CENSORING THE TRUTH IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

WASHINGTON - Like most cities, Washington relies on advertising to
keep its mass transit system solvent. Get on the subway, and you'll
see ads for everything under the sun. Or just about. But there's one
thing you won't see -- in fact, can't see: any political message
criticizing the U.S. war on drugs.

It's shocking that such a crude censorship policy would be encoded in
U.S. federal law. Yet it is. In January, Congress passed a spending
bill that makes it illegal for local transit authorities that accept
federal aid to run ads critical of America's draconian drug policies.
And since D.C. depends on the feds' annual infusion to keep its trains
running, the city has little say in the matter. In February, a
coalition of drug reform groups submitted an ad arguing that
"marijuana laws waste billions of taxpayer dollars to lock up
non-violent Americans." It was rejected.

Sanity may ultimately prevail: On April 29, the ad's sponsors will
appear in court to challenge the constitutionality of the new
censorship policy. And I have enough faith in the U.S. court system to
believe they will win.

But however this shakes out, the episode says a lot about the war on
drugs. Decades spent focusing on criminalizing supply instead of
treating demand have produced nothing but failure. And notwithstanding
bravado exuded by the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy, everyone in Washington knows it. The surest sign of a policy
failure is when government uses its bully power to shut up everyone
who points it out.

The situation in Washington also says a lot about how the war on drugs has
eroded core U.S. principles. Speech is freer in the United States than in
any nation on Earth: For years, Canadian academics and journalists have
gazed longingly southward as we bemoaned our own censorious human rights
commissions and hate speech laws. Yet here we have a collection of advocacy
groups that seek to criticize a policy of the U.S. government in a public
space -- exactly the sort of core political communication the First
Amendment is supposed to protect -- and it is being censored because
Congress is embarrassed by the specific viewpoint espoused.

Liberals have long criticized the U.S. war on drugs -- especially laws
that doom small-time street peddlers to decades in jail for selling
small amounts of cocaine or marijuana. But it astounds me that even
conservatives can stomach it. Free speech aside, what about the
autonomy of local governments and states' rights? In California,
residents have been trying for years to put medicinal marijuana in the
hands of sick people. But they've been stymied by federal officials
who insist the war on drugs trumps local law.

As many letter writers noticed last week, I'm hardly a pure
libertarian. (Urging higher gas taxes to discourage driving, I wrote
that "sometimes, you need the law to enforce behaviour that everyone
knows is right, but which none of us have the discipline to
implement.") And I would have no problem with the war on drugs if --
like the war on terror, which also encroaches on civil liberties --
the benefits outweighed the costs. But they don't: The benefits are
small, while the costs are huge.

Those costs include not only censorship, but also hundreds of
thousands of people in jail, a profitable contraband industry in
Afghanistan and Columbia that funds two different terrorist armies,
not to mention tens of billions of dollars spent on domestic
enforcement that might be far better spent on treatment. As the ACLU
likes to point out -- when it's not being muzzled -- 700,000 Americans
were arrested last year for offences related to marijuana, a
non-addictive substance less dangerous on balance than tobacco or alcohol.

There is some progress being made in the fight to reduce drug usage.
But it is not because of the quasi-military campaign against
suppliers: Drugs are cheaper than ever. It is because the
post-crack-boom generation knows that addictive drugs like cocaine and
heroin can ruin your life. The bottom line is that drugs should be
treated as a health issue, not the target of a military campaign, and
it's nice to know that I live in a country where admitting as much
isn't the object of government censorship.