THE MISADVENTURE OF OUR DRUG WAR

Pick your week or month, the evidence keeps rolling in to show this
country's vaunted "war on drugs" is as destructively misguided as our
cataclysmic error in invading Iraq.

There are 2.2 million Americans behind bars, another 5 million on
probation or parole, the Justice Department reported on Nov. 30. We
exceed Russia and Cuba in incarcerations per 100,000 people; in fact
no other nation comes close. The biggest single reason for the
expanding numbers? Our war on drugs - a quarter of all sentences are
for drug offenses, mostly nonviolent.

So has the "war" worked? Has drug use or addiction declined? Clearly
not. Hard street drugs are reportedly cheaper and purer, and as easy
to get, as when President Richard Nixon declared substance abuse a
"national emergency."

Drugs crossing our borders have been widely blamed. To stem them,
President Bill Clinton launched Plan Colombia, carried on
enthusiastically under the Bush administration. The plan's modus
operandi is war from the sky - aerial spraying that has covered 2.4
million acres of Colombia's coca plant and opium poppy fields -
almost as much territory as Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

The U.S. Embassy in Bogota has become our second-largest diplomatic
mission, employing over 2,000 people. Still, the U.N. reports,
Colombia last year produced 776 metric tons of cocaine, enough to
supply 80 percent of the world market. Great victory.

In Afghanistan, the provider of a huge portion of the world's heroin,
production is soaring with the profits funding insurgents and
criminals. Drug cartels with their own armies regularly engage NATO
forces - as serious a threat as the Taliban. High-level government
officials and police are reportedly corrupted. And the U.S. still
presses eradication programs that will alienate beleaguered villagers.

And Mexico? Under Vicente Fox's presidency, Mexico captured several
drug gang leaders, seized record amounts of drugs and extradited
about 50 suspected traffickers to the U.S. Our government is said to
be pleased. Except that gang-sparked gunfights, kidnappings and
murders have escalated along the U.S.-Mexico border. A vast majority
of cocaine entering the U.S., plus increasing amounts of marijuana
and methamphetamine, continues to flow through Mexico.

We'd be incredibly better off if we had treated drugs as a public
health issue instead of a criminal issue - as the celebrated Nobel
Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman advised us. Friedman, who
died last month at 94, witnessed America's misadventure into alcohol
prohibition in his youth. "We had this spectacle of Al Capone, of the
hijackings, the gang wars," wrote Friedman. He decried turning users
into criminals: "Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters
worse - for both the addict and the rest of us."

Debating then-drug czar William Bennett in 1989, Friedman opposed
"the path you propose of more police, more jails, use of the military
in foreign countries, harsh penalties for drug users, and a whole
panoply of repressive measures."

And in one of his last interviews, Friedman asked the relevant
questions: "Should we allow the killing to go on in the ghettos?
10,000 additional murders a year? .. Should we continue to destroy
Colombia and Afghanistan?"

The ironic truth is that humans have used drugs - psychoactive
substances ranging from opium and coca to alcohol, hemp, tobacco and
coffee - since the dawn of history. Problems get triggered when
substances are associated with despised or feared subgroups,
according to a careful study by the King County, Wash., Bar Association.

Tobacco users returning to Spain from the Americas in the 16th
century, for example, were subject to tortures of the Inquisition
because they smoked like "savage" Indians. Coffeehouses were
politically suspect in 17th-century eastern Europe, with users
subject to the death penalty.

In this country, opium was widely applied medicinally up to 1900, but
then became associated with "opium dens" operated by Chinese
immigrants. Cocaine, used by oppressed Southern field hands to allay
their pains, became associated with "Negroes." Alcohol use was
identified with urban Catholic immigrants, "marihuana" smoking with
Mexicans. The same Puritanism and misplaced religious zeal that
triggered prohibition of alcohol was gradually applied to more and
more substances from the early 1900s onward, culminating in our ugly
and now global drug war.

Race remains a disturbing factor: The federal penalty for crack
cocaine, a drug favored in poor black neighborhoods, remains 10 times
that for regular cocaine, which is more popular among whites.

Yet just think: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson cultivated
hemp for pain relief. President William McKinley entertained with
coca wine. In 1898, Bayer Pharmaceuticals ran ads giving equal
billing to aspirin and "heroin - the sedative for coughs." Coca-Cola
contained small amounts of coca and caffeine until the coca was
removed in 1903.

The United States professes values of freedom, tolerance and love for
peace. Yet now, in its drug laws, its wholesale incarceration
practices and increasingly in its international drug practices, the
country lurches in a polar opposite direction.