REESE WRONG ABOUT LEGALIZING DRUGS

Charley Reese has trotted out the tired myth of rampant criminality during
Prohibition to make a sophomoric case for legalizing drugs. Perhaps if he
spent as much time as I have working with the addicted and their families,
his rhetoric would be more temperate. His contention that anti-drug efforts,
not drugs themselves, cause society greater harm is terribly wrong.

Reese presents the legalizers' refrain that banning alcohol brought us Al
Capone, tommy-guns, the St. Valentine's Day massacre and Chicago gangsters.
He implies that if prohibiting alcohol caused crime, legalizing drugs would
benefit society.

The reality is that the murder rate went up more than 400 percent in the two
decades before Prohibition (and before the Harrison Act of 1914, which
constrained wholesale use of dangerous drugs). The 25 percent rise after
Prohibition, by comparison, was minor, and the rate started back down before
Prohibition was repealed.

Even today we can attribute as much as 80 percent of crime to drug abuse --
not by those quietly using drugs at home but by those who commit crimes
while high on drugs, some to obtain money for drugs.

Reese also misses the point that drug abuse in America has dropped 50
percent (from 25 million users to 12.8 million) in the past two decades,
while cocaine addiction has dropped by 70 percent. Recent Federal Bureau of
Investigation statistics reveal an impressive drop in serious crimes, which
experts credit, in part, to decreased crack-cocaine use. When we stop paying
attention to the problem, it worsens. Youth use rose dramatically in the
early 1990s after we abandoned the '80s' "Just Say No" campaign. Use fell
after the onset of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. So, although
Reese argues that anti-drug efforts have failed, the Partnership for a
Drug-Free America reports youth attitudes toward drugs becoming increasingly
negative, a step in the right direction.

Reese's basic point is that drug use is the user's problem. Actually, drug
abuse is society's problem. Ask the children of addicts, who constitute more
than 60 percent of foster-home placements. Ask the taxpayers who pay $110
billion a year in medical and social costs for the ravages of drug abuse.
Most of all, ask the heart-broken parents who watch their children waste
away as they turn into someone else -- drugs are, indeed, mind-altering --
because we did not care to keep those children drug-free.

With this part of Reese's argument I agree:

The struggle against drug abuse is not a war, because war implies a final
victory, an ultimate vanquishing of a foe. This struggle will never end, for
the minute we drop our guard, drug abuse will only roar back to do more
harm. Nor is it a war, because we do not make war on children. Instead, we
protect them from harm.

The only wise solution is to continue the successful strategy of countering
drug abuse, by endeavoring both to lower demand and to make it riskier to
supply drugs to our citizenry.

James R. McDonough is the director of the Office of Drug Control for Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush and was the Director of Strategy in Barry McCaffrey's ONDCP in
Washington D.C.