30 YEARS ON, WAR ON DRUGS AN ABYSMAL FAILURE

As a retired police captain, I applaud the police work that went into
the recent breakup of the drug ring that netted 937 grams of cocaine.

But, if my years of experience in those positions has taught me
anything, it is that nothing will change except the lives of those
arrested and their families.

Ever since President Nixon declared a war on drugs in 1970, U.S.
taxpayers have paid over $1 trillion to arrest our way out of our
drug problems. We have made over 35 million arrests and currently
spend $69 billion a year on this war.

This year we will arrest some 1.7 million Americans on non-violent
drug charges, mostly for possession. Yet today, drugs are more potent
and cheaper than they were in 1970, and our school children report
that it is easier to buy marijuana than it is to buy beer.

This is the very definition of a failed policy. As a cop I knew that
when we arrested a rapist, there would be fewer assaults, and our
streets would be safer, same for all violent crimes. But when we
arrested a drug dealer, whether at the top or the bottom of the heap,
all we created was a job opening.

The profit margins are just too incredible -- 17,000 percent from
harvest to street sale -- to believe that nobody will take the place
of those arrested.

And I am disturbed to note that two cars were seized. Our drug laws
allow police departments to keep half of the value of what they seize
in drug busts. This has become so lucrative, that some police
departments even put anticipated seizures in their budgets.

We are arresting people so fast that the United States with just 4
percent of the world's population has over 24 percent of the world's
prison population. Prison construction is our fastest growing
industrial sector. It is not just drug addicts who are addicted.

According to U.N. research, illegal narcotics worldwide provide gross
profits of nearly half a trillion dollars a year; more than the U.S.
defense budget. Much of that profit goes into bribing local
authorities and even national leaders to look the other way.

Drug trafficking may not be the only game in town, for much of the
world's population, but it is the best paying. And it is backed up by
well armed, ruthless gangs that have grown rich and powerful from the
artificially inflated prices caused by our prohibition.

And so, we Americans lay out billions of dollars for selective crop
eradication in Latin America or Afghanistan only to find that the
crops are grown in another area or even in another country, while our
government's own figures show that total drug imports are simply not affected.

The three months of intense police work on the part of over two dozen
officers, I am sad to say, will not amount to much. Albert Einstein
said that the definition of insanity is continually doing the same
thing over and over and expecting different results. Our war on drugs
is, by this definition, insane.

And it is not necessary. If we want to cut off the drug cartels, drug
dealers and warring street gangs at the knees, we need to take a very
bold step. If we really want to regulate these hard drugs and make it
harder for our children to get them, we need to take a very bold step.

We need to legalize drugs so that we can truly regulate them.
Switzerland began a trial program 11 years ago, providing hard-core
heroin addicts with free heroin in a controlled setting with social services.

This has expanded to a full-blown public policy stretching across the
country, as reported in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet.

In Switzerland, in the reported area, a decrease of violent and
property crime, absolutely no overdoses, an actual decrease in
addiction among the addicts; and an 80 percent reduction in
anticipated new cases of heroin addiction.

Regulation and control? Yes, it works, and with great savings to the
Swiss taxpayers.

Prohibition doesn't work -- have we forgotten how bad it was in the 1920s?