WHY THE US IS LOSING THE WAR AT HOME TOO

While the politicians, diplomats, generals and spies engage in an
increasingly academic debate over whether America is winning, losing
or indeed has already lost the war in Iraq, the comprehensive nature
of its defeat in another, more protracted war was rubbed in this week.

According to a report citing United States Government figures,
marijuana is now America's most valuable cash crop, worth more than
corn and wheat combined. Weed is bigger than cotton in Alabama, than
grapes in California and peanuts in Georgia.

Despite billions of dollars and the strenuous efforts of local police
forces, the FBI and the gigantic Drug Enforcement Agency, marijuana
production has increased 10-fold over the past 25 years.

In Pentagon-speak, the war on drugs is an irony-rich environment. For
instance, the losing side refuses to accept that the war was lost
some time ago and its prolongation achieves nothing beyond turning a
defeat into a rout. The drug warriors obviously never absorbed the
cardinal rule of warfare: don't expend resources in a hopeless cause.

The core strategy of prohibition has brought about exactly the
situation it was intended to prevent: the entrenched and widespread
use and acceptance of recreational drugs in Western society.

Prohibition was supposed to marginalise and eventually eliminate the
drugs trade. Instead, by creating an immensely profitable black
market, it enabled the trade to thrive.

Because drugs are illegal, those who traffic in them pay no tax on
their earnings, an enormous incentive to invest and expand. It seems
strange that governments, which use the taxation system as a tool of
economic management, should persist with policies that confer
irresistible commercial logic and appeal on an activity of which they
thoroughly disapprove.

With benefactors like these, who needs Santa Claus?

Because the power structure and society in general are either
unwilling or unable to recognise defeat, no one has had to carry the
can for this catastrophic failure of analysis and policy.

This is one key difference between the war on drugs and the war in
Iraq: in the latter case the guilty men have been identified and are
being picked off one by one.

Another key difference is the media and public reaction to the
mounting evidence that the Iraq project has failed. The occupation
began a mere three years ago yet the overwhelming consensus is that
the US and Britain should declare defeat and get out, whatever the
consequences for the people of Iraq and a region that's already
dangerously close to flashpoint.

The war on drugs, however, will meander on pointlessly and
counter-productively for years without protesters taking to the
streets or committees crafting elegant strategies for disengagement,
i.e. cutting and running.

But there are also striking similarities. Like the war on drugs, the
war in Iraq has achieved the exact opposite of what was intended.

Instead of becoming the tolerant, secular democracy that would
transform the Middle East by its benign example, as the
neo-conservatives fondly imagined, Iraq has collapsed into an
ungovernable chaos of sectarian barbarism, a model for no one save al
Qaeda's gleeful nihilists.

Both wars were launched on the basis of two questionable assumptions.
The first is that people know what's good for them - sobriety and
clean living on the one hand, secular democracy on the other - and
will embrace it given half a chance and provided the opportunity or
temptation to do otherwise is curtailed.

The second is that, if used robustly enough, the instruments of state
- - prohibition and prosecution on the one hand, military force on the
other - can create better people and better societies.

There will always be resistance to the legalisation of narcotics,
particularly hard drugs. Those most likely to abuse drugs and suffer
the consequences are the young, and as a society we place a high
value on our children.

As the writer Auberon Waugh observed many years ago, parents are
hardly going to agree that the children in whom they've invested
years of care, effort, attention, and money should be free to choose
oblivion as soon as they leave home.

But this is wishful thinking: children can and sometimes do choose
oblivion as soon as they leave home or even earlier because the war
on drugs has failed in its most basic and narrow objective - that of
making it really, really hard for people to get their hands on dope.

Drugs are now so readily available and with so little legal risk
attached that the real question is why the majority of children don't
choose oblivion as soon as they leave home. It's not because they're
afraid of ending up behind bars; it's because they grasp - thanks in
part to anti-drug education - that drugs can be bad for you and
oblivion hasn't got a lot going for it.

Enough of drugs: 'tis the season to be jolly and nothing encourages
jollity like alcohol, the recreational drug we can guzzle with a
clear conscience. I wish readers a happy, safe and oblivion-free
festive season.