SORTING OUT DRUG WAR'S GOOD, BAD GUYS

People have been using and trading opium for at least 5,400 years, but wars
and massacres over the drug started only about 200 years ago when Britain
and France decided to force it upon China. There's been a formal global
restraint on opium since 1912, yet a violent black market in opium has
flourished ever since.

Since the 1950s, our frighteningly robust drug market is the product of
nations such as the United States and France that have trained, armed and
paid known drug lords to fight other enemies, like communists or other
intolerable ideologues, so we could keep our innocence and safety intact.
But as we now know, the bad guys we support sometimes become the bad guys we
have to fight ourselves.

Richard Nixon's so-called "war on drugs" has been raging for about 30 years
now. In terms of people killed, rights forfeited, money spent, citizens
imprisoned and crime multiplied on a global scale, this war has been worse
than our first Prohibition, and worse than most wars ever fought. It has
thrust money and power upon the most dysfunctional people, and the worst
effects of this war are upon those most susceptible to peer pressure, our
young.

In recent years, Afghanistan has produced over three-quarters of the world's
opium, much of it channeled through the Northern Alliance forces and into
Tajikistan, Iran and Russia in trade for weapons to fight the Taliban. U.S.
taxpayers have paid the Taliban to fight that opium pipeline. Though the
United Nations accused the Taliban of stockpiling opium, and opium grown in
Taliban-controlled areas boosted the Afghan harvest to a new record in 1999,
we had until now treated the northern alliance as "bad guys" in the drug
war.

Without a formal declaration of war against Afghanistan, we're currently
remodeling the place and destroying "targets of opportunity" at will.

This begs a question: Are any of those targets the poppy or cannabis fields
we claim to despise? In actions we've called "war," we've blanketed Vietnam
and Colombia with defoliants, turning lush jungle into poisoned dirt. Are we
providing this service to the Afghans as well? As far as I can tell, no.

Once again, we seem to be working with drug dealers. Why? The only
casualties in this particular skirmish with drug forces are Bayer Corp. and
the patent laws that make beneficial drug development possible. Bayer
developed Cipro, or ciprofloxacin, a potent antibiotic against anthrax. It
takes a lot of money to develop new pharmaceuticals and wriggle them through
the various Food and Drug Administration hoops. If companies can sidestep
the development, testing, regulatory and marketing costs by simply stealing
the work of others, new beneficial drug development will dry up.

By threatening to overturn its patent rights, the U.S. government forced
Bayer into selling Cipro to the government at a bargain price. There have
been other attacks on drug patent protection in recent years, many on behalf
of AIDS special interests and the nations too poor to buy the medicines. I
understand the impulse to help people in the short term. But with all the
foolish pork and corporate welfare Americans are forced to support every
day, paying the market price for valuable drugs isn't merely fair, it is
justice that pays very well in the long run.

I know we're fighting a "War On Terror," but we're also attacking the drugs
we call good while tacitly supporting the drugs we call bad. The war on
drugs is wrong; it diverts attention and resources from the root problems of
drug abuse. But if we're going to call it a war and exact the sacrifice from
citizens that goes with that word, we should at least wage it to some kind
of conclusion. Similarly, if we're going to take out a nation, we should
declare war on it according to our own laws. And if we say we're defending
liberty, we should defend patent protections to the best of our ability.

For too long, we've been fudging rules, hiding our intentions, compromising
our principles and playing both sides against reason. We could fix this by
electing leaders for whom yes means yes and no means no. But for now, I'd be
happy if our leaders would tell us what is a war, how many we're waging
right now, and against whom. These questions really should have simple
answers.