DRUG WAR WON'T BRING EVEN MORAL VICTORIES

U.S. Senior District Judge John Kane is really good at this. He's been
giving versions of the same speech for nearly a decade now. He wows every
audience.

It's easy to see why. His argument is compelling. It's based on mountains
of evidence. And it's the product of a keen legal mind.

Furthermore, he delivers it with wit, candor and blistering conviction.

So when he brought the City Club crowd to their feet this week, it was
nothing new.

What would be new, however, is if the leaders in the country's futile and
destructive war on drugs would pay attention.

If they did, they'd learn, for example, that in 1914, when drugs were
readily available without prescriptions, the addiction rate in the U.S.
population was 1.3 percent. In 1979, before the war on drugs was fully
mobilized, the addiction rate was 1.3 percent. "Today, while billions of
dollars are spent to reduce drug use, the addiction rate is still 1.3
percent," Kane said.

In 1975, the number of youths who said it was easy to obtain marijuana was
87 percent. In 1998, after millions of arrests and billions spent on law
enforcement, he said that figure rose to 89.6 percent. Meanwhile, prices
for illicit drugs such as heroin and cocaine have plummeted.

The war on drugs drains more than $18 billion a year from taxpayers'
wallets, Kane said, and another $9 billion is spent annually to incarcerate
an estimated 458,000 drug offenders.

And while the financial costs are shocking, the price to our country in
human terms is appalling.

Thanks in large part to the war on drugs, "more African-Americans were
imprisoned during the Clinton administration than in all the rest of U.S.
history," Kane said. Two million Americans are behind bars.

But that's only a beginning.

If the policy of arresting and convicting every illegal drug user in the
U.S. actually was fulfilled, the prisons would have to accommodate "the 9
million Americans who smoked marijuana last month, the 1.2 million who
ingested cocaine during that same period and the nearly 6 million who
ingested it during the past year."

Oh, and half of all graduating high school seniors also would go to prison
since they admit to having experimented with drugs.

Of course, that won't happen because we all know the war on drugs is a
laughingstock. We mock it with impunity, and that creates another set of
problems.

The fact that millions of "otherwise law-abiding citizens" ignore the
country's drug laws makes us "cynical about all laws and our legal system
and the political process in particular," Kane said.

But if you really want to know cynicism, consider this: Despite the
widespread recognition of failure, reform of the nation's drug laws is
unlikely because law enforcement agencies profit from them.

Police departments rake in untold billions each year through the seizure
and sale of private property - houses, yachts, airplanes, artworks, cars,
jewelry, cash - from drug offenders and suspects.

Kane said we should "terminate the symbiotic business relationship that law
enforcement has with the illegal-drug industry."

"Indeed, the two groups who would suffer most from an elimination of the
black market in drugs would be, in nearly equal measure, organized crime
and law enforcement."

Oh, and there's a third group that would suffer - the elected officials who
for 30 years have exploited our fears, divided our communities and trampled
our civil liberties with a phony war on drugs.

Because, as Kane said, then we'd all see that "the emperor has no clothes."