Please Notify America: The Drug War Is Dead
By Daniel Lazare
[The writer is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the
Constitution is Paralyzing Dernocracy." He contributed this comment
to the Herald Tribune.]

NEW YORK I've never been in battle, but I understand that it will
sometime happen that a soldier will take a bullet to the stomach but
will stagger on regardless. Only when he looks down does he realize the
damage that's been done. And then, of course, he dies.
Something similar seems to be happening to U.S. drug policy.
Since last autumn, it has taken no fewer than four solid hits to the
midsection. Although no one in Washington seems to have noticed yet,
the damage is frightful. Rather than figuring out how to repair the drug
war and get it back on track, the real question is how much longer this
walking corpse of a crusade can continue before it finally collapses.
The first blow occurred in November when voters in California
and Arizona approved referenda legalizing the use of marijuana for
medical purposes. Ever since, drugwar stalwarts have been arguing that
medical marijuana is a diversion in a campaign to slip in legalization
through the back door.
There's a grain of truth in this. Medical marijuana is a small but
significant step toward a more reasonable drug policy, a feature of
which would undoubtedly involve marijuana legalization.
But the real issue is not medicalization per se so much as the
government's conduct in this debate. Washington has blocked research
money and then complained that there is no evidence that marijuana
may be useful in treating glaucoma, mitigating the side effects of cancer
chemotherapy or preventing the "wasting"associated with AIDS. In the
end, voters bolted. Fiftysix percent voted in favor in California, while
in Arizonano one's idea of a liberal bastionthey approved by nearly
two to one.
The second blow occurred in December when the University of
Michigan released its annual adolescent drug survey. Among eighth
graders, it found that illicit drug use has more than doubled since
1991. Among 10th graders, it has nearly doubled, while among high
school seniors it has risen nearly 50 percent. While no one can say for
certain what is driving drug use, one thing seems clear: The
government's overheated antidrug rhetoric is backfiring badly.
The thud major blow was the certification farce, the
reverberations of which are still being felt on Capitol Hill. Colombia
sprayed about 40,000 acres of coca fields last year, while, according to
prosecutors, Mexico's drug czar, General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was
on the take from drug traffickers. But Mexico was deemed too
economically important to be decertified as a goodfaith partner in the
war on drugs. Therefore, Mexico was certified, while Columbia, for the
second year in a row, was not.
In truth, there is no way that Colombia, Mexico or the United
States can fight this traffic. Rather than driving down usage, the drug
war has turned into the most potent device for driving up drug
consumption since British gunboats forced Imperial China to open its
doors to the opium trade in the 1840s. Prohibiting drugs does not
dampen demand. Quite the contrary, it glamorizes and eroticizes drugs,
driving up demand in much the same way Prohibition drove up demand
in the 1920s for lethal concoctions like bathtub gin. The result is a
multibilliondollar drug trade that is far beyond the power of financially
strapped Latin American governments.
The fourth blow to American drug policy is contained in a
federal indictment handed up in Miami in January, detailing a plot by
Russian, Colombian and Cuban mobsters to purchase a Soviet
submarine for use in smuggling cocaine into the U.S. mainland. The
drug trade is rapidly globalizing as traffickers from Latin America, the
former Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, Pakistan and who knows where
else join forces to create a marketing operation with worldwide reach.
Officials in Washington should be terrified by this. But they are
so captivated by them own rhetoric that they have so far failed to
notice. When they do, they will realize that the jihad they've been
fighting all these years is dead and that reality has emerged victorious.
Perhaps then they can move to something a little more cogent.