WE LOSE THE WAR WHEN WE SEE IT AS ONE

It has become fashionable in intellectual circles to declare that we have
lost the "War on Drugs." There seems to be growing agreement among the
Commentariat that decades of effort, entailing countless arrests and untold
billions of dollars, have done little to stem the tide of illegal
narcotics. A popular metaphor is to liken the struggle to the Vietnam
conflict -- a quagmire of futility from which there can be no honorable exit.

Many reasonable people have despaired of the effort and now suggest that
it's time to give up. If the War on Drugs is Vietnam, then legalization is
the Fall of Saigon. Before we willingly submit to another humiliating
defeat, it's worth considering a couple of observations about the nature of
"war" and the history of "drugs."

War is an inherently contradictory enterprise. The Revolutionary War, for
instance, was waged for the expressed purposes of ensuring "life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness." The men who fought the armed campaign for
these ideals subsequently placed their lives in peril, forfeited their
liberty to the dictates of military service and abandoned the pursuit of
happiness to the grim necessities of combat.

Clearly, the only reasonable justification for war is the hope of eventual
peace. Sane combatants fight for an end to fighting. Thus understood, the
so-called War on Drugs was doomed from the start. So, too, was the war on
murder. Killing your fellow citizen has been illegal since biblical times.
Cain slew Abel and was exiled for his misdeed. That solution didn't solve
the problem, and now, several millennia later, people still kill each other
with discouraging regularity.

Every major police department has a Homicide Division whose sole purpose is
to investigate these events at considerable expense to the public coffers.
Despite our failure to eliminate mayhem, I'm unaware of serious
commentators who suggest that we should legalize murder. Maybe violence is
simply a facet of the human predicament -- a vice that societies must deal
with as part of the cost of doing business.

If the propensity to violence is an innate human characteristic, so is the
"pleasure principle." That theorem states that people tend to do things
that feel good. Unfortunately, some of these pleasurable activities have
harmful side effects for society at large. Proponents of legalizing drugs
seldom mention that we've already tried that strategy. History recounts
that opium was brought to the American frontier by Chinese railroad
laborers. At the time, it was perfectly legal. Heroin enjoyed a brief
popularity as an ingredient in cough syrups and elixirs. Not
coincidentally, there were more heroin addicts in New York in 1900 than
there were during the freewheeling '60s.

When LSD was introduced into the mainstream, cops were powerless to prevent
its usage. The designer drug Ecstasy was legal until 1985. All of these
substances came to be outlawed because of the deleterious impact they had
upon public order. Lifting the ban against them will not solve the problems
that got them banned in the first place.

One argument in favor of legalization states that by eliminating the
sanctions against narcotics we would take the profit motive out of their
distribution. I've never understood how that is supposed to work. What
product can you name that is sold without profit? Who would supply the
newly legal demand for drugs? We are currently in the process of suing
cigarette manufacturers for billions because of the long-term health
effects of their product. Can you imagine the product liability associated
with marketing PCP and crack cocaine?

Getting criminals out of the drug trade is like trying to get the spots out
of Dalmatians. August Busch III, president of Anheuser-Busch Breweries,
manufactures a product that contains the only legal intoxicant, alcohol. He
recently had the audacity to mention that college kids drink beer and to
suggest that we might do better to acknowledge that obvious fact rather
than pretend that it didn't exist. Busch's proposal elicited howls of
protest from critics who claimed that he was merely trying to sell more
beer at the expense of public welfare. Perhaps. Then again, maybe Mr. Busch
believes that it's difficult to formulate sound public policy with your
head in the sand.

Repealing drug laws will make potentially lethal narcotics as commonplace
as draft beer at a frat party. Because society's younger members are the
most prone to experimentation, future generations will look back on the
current state of affairs as "the good old days." The problem with the War
on Drugs is not its intent, but its name. Cops don't wage war; they enforce
laws necessitated by human folly. That's why they have a pension plan.