500 DRUG GENIUSES

With 500 of the world's prominent people serving as foot soldiers, there's
now a war on against the war on drugs. As the U.N. General Assembly opened
a special anti-drugs session this week, an international group of eminences
urged the world to cede victory to the drugs' allure and concentrate its
money and attention on making the addicts more comfortable.

"The global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself,"
said a letter appearing Monday in newspapers and bearing the signatures of

500 people rounded up by an outfit bankrolled by financier George Soros,
the man who underwrote the successful California effort to legalize
"medical marijuana." "Punitive prohibitions" should be dropped in favor of
approaches based on "common sense, public health and human rights."

The letter is mostly the sort of high-minded pabulum needed to attract such
famous names as former U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar or
former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz. The word "legalize" never
appears. Nor do the words cocaine, heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine or
designer drugs. For the "We Believe" signers, it's all just "drugs." We
hope all these sophisticated folks won't feel their judgment is being too
terribly offended if we say quite bluntly: They have just been enlisted in
Mr. Soros's legalization crusade.

It's a remarkable collection: former White House general counsel Lloyd
Cutler, Milton Friedman, Willie Brown, Richard Burt, Bob Strauss, Joycelyn
Elders, Ahmet Ertegun, Harvey Cox, Charles Murray, Bishop Paul Moore Jr.,
former FDA Commissioner and Stanford President Donald Kennedy, Ruth
Messinger, Walter Cronkite, anti-biowarfare crusader Matthew Meselson of
Harvard, Gunter Grass, Ivan Illich, Jesus Silva Herzog of Mexico. They're
all listed at www.lindesmith.org/news/un.html.

We have a few favorites. Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, who's
famous for worrying about testing cosmetic chemicals on animals. And--this
takes the cake--Naderite Sidney Wolfe, who's dedicated his life to
allegations that various prescription drugs are "unsafe." No doubt Dr.
Wolfe would advocate package inserts listing such side-effects as crack
babies and headlong dives out windows.

The notion that drug use is both a human right and an unstoppable urge is
at root an immoral one, with its suggestion that some human lives are not
worth saving from the scourge of addiction. Fortunately, this defeatist
attitude is still in the minority. The mainstream view remains the one
articulated by French President Jacques Chirac as the U.N. session opened:
"The great crusade against drugs will not end until we have done [away]
with this cancer eating at our societies."

Critics of this approach include a diverse crew of leftists and
self-described realists and libertarian economists who believe in
backward-sloping demand curves. It occurs to us to suggest that the future
of the debate would profit if all of these people stated publicly whether
they themselves use any of these drugs recreationally.

They argue that years of effort have done little or nothing to stem the
flow and consumption of narcotics. Some add that de-criminalizing drug use
is the best way to bring down drug lords and to eradicate the pernicious
political and social effects of their illegal activities. All seem to
believe that drug use and abuse are part of the human condition, and that
governments should concentrate on making addicts less of a threat to
themselves and their societies by providing safer access to drugs and the
adult addicts' attendant diaper-changing services, which they call "public
health."

It still strikes us as a hard sell to families who've bankrupted themselves
trying to bring a son or daughter out of heroin hell. Or parents battling
to make sure their children aren't among those down at the local high
school or middle school using marijuana. Pedophilia and child prostitution
may also be part of the human condition, but you don't hear anyone arguing
that they should be legalized or at least made safe and sanitary.

None of this can obscure the fact that the current war on drug
trafficking--and the political corruption, economic distortion, crime, AIDS
and other social ills that flow from it--is not going well. This week's
session at the United Nations, however, at least begins to point in the
right direction. The proposals we are hearing are for a more cross-border
approach to a cross-border problem. Up to now most countries have focused
their efforts internally, with a more global approach mostly breeding
recriminations. This time the heads of state are on the right track, and
perhaps something useful will slowly come from this session.

If the war on drugs isn't working, the answer is not to abandon the fight.
We suspect that unlike the 500 famous authors of this week's petition,
ordinary people have much less tolerance for the drug culture or its
denizens.


Checked-by: Richard Lake