FIGHT THE WAR ON DRUGS BY SUPPRESSING DEMAND by Pat M. Holt
Copyright (c) 1997, The Christian Science Publishing Society

A piece of ancient folk wisdom says, "If you're in a hole,
stop digging." The United States war on drugs is a
classic example of ignoring that sound advice. In the
first place, every year we spend more money, hire more
agents, seize more drugs, throw more people in jail and
see drug use increase. And every year the people in charge
of the war on drugs urge us to intensify our efforts
in other words, to keep digging the hole deeper. In the
second place, the corollary effects are worse than the
drug abuse the war is designed to prevent. The most
important of these effects is the pervasively malign
influence of the money that is generated by making the drug
trade illegal. This is what has spawned the street
violence that is tearing the social fabric of so many
American cities and leaving so many people (mainly young
black men) dead. This is what is corrupting the politics
of Colombia and Mexico. The tide is spreading across the
USMexican border to infect United States law enforcement
officers. Through campaign contributions, drug money
destroyed the president of Colombia and we do not know how
many other Colombian politicians. So far as we know, drug
money has not reached into Los Pinos, the Mexican White
House, but for months Mexicans have been buffeted by almost
daily scandals of drug money in other places. Given the
fact that drug lords have had almost as much experience as
the CIA in laundering money and concealing paper trails, it
would not be surprising if some of their money turned up as
bipartisan political contributions in Washington. In the
face of these baleful side effects, antidrug crusaders in
Congress, including some who ought to know better, become
more, not less, insistent on making drugs the litmus test
of United States Latin American policy, especially with
Mexico. This ignores the extraordinary historical
sensitivity of Mexicans to any hint of United States
interference. Attempts to coerce Mexico are not only doomed
to failure but guaranteed to be counterproductive. The
first step in getting out of a hole is to analyze why we
started digging to begin with. In the case of the war on
drugs, it was because drugs are bad. They destroy
individuals and families and lead to crime and other social
evils. We can deal with drugs by suppressing supply or
demand or both. We have tried to do both, but the major
emphasis of drug policy has been on interdicting supplies,
and this has been its spectacular failure. It has also been
the source of the policy's counterproductive mischief
through generating the oceans of cash that pay for such
widespread corruption. We would be much better off if we
concentrated on suppressing demand. There are several
helpful precedents for dealing with the current problem.
In 1919 the United States banned "intoxicating liquors."
This was in response to a prolonged campaign against the
undeniable social evils linked to alcohol. What happened
was the growth of other social evils represented by the
rise of gangsterism as a forerunner of the Mafia. For every
speakeasy broken up by federal alcohol agents, two more
seemed to arise, while alcoholism continued unabated. In
1933 the United States abandoned Prohibition as a national
policy (though it remained in some states and local
jurisdictions) and instituted a system of regulation that
on the whole has worked well. We still have alcoholism, but
we do not have the pernicious side effects we had under
Prohibition. Our experience in Vietnam offers another
useful lesson. Voices urging intensified efforts in the
war on drugs are eerily reminiscent of what we were
hearing from the White House about Vietnam 30 years ago. If
we sent more troops and dropped more bombs, the strategists
of the Vietnam disaster told us, victory would assuredly be
ours. Instead, things only got worse. Congress at last
pulled the plug, and today we have normal diplomatic
relations and the beginning of commerce with Vietnam.
Finally, there is the example of nicotine. This is surely
as addictive, and over the long term as destructive, as the
main targets of the drug war. Nobody has suggested that
cigarettes be made illegal. Instead, the government has
mounted a vigorous propaganda campaign, which has resulted
in a marked decline in smoking. The most telling
commentary on the war on drugs is not that it has
failed to control drugs but that it has created so many
related social problems. These will endure even when and if
the drug policy is changed. They are a high price to pay
for pigheadedness. * Pat M. Holt, former chief of staff of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, writes on foreign
affairs from Washington.