DRUG WAR'S DOGMAS ARE BANKRUPT

Stetson University is experimenting with reefer reasoning. Good thing
somebody is, because reefer madness -- official federal, state and
local policy across the United States -- isn't working.

A university-sponsored debate tonight is squaring off the editor of
High Times magazine (the current issue is featuring "The First World
Marijuana Film Festival" and the "Beginner's Guide to a Closet
Garden") against a retired Drug Enforcement Agency agent. Don't
expect surprises. Bub Stutman, the ex-DEA agent, argues against
anything like legalization of marijuana. Editor Steven Hager argues
for it. The debate is noteworthy for being held at all: For all the
drug war's staggering costs (it was estimated to have exceeded the
half-trillion dollar mark in the late 1990s), its four-decade
longevity and its history of futility, the war generates little
debate, the legalization of drugs even less so. The federal
government forbids most research on the matter, yet doesn't hesitate
to pronounce, year after year, that marijuana is a scourge and that
legalization would send the nation to pot.

No wonder the government's dogmas are mostly myth, beginning with the
sensational one it pushes on students and parents whenever one of
those "drug awareness" programs makes its appearances in schools --
that marijuana is a lethal drug and a "gateway" to worse drugs. Both
claims are flat-out wrong.

As a drug, marijuana is not known to have killed anyone by
"overdose." Ever. That's because -- as a Time magazine report
described it in 2002 -- a person of average weight would have to
smoke 900 joints in a single sitting to reach a lethal dose of
poisoning from marijuana's main "psychoactive" chemical. In
comparison, and by Stutman's estimate, alcohol kills 300,000 people a
year. That's not to say that alcohol prohibition doesn't have its
advocates to this day. But not enough to out-argue history's judgment
on Prohibition in the United States, a period dismal for its rampant
crime, black marketeers and false virtues.

Government begs for disaster when it imposes temperance by law. Drug
prohibition is replaying the failures of alcohol prohibition with
similar results. Prisons and jails are filled with drug users whose
"infractions" ought to be treated either as personal matters in most
cases, or, as with alcoholics, as medical matters. Treating drug
users like criminals only damages them personally for having to
contend with a generally abysmal incarceration system. It damages
society for subtracting otherwise productive individuals from the
work force. It damages families and communities for taking away
fathers and mothers, and in some cases children, from their support
system. And it drains government coffers to no end. More than half of
all federal inmates and almost a quarter of all state prison inmates
are being held on drug convictions among a total prison and jail
population exceeding 2 million.

Yet the drug war goes on, sustained by such falsehoods as the gateway
myth. That marijuana is a gateway drug is demonstrably false -- as
false as suggesting that because an individual will have a beer,
he'll eventually turn to whiskey. About 6.5 percent of Americans use
illegal drugs in one form or another (according to the latest
National Survey on Drug Use and Health) -- from the "hardest" kind
like heroin to marijuana. More than half of those, or about 10
million, only use marijuana, and most of those do so on a
recreational basis: Only 9 percent of marijuana users develop an
addiction (compared with 15 percent of drinkers). If the gateway
argument held any truth, 10 million marijuana users would eventually
become 10 million users of crack, meth, heroin and other drugs. Of
course, they don't, except in the imagination and propaganda of
government agents more addicted to the war on drugs than the average
user is to marijuana.

The government isn't willing to debate or research the matter. At
least in places like Stetson, the smoke and mirrors can give way to a
necessary debate -- for an evening.