WE'VE WAGED AN 85-YEAR WAR AGAINST ECCENTRICITY

More even than European conquest, Hitler was fixated on "solving" the
"Jewish Problem."

Jews, as Hitler saw things, were parasites, spiritually and morally
corrupt, powerful and conspiratorial, purveyors of decadence, a
corrosive influence on Germanic culture and a clear and present danger
to the German state. That's what Hitler preached, and what Nazified
Germans believed, even though it was false, all of it.

What if by some miracle, a suddenly enlightened Hitler had stood
before the masses and spoken the truth: That, as a tiny minority, the
Jews had no power to threaten the German state, presented no danger;
that they were people, good, bad and indifferent like any others; that
they had enriched, not corrupted culture; that the "Jewish Problem"
did not exist?

Had that truth been revealed, the "Jewish Problem" would have vanished
like the phantasm it was.

America's "Drug Problem" is likewise a chimera, even if its reality is
an article of faith which holds that drug users are parasites,
purveyors of decadence, a corrupting influence on society; that drugs
are a force so powerful they constitute a clear and present danger to
the nation. Drug users are the Jews of 20th century America --
hounded, persecuted, shipped off to prisons and labor camps by the
hundreds of thousands.

But our "Drug Problem" is not real, and if only the national
leadership would let go its fixation on this dangerous mirage, 10
years from now we would look back on the Drug War in horror, as
Germans do the Holocaust.

(For the analogy, credit to Daniel K. Benjamin and Roger Leroy
Miller's insightful 1991 book, "Undoing Drugs: Beyond Legalization.")

Be advised that the United States -- where all drugs, including
cocaine, heroin, morphine and opium, were legal -- didn't have a "Drug
Problem" until prohibitionists created it out of thin air for
propaganda purposes in the push for enactment of the Harrison Narcotic
Act of 1914.

In the 19th century, drug use was widely viewed as mere eccentricity.
Opium dens were centrally located. Pharmacies sold morphine -- or
anything else -- over the counter. Heroin could be ordered through the
mail.

In the late 1800s, your typical morphine addict was a doctor, a
patient suffering pain or a middle-aged woman who lived in the South. Opium
was the soporific of choice among Chinese laborers, itinerant gamblers and
prostitutes. Cocaine attracted the "melancholy" and society's workaholics.
(Thanks to David T. Courtwright's 1982 study, "Dark Paradise: Opiate
Addiction in America Before 1940.")

Among the prominent cocaine users of the era were Thomas Edison,
President William McKinley and Sigmund Freud. Opium aficionados
included Edgar Allen Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and many other poets
and authors; lots of physicians, noted actors, musicians, professors,
scientists and politicians. Most were just plain working people.

By the turn of the century, Courtwright calculates (through study of
import, pharmacy and tax records and contemporary surveys) addicts
constituted less than 1 percent of the population, and addiction was
in steady decline. The "Drug Problem" did not exist until evangelical
prohibitionists like Harry Anslinger and his federal allies alerted
everybody to the heretofore unnoticed peril.

The prohibition of recreational drugs after 1914 quickly turned
hundreds of thousands of solid citizens into criminals. Hundreds of
physicians became jailbirds. Black-market merchants demanded piles of
cash for what used to be a few pennies worth of powder from the
friendly local apothecary.

"The scope of this change," writes Courtwright, "can be described by
the etymology of a single word, 'junkie.' During the early 1920s, a
number of New York City addicts supported themselves by picking
through industrial dumps for scraps of copper, lead, zinc and iron,
which they collected in a wagon and then sold to a dealer. Junkie, in
its original sense, literally meant junkman. The term was symbolically
appropriate as well, since the locus of addiction had, within a single
generation, shifted from the office and parlor to the desolate piles
of urban debris."

It is against these people, rendered desperate and powerless by the
drug laws, that we wage war. Like Hitler's anti-Jewish laws, our Drug
War compels people into depravity and criminality -- and then we
persecute them on the grounds of their depraved criminality.

Eighty-five years of the Drug War have wrought a stupendously complex
Rube Goldberg apparatus -- a dozen layers of law enforcement, a vast
web of repressive laws, an exploding prison system, an archipelago of
treatment and re-education programs, hideous turf wars in the inner
city and, most recently, young Americans dying in the fetid Colombian
jungles in service of the impossible task of eradicating a trade that
cannot be eradicated even inside the walls of maximum security prisons.

All this -- and for what, exactly? To solve the "Drug Problem"; to
stop maybe 1 percent of our citizens from indulging an eccentricity a
saner century correctly viewed as causing a "problem" no more serious
than skipping church.

Note: Rafael Tammariello is a Review-Journal editorial writer. His column
appears on Sunday.