THE WAR ON DRUGS HAS CREATED MORE PROBLEMS THAN IT HAS SOLVED

I applaud former prosecutor Peter Letang's call for a re-examination
of the drug war and welcome him to the cause. He is not the first.
Many other prosecutors, judges, and, most significantly, members of
law enforcement who conduct the war out on the streets have also come
forward, risking their careers and reputations. They have come
together to form an organization to end drug prohibition. The
organization is known as LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting with a decorated member of the
U.S. Marshal Service, Matthew Fogg. Mr. Fogg began as a marshall in
1978 and he has worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration and
other areas of the Department of Justice on numerous drug
interdiction efforts, including SWAT teams, and participated in the
arrests of hundreds of drug dealers and drug users.

Mr. Fogg echoes Mr. Letang, observing that despite the massive number
of arrests, the drug trade, drug availability and drug usage have not
declined, and far too many lives have been lost or damaged and more
are drawn into peril each day.

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He also points out selective enforcement tactics that tend to target
lower income neighborhoods and dealers (why do they target East
Wilmington but not Greenville, Centreville, don't those people do
drugs?) and the disparate effect the drug war has had in the black
community, but he gives better voice than I on those issues.

It's now nearly 35 years since President Nixon escalated drug
prohibition in first declaring the war on drugs and later forming the
DEA. The drug war has produced the thriving and violent illegal
market that exists today while drug addiction remains about 1.3
percent, as it has since 1914, when this prohibition began.

Vast profits in the illegal market draw drug dealers to the trade.

Because they operate illegally, they bear no responsibility for the
"products" they offer, offer no product labeling, and they enhance
purity or chemically alter to make transportation easier and
weight-based penalties easier to avoid. Vast profit leads them to
aggressively market their wares at street corners, in drug-free
zones, at workplaces, and in the shadows of even our newest suburban
plazas, as I recently observed outside Newark.

The dealers, ruthless and fearless, move their wares and defend their
turf. Should they be removed by police, others spring up to capture
the profit. Should they be too successful, a dispute with would-be
competition is sure to result. Denied legal avenues to settle
disputes, drug dealers, as participants in illegal markets, settle
disputes violently on the streets.

Today, well over a million more Americans are in prison or jail than
in 1972 and incarceration rates per capita have increased more than
fivefold. Hundreds of thousands more have died in the "drug war," and
either way the cost to lives is ruinous.

Direct financial costs to taxpayers have soared, with increased
prison population the reflection of increased interdiction efforts.
Here in Delaware, prison facilities such as the former Gander Hill in
Wilmington, now renamed the Young Correctional Facility, and the
high-security prison in Smyrna are overflowing with prisoners and
hazardous to both prisoners and employees, despite a four-year, $180
million expansion completed in 2000 and further expansions since.
These prisons overflow despite the fact that prison capacity has been
increased at a rate that far exceeds population growth and despite
the fact that both violent and property-crime-related prisoners are
given early release so that drug users and dealers can fulfill their
minimum mandatory sentences.

There are many other arguments to end the drug war. There is the
corrupting influence on the police, whose departments and governments
seek financial gain through property seizures even when no one is
charged with a crime (so the cycle is not broken) and sporadic
reports of the planting of evidence. There is the fact that the
government, in declaring that it will control what over 280 million
people may ingest at any time of any day, has disenfranchised people
from making choices in their own lives while it has also debased the
emphasis of the choice each of us faces from being based on the
natural consequences of drug use on one's life and ambition to simply
whether one will be caught.

Meanwhile, cancer patients, those with degenerative nerve disorders
like ALS, and AIDS patients are denied cost effective and natural
treatment that can improve appetite or relieve pain.

And there are the effects on foreign nations and foreign policy,
where Colombia is largely controlled by violent drug kingpins because
of the massive profits involved while at the same time we intervene
with and condemn peaceful practices in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador,
where locals have for centuries chewed unprocessed coca leaves and
drunk coca tea to stave off hunger or boost energy with little
harmful effect. Prohibition can leave even the most casual user or
one-time experimenter scarred for life with a criminal record that
will destroy opportunity for a lifetime or unable to seek help or
treatment for fear of facing the risk of arrest.

The drug war reflects a political arrogance that the government can
solve bad habits by passing a law and sending police out on the
streets to arrest the way to an improved society.

The collateral damage of this arrogance is clear. It is time to end
the drug war, to seek education, treatment, product labeling and
testing, and a more orderly yet much less profitable market for the
measure of drug usage, which society cannot stem or prevent, with or
without force.

The transition will be difficult as people adjust to taking more
personal responsibility, just as the transition from a centrally
planned economy did not go smoothly in Russia or Eastern Europe, but
the end result is a more just, more peaceful and more prosperous
society. Of course there will be those that use drugs to their
demise, there always was and there is today. At least there will not
be vast profits for dealers and the associated violence and property
crime or the other side effects of the drug war.

Logic compels that we end the drug war and with all my heart and soul
I believe we must.

George Jurgensen is state chairman of the Libertarian Party of Delaware.