END THE WAR ON DRUGS

For well over 30 years, the government has waged a "War on Drugs." By
nearly all accounts, this war, much like the utopian "War on
Poverty," has been an abject failure. The stated goals of the federal
government's drug policy - reducing crime, drug addiction, and
juvenile drug use - have not been achieved. In many instances, the
aggressive prosecution of the "war" has inflamed the problem rather
than solved it. At the very least, the federal government's policy
has been an invasion of the constitutional rights of Americans.

Marijuana has been around as both a medicinal plant and a drug for
thousands of years. It was legal in the United States and was used as
medicine until 1937. The war on drugs, however, began in earnest with
the election of Richard Nixon as president. In 1972 marijuana was
placed in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, meaning that
the government considered it to have "no accepted medical use in
treatment in the United States."

William F. Buckley, Jr., one of the founders of the modern
conservative movement and of the magazine National Review, has been
convinced that the United States should cease and desist from the war on drugs.

He stated in a 2004 column that, "The marijuana laws can most
directly be compared to the Prohibition-era laws, which didn't work,
undermined the law, and were capriciously enforced. Pot consumption
varies, but not in correlation with the laws' throw-weight. If you
buy an ounce in New York state, that could bring you a fine of $l00;
in Louisiana, a jail sentence of 20 years."

Buckley shares some interesting statistics. He said, "When Nixon
declared his tough drug policies, athwart the recommendation of his
own commission, which had advocated licensing marijuana for
individual home consumption, arrests climbed to over 100,000 per year.

In 2001, 720,000 Americans were arrested for pot. About 20,000
inmates in the federal system have been incarcerated primarily for a
marijuana offense. Those in state systems would equal that figure,
and exceed it."

The war on drugs has continued despite growing public resistance to
the notion that marijuana use and possession should be classified as
a criminal activity.

According to a 1999 Gallup poll, 73 percent of Americans are in favor
of "making marijuana legally available for doctors to prescribe in
order to reduce pain and suffering." In a 2004 poll commissioned by
the AARP, 72 percent of Americans ages 45 and older thought marijuana
should be legal for medicinal purposes if recommended by a doctor.
Since 1996, voters in eight states, plus the District of Columbia,
have passed favorable medical marijuana ballot initiatives.

The policemen and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents who
enforce the federal and state laws on drugs have begun to show signs
of dissatisfaction with current policy as well.

In 2002, several thousand current and former members of the law
enforcement and criminal justice communities formed a group called
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), which aims to legalize
drug use under a regulatory scheme, which would be administered by
the government.

LEAP states that "Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the
money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and
far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the
war on drugs. Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while
drug barons and terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before."

Legalizing marijuana would bring few societal ills and would benefit
society in a variety of unforeseen ways. By regulating pot, the
government would take it out of the hands of drug lords and into the
marketplace; by legalizing it, we would free our law enforcement
community from the burden of frivolous arrests; and, by putting the
responsibility of drug use back on the citizenry, we would restore
the individual liberty of the American people.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that, "Timid men prefer the calm of despotism
to the tempestuous sea of Liberty." Americans aren't timid people.
They are capable of making their own choices and determining their
own destinies.

Kevin Boland is a Heights staff columnist. He welcomes comments at
kboland@bcheights.com.