WAR ON DRUGS HIGH ON LIST OF STUPID THINGS

Sometimes, the coffee drinkers play a game called the Stupidest Thing in
Government.

Most of the time it's funny. Someone will mention that someone sold the
Navy a $4,000 toilet seat. Someone else will have seen a $5 million study
on the economic impact of tulip farming in Delaware.

When my turn came to talk about the silliest government program, I said I
thought it was the War of Drugs.

No one laughed.

It was one of those gaffs I'll probably never recover from - or be forgiven
for.

One of the ironies is that I am a moralistic, judgmental prude about drugs.

I think people who spend money on cocaine might as well make a
tax-deductible contribution to an organization that murders honest judges
and journalists in South America.

I also see the effects of addiction in Galveston. Every day.

People who buy cocaine pay the bills for thugs who enslave people in
distant lands and who poison our neighbors next door.

I think it's clear we ought to fight drugs.

I also think it's clear that what we're doing is not working.

Suppose you were a CEO of a large organization. Suppose your one corporate
goal was to reduce the importation of a competitor's product.

Your bonus is riding on this, so think hard.

Suppose, in your first year, that your competitor's imports were up 50
percent. You go to your stockholders, hat in hand, and ask for another year
and more money.

Maybe they give you a year.

But who would look at 20 years of wildly escalating imports and wildly
escalating expenditures and conclude that next year, you ought to be given
more money to do what you did last year?

Well, if you are the drug czar, the answer is Congress.

One more irony: This country had a far more coherent drug policy under
Richard Nixon, arguably the worst president in our history, than it does now.

Nixon argued that spending heavily on drug interdiction didn't make
economic sense. He argued that the only way to curtail supply was to
curtail demand.

His drug policy included funds to educate young people and to treat addicts.

His argument against putting all the funding into intercepting drug
shipments was simple. With luck, law officers might intercept two out of
every 10 shipments from the cocaine cartels. That would leave the cartel
with a measly profit of somewhere around 8,000 percent.

Nixon realized that, by increasing U.S. spending on drug enforcement, he
might cut the cartel's operating profits to, say, 6,000 percent.

He did not believe that would force the drug lords to liquidate their evil
factories and transfer their money to the stock market.

Since the Nixon era, we have gotten tougher and tougher on drugs by
spending more and more on law enforcement.

Bottom line: Demand for cocaine is up. So are the profits of our ruthless
competitors.

Next year, though, our plan is going to be to put those jerks out of
business by spending more than ever and finally cutting their profits to
6,000 percent.

I doubt that will work.

But I am absolutely certain that's our plan.

I know because we've tried that plan every year since Nixon left office.