THE OTHER WAR WE CAN'T WIN

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 more than 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 alienate 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, in fact 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."

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 "savages." 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." 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, favored in poor black neighborhoods, remains 10 times that
for regular cocaine, more popular among whites.

Yet just think: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson cultivated
hemp for pain relief. President William McKinley entertained with
coca wine. 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.