, or prevention it uses -- and
no matter how badly it erodes the Constitution or fills up prisons.

Some citizens will still use disapproved pleasure drugs, the vast majority
without addiction. And someone will always distribute those pleasure drugs.
That will never change, regardless of the stern pronouncements of
politicians and enforcers.

All our society can do is choose how pleasure drugs will be distributed.
Holmes, the DEA, and thousands of drug-warring officials effectively insist
that the only distribution method must be the black-market system. That's
bizarre. America should stop insisting on absolute control over drugs. That
strategy gives us the least possible control, while increasing the harms
done by drugs and adding harms caused by drug-prohibition itself.

Officials in Mexico, Uruguay, Switzerland, and Belgium have begun realizing
that pleasure drugs can be handled far better by regulating them rather
than trying in vain to banish them. Puritanical America, despite its
bitter experience with alcohol prohibition, seems mentally incapable of
learning this lesson.

Paul M. Bischke, Board Member Drug Policy Reform Group of Minnesota St.
Paul, Minn.