SOLUTION TO DRUG PROBLEM: JUST LEGALIZE THEM ALL

There was a slew of alarming reports this week about the drug problem
in Arizona.

The East Valley Tribune reports a rising prevalence of Mexican
black-tar heroin in Valley high schools, along with rumblings that a
popular, candy-like pill from Thailand called Yaba - a mixture of
methamphetamine and caffeine - is gaining popularity, and a notice on
the increasing difficulty of obtaining in-patient substance-abuse
treatment in Phoenix.

The Arizona Republic also reports that Mexican drug cartels have
successfully taken over the American meth trade with violent,
efficient panache.

This news fits the backdrop of government reports, which characterize
the drug trade, as ever, with a rising tide of violence, a lack of
treatment options, widespread ignorance, and the increased potency
and easy availability of drugs.

Among these drugs, methamphetamine is considered one of the most
dangerous and easiest to obtain. The National Drug Intelligence
Center's National Methamphetamine Threat Assessment of 2007 found a
number of interesting details.

First off, state level controls on the sale of pseudoephedrine and
ephedrine, the major ingredients of meth, have effectively shut down
most small-fry "Beavis and Butthead" labs in the United States.

However, the superlabs - huge, efficient, well-funded operations that
crank out the crank by the ton - have been pushed out of cities into
rural areas, or into Mexico.

Accordingly, production in Mexico has skyrocketed, and Mexican
distributors have filled the vacuum left by the disappearance of
mom-and-pop ventures.

Add to that an increased preference among users towards "ice" - meth
that's smoked, with an instantaneous, intense, long-lasting high,
rapid addiction rates, and high toxicity - and voila! You have a
monkey the size of King Kong on the back of the United States, and
one that's getting heavier by the minute.

So, let's roll up our sleeves and fight it, right?

Wrong.

The War on Drugs isn't a real war - in that it can't be won. It won't
ever eradicate the presence or need for drugs. It will simply
eliminate the two-bit players in the global pyramid of need that is
the drug trade, piecemeal, and allow new and smarter ones to take their place.

This fact holds steady throughout the history of the War on Drugs.
Macy Hanson's column last Thursday called attention to Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization of experienced
police officers who are fed up and calling for an end to America's
expensive, destructive and ineffective policy that has cost so much
and changed so little.

Its proposal for solving the drug problem is simple: legalize all
drugs. Organized criminals are driven by profit. If we remove the
margin of profit, offer properly processed drugs at regulated prices
from a legal source - or better yet, offer them for free - the black
market would collapse.

What we'd have left is a massive but not insurmountable addiction
problem, and an embarrassment of funding ($69 billion a year) no
longer devoted to law enforcement and drug interdiction.

That funding could go toward rehabilitation, education and
prevention. Drug users would be disassociated from criminal culture
and would no longer be driven to violent, unpredictable acts by their need.

Painful? Maybe. Impossible? Certainly not. Burroughs wrote in 1959,
"The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need...beyond a
certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control."

Eliminate the need to cheat the law, and a whole criminal culture
goes up in smoke.

Understand the algebra of need, and a whole nation gets its youth back.

So, let's stop wasting our time with the War on Drugs before it gets any worse.