DRUG WAR IS IRRELEVANT TO PATTERN OF DRUG USE

The first rule of warfare is to know your enemy. The drug war is doomed to
failure because its strategies are dictated by a series of false
descriptions of the problem.

We commonly see such phrases as, "the United States' insatiable demand for
illegal drugs."

There is no "insatiable demand" for intoxicating illegal drugs.

It is the very fact that the demand is so small and easily met that allows
the suppliers to amass a huge surplus inventory that could supply demand for
years even if no new drugs were produced.

The remarkably distorted financial impact of low scale drug use stems from a
prohibition that dramatically multiplies the cost of illegal drugs.

Street heroin sells for about 200 times its legal pharmaceutical cost. The
drug war has been an exercise in scratching a pimple until it becomes a
cancer.

About 30% of our population are teetotalers or near teetotalers. No highly
intoxicating drug poses much temptation for them under any circumstances.

Next, about 60% are moderate users. They are the sort of people who drink
alcohol from time to time and they know the difference between a quart of
straight bourbon or rocks of crack cocaine and a quart of beer. They do not
alter their general orientation to intoxication based on price or
availability. They do not need the government to protect them from
themselves.

The conflating fallacy is that this group might somehow behave differently
in regard to drugs like heroin or cocaine, whose users in fact demonstrate
virtually identical distributions of moderate, controlled, harmless users
(once one controls for prohibition's impact on the most casual use).

There is great resistance to accepting the fact that most users of illegal
drugs do no more harm and show no more likelihood of becoming addicted than
do users of alcohol.

Last March, The Brown University Digest of Addiction Theory and Application,
summed up the situation: "These data . . . provide preliminary evidence
that self-described nondeviant, physically and psychologically healthy
adults can use alcohol and illicit psychoactive drugs in a safe and
controlled manner. . . . Policies, laws, education and treatment
approaches that treat all drug consumption as unhealthy, and thus drug
abuse, appear to be inherently flawed in their conceptual design."

The "success" of the drug war lies in convincing the public that stopping a
lot of moderate users from engaging in occasional harmless use is a triumph.

It is as effective as fighting alcohol addiction by threatening casual
drinkers or bar maids with prison would be.

Finally there are the 10%, not counting tobacco users, who are fairly heavy
users, some showing characteristics of severe dependency. About 8% abuse
legal drugs and 2% abuse illegal drugs.

Prohibition is endured for the zero benefit of trying, with zero success in
20 years, to get this relative handful of the addiction prone to switch to a
government approved drug, alcohol, the abuse of which is quite arguably
worse for society than, say, heroin addiction.

Japanese cars come and the Studebakers and Edsels go, but more cars do not
create new drivers and the percentage of reckless drivers is not changed.

Similarly, the drug war is irrelevant to the larger patterns of drug use,
but it demands that we pay for over 50 bureaucracies that pretend otherwise.

Picture adding line after line of people with pails rushing to bail out the
Gulf of Mexico in order to save Galveston from the next flood.

But the drug war is not irrelevant to the cartels that supply drugs to our
children and make us the victims of crimes. It has created these drug lords
and made them the wealthiest and most powerful group of criminals in the
world's history.

We are the marks in the nation's longest running con game.