Time For A New Approach

Editor,

Re: "Local Political Leaders Blast Johnson's Plans" by Dave Burge, Jan. 6,
2001.

Governor Johnson has hit a tender spot with his recent proposals for drug
policy reform. The responses of elected officials in the Four Corners area
are typical knee-jerk reactions.

The failed drug war criminalizes someone who willingly buys, sells, or
consumes an arbitrarily illegal substance. Criminalizing this behavior is
impossible to enforce and unconstitutional. Arresting bank robbers,
something we all agree is good, criminalizes action that has caused harm to
an unwilling party.

Numerous well-known academics, journalist, politicians and concerned
citizens of all political persuasions have come out in favor of reform,
including Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, William F. Buckley, Jr.,
former Rep. Tom Campbell, Hawaii Gov. Benjamin Cayetano, Rep. John Conyers,
Jr., Walter Cronkite, Hugh Downs, Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman,
Arianna Huffington, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rep. Charles Rangel, former
Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, Rep. Maxine
Waters, and others.

The proposed reforms do not suggest legalizing drugs. In 2000, our federal
and state drug war bureaucracies consumed more than $40 billion - a
dramatic increase since 1980, when federal spending was roughly $1 billion
and state spending just a few times that.

Yet despite the ballooning costs of the drug war, drugs are cheaper and
purer than they were two decades ago, and teens say drugs are easier to get
than alcohol. A study by the RAND Drug Policy Research Center found that
every additional dollar invested in treatment saves taxpayers more than $7,
and that additional law enforcement cost 15 times as much as treatment to
achieve the same reduction in drug abuse and related social costs.

The current drug war does not handle the problem, and it's time for a new
approach.

Clovis Thorn, a native New Mexican, is special projects coordinator for The
Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation in New York.