TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT

A few issues have so polarized Americans that each side has difficulty even
listening to the other side, much less compromising with it. On these
issues, the majority is usually found in the middle, a place where
activists won't go because their own side will accuse them of caving in.
What the activists can't see is that the common good would be served well
by compromise.

The shared desire to reduce the crime and the lives ruined by the abuse of
illegal drugs becomes polarized when we discuss how to do it best. We have
been wedded to the current war on drugs and it has stalemated. The illegal
drug market has learned to thrive underground. The drug supplying and money
laundering infrastructure is in place, and anyone who wants drugs can get
them.The war has gone on so long that we have come to accept the deaths,
the lives ruined, the violent criines, the clogged courts and prisons, and
the corrupting influences on society. Most of us don't experience these
effects firsthand, but citizens who can least afford it must live in war
zones and hope their children can live to grow up and escape to something
better.

None of this will change unless we try something different. Getting tough
on drugs makes good political rhetoric, but has been tried for 20 years,
and has helped create today's predicament. It is so bad that almost any
change would be an improvement.

A recent issue of Foreign Affairs, a respected, nonpartisan,
non-ideological periodical, has an article entitled "Commonsense Drug
Policy," which focuses on reducing the harm being caused by drugs. It
reports the results of experiments and trials run in other countries, and
compares them to what is being done in the United States. The fact that it
states that "most proponents of harm reduction do not favor legalization"
suggests that the ideas in the article might provide a nucleus for
compromise. Public awareness of these alternatives to the drug war is a
first step toward improving this predicament we are in.