OPED: CALL OFF THE WAR ON DRUGS

There's only one way for the United States to win its
War on Drugs: Call it off

The country would save $1.7 billion US, and ease the incredible
burden on its prisons

On March 30, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the
main Marxist rebel force in the country that supplies 80 per cent of
the world's cocaine, responded to the U.S. Congress's recent approval
of $1.7 billion US in military aid to help the Colombian army fight
the drug lords with a radical proposal of its own. Why not just cut
the ground out from under the cocaine mafia by legalizing the drugs?

Ending the legal prohibition of drug use would "eliminate the root
cause of the high profits produced by the illegality of this
business," the FARC spokesman pointed out. That $1.7 billion could
then be spent on more useful things like offering treatment (not
imprisonment) to American drug users who wanted to quit, and
subsidizing crop-replacement programs for peasant farmers in Colombia
and other drug-exporting countries. It was all so sane and reasonable
that it had to come from a non-American source.

Back in the U.S.A., by contrast, last week's news from the front line
of the War on Drugs was the revelation by Rolling Stone magazine that
major U.S. publications like Seventeen, Family Circle, and US News
and World Report have secretly been taking government money to run
anti-drug propaganda disguised as fiction or straight reporting. In
most democracies, official perversion of the media on this scale would
have caused a huge public outcry, but not in America.

So deeply inured have Americans become to the fanatical War on Drugs
mind-set that neither the magazines nor the White House seemed
embarrassed by this abuse of public trust. "There's another anti-drug
feature in May or June," chirped Jackie O'Hare, in charge of ad sales
at Seventeen. "I'm sure (the White House) will be happy about that."

Biggest imprisoned population

One month before, in February, the United States jail population
passed two million. With five per cent of the world's population, the
U.S. now has 25 per cent of its prison population, and probably has a
higher proportion of its citizens in jail than any other country in
history. Over half a million of those imprisoned Americans - including
about 60 per cent of all prisoners in federal institutions - are in
jail for non-violent drug of-fences (i.e. just having some banned
substances in their possession).

Probably half of the rest are imprisoned for theft or violent offences
that are connected in one way or another with the enormous trade in
illegal drugs. If the War on Drugs had been shut down 10 years ago,
the number of people in U.S. prisons would probably not be much higher
than in the rest of the world - and neither would the U.S. crime rate.
Yet no responsible American politician ever suggests abandoning this
futile and destructive crusade, because to do so would be political
suicide.

Unfortunately, ideology and moralism have completely driven out
pragmatism and humanitarian considerations in the United States when
it comes to drugs. The propaganda has also driven out most of the
plain facts about drug addiction. So here are a few facts that ought
to be obvious, but aren't.

First, illegal drugs, including the so-called "hard drugs" like
heroin, are no more addictive than alcohol or nicotine. Whether the
drug in question is alcohol, marijuana or heroin, it is those with
addictive personalities who are vulnerable (in varying degrees). Most
consumers can remain casual users, and may even drift away in time.

Second, consuming most illegal drugs is less dangerous to the
individual's health than consuming the most popular legal drugs in
Western culture: alcohol and nicotine. Smoking can kill you; heroin,
except in a massive overdose, cannot.

The main health hazard in using marijuana (cannabis) is that it is
usually smoked in combination with tobacco. Cocaine is hard on the
nasal membranes, but pure heroin, consumed regularly in moderate
quantities, has no known health costs. Nor does it cause the kind of
violent personality changes that often accompany alcohol addiction.

All this sounds like stark heresy after a half century of propaganda,
but ask any doctor. It's preferable not to be addicted to any chemical
substance, but the huge difference between the way Americans treat
alcohol or nicotine addiction and addiction to other chemicals is
purely a cultural reflex.

Puritanical

Because of American power in the world, this puritanical approach to
psychotropic drugs has been exported to the entire world, with other
governments being strong-armed into adopting the prohibitionist US
approach (thus filling their prisons and raising their crime rates as
well).

And it is not likely that a proposal from a source as tainted as FARC,
whose commanders derive much of their income by imposing a 15-per-cent
"war tax" on coca producers and drug laboratories in the parts of
Colombia they control, will change many American minds.

Many more millions of lives will have to be ruined before the U.S.
rethinks its drug policies, especially since the hugely lucrative
industry of building and staffing jails to hold the victims of the War
on Drugs has created a powerful new prohibitionist lobby in
Washington. (The prison industry now employs over 520,000 people, more
than any other employer except General Motors.)

But in the long run, such manifest insanity cannot prevail.