DRUG WAR UNWINNABLE WITHOUT LEGALIZATION

Jay McCloskey, a lawyer trained to find fact, lets his emotions carry away
his brain in his column, "Making the case against legalization" (BDN, Sept.
23-24).

Does he remember a time when Maine, along with nine other states,
decriminalized marijuana possession back in the '70s? At the time this
reform was considered "tantamount to legalization" and was predicted to
produce a veritable drug orgy. After all, you could own an ounce of the
stuff and worry about nothing more than a $100 fine. That was hardly
considered to be a deterrent against jaywalking, let alone the irresistible
addictiveness of the evil weed.

But marijuana use did not go up, either among youth or adults, in any of
the states which decriminalzed. Nor were there any of the mass migrations
of marijuana users, also predicted by the McCloskeys of that time, to
states which offered a safe haven to depravity.

Holland, which made cannabis products virtually — but not officially —-
legal back in the '70s, boasts drug use rates among its teen-agers that are
a small fraction of U.S. rates. More than this, crime and incarceration
rates are also well below ours. Switzerland, Spain, Italy and other
countries have also decriminalized marijuana and other drugs without the
McCloskey scenario of "90 percent" drug use rates.

What causes the cognitive dissonance here is the fact that prohibition
itself — the law — is the real reason behind most of the ills, including
"the devastating consequences that drugs have on the people who use them
and on their families," which the law ascribes to drugs. Even the
well-intentioned D.A.R.E. program has been shown in study after study to
increase drug use among its graduates. Blinded by our outrage, we have for
generations woven the enemy out of our own faith in the force of law as
remedy for all ills.

We pretend that the drug war is different from alcohol prohibition and so
refuse to learn the obvious lessons of history. The results fly in the face
of our attempts to beat, shoot, propagandize and jail the drug problem out
of our lives. We have been getting tougher on drugs for 100 years, and the
drugs just get tougher.

In a familiar story of Drug War America, last week an 11-year-old child was
shot in San Diego by no-knock, hair-triggered police. The 41 shots New York
police made into an unarmed man they had approached with the intent of
setting him up as a marijuana dealer have become legend sung by Bruce
Springsteen.

How can this carnage possibly be better than the effective policy of "harm
reduction," which our European neighbors have shown actually reduces drug
use rates?

Perhaps another reason for cognitive dissonance is the fact that McCloskey
makes his living from a system that depends on the drug war. Remove
marijuana prosecutions as alcohol prosecutions were removed in 1933, and
the Department of Justice would be closing down 75 percent of its offices
and letting go of 75 percent of its employees. The drug war is a major
vested interest. In California, the largest contributor to political
campaigns is the prison guards' union.

This huge flow of federal drug war dollars is the most addictive substance
of all. It makes all those charts and paid expert reports seem to make
sense even when obvious facts contradict them.

Supply follows demand, legal or not. If you want to control something, you
don't turn it over to gangsters. By funding the criminals, the law has
turned the world into a vast 1920s Chicago.

It is in the case for legalization that alcohol and tobacco are exhibits A
and B. They are much more toxic and addictive than marijuana, which has
never caused a recorded medical death and is rated below caffeine by
addiction experts. But at least we do not have alcohol and tobacco
gangsters selling these products in schoolyards, nor are people dying in
turf wars or police raids.

McCloskey is still struggling with the devastating truth that is barely
starting to hit America, that the "solution" is actually most of the
problem with respect to marijuana. Holding up such paper-thin premises as
"we could expect to see use rates rise to climb to about 90 percent" shows
just how close the truth has finally come.