A TRUCE IN THE WAR ON DRUGS by Arnold Beichman; THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, News World Communications, Inc.

In one of the Sherlock Holmes tales, the great detective
tells Dr. Watson in their Baker Street rooms: "When you
have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however
improbable, must be the truth."

Something like this logic has impelled me to come
around, albeit with great reluctance, in support of the
position that federal and state governments ought to
decriminalize drugs. Let the market prevail with, of
course, controls to prevent sales to children. Everybody
knows that the " war against drugs" has failed.
Evidence? Our overcrowded jails; the steadily increasing
use of drugs by children despite the " war against drugs.
"

My single reason for this agonizing reappraisal after
years of thinking about this paramount problem has little
to do with the libertarian doctrines of John Stuart Mill or
Milton Friedman, however relevant they may be. What my
switch has to do with is the drug cartel's corruption not
only of our urban and even rural police departments but
also of police departments throughout the world. The
French Connection is everywhere.

As Joseph D. McNamara, former police chief of San
Jose, Calif. and Kansas City, Mo., has written: "Every
week somewhere across the country there is another police
scandal related to the drug war corruption, brutality
and even armed robbery by cops in uniform, as well as
consistent violations of civil rights by officers who feel
that anything goes in a war."

There are many requirements for the maintenance of a
civil society autonomous private institutions protected
by the rule of law "within which individuals and
communities, possessing divergent values and beliefs, may
coexist in peace," in the words of Oxford philosopher John
Gray. After watching with sinking heart the many failures
of America's socalled war against drugs I believe there
is another important ingredient, a public institution,
without which no civil society is maintainable: a
trustworthy police department. A corrupted police
department, perceived as such by those it is commanded to
protect, endangers a civil society because the rule of law
is blunted. Prohibition from 1919 to 1933 was the great
corrupter. And now it's drug trafficking.

Could drug distribution be as widespread as it is today
unless law enforcement agencies or their subordinates were,
at best, turning a blind eye to the trade and, at worst,
were somehow involved in the trade itself? Should we hire
even more police? Build even more jails? Impose even
harsher prison sentences? These are not answers. Not when
$500 worth of heroin or cocaine from source countries like
Columbia, Bolivia or Peru is worth anywhere from $2,000,000
to $10,000,000 on our city streets.

J. Edgar Hoover knew what he was doing when he
declined an offer to bring drug law enforcement under FBI
jurisdiction. Hoover was an empire builder but he knew
where to stop. Going after the Mafia bosses was one thing.
But going after drugpushers, streetcorner distributors?
Hoover knew better than to drag the FBI into Operation
Rathole.

Mexico is an instructive case of what can happen to a
country when the United States cannot enforce its own drug
policies. Because the United States is the biggest and
richest market for drug trafficking, 28 percent of Mexico's
law enforcement officials have been fired for corruption in
the last three years, according to the March 17 New
Republic. In the last year alone, writes Susan E. Reed,
more than 900 Federal Judicial police have been fired for
suspected offenses including theft, extortion, guarding
drug shipments and murder. You can be sure such firings
don't even scratch the surface, especially when you learn
that General Jesus Guttierez Rebollo, Mexico's top official
in its alleged war on drugs was on the take for seven
years. The Mexican cartel takes in $10 billion a year.

George Shultz, former Secretary of State, said
recently: "We're not really going to get anywhere until we
take the criminality out of the drug business and the
incentives for criminality out of it."

In other words, let these drugs be treated no
differently from two other potentially lifethreatening
"drugs" alcohol and tobacco which are, except for age
restrictions, easily available to adults. In short, having
eliminated the impossible more cops, more jails, more
jailtime, more narcs only one path remains:
decriminalization.

Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover
Institution, is a columnist for The Washington Times.