To the Editor:

Colombia's recent decertification as a country committed to the war on
drugs is a good example of how US drug prohibition policy, by mindlessly
and inevitably creating a lucrative black market for drugs, also inevitably
saddles producer nations with the same chronic problems of crime and
corruption we face at home. The fact that Columbia will now be punished for
following the dictates of the market exposes the central fallacy of
prohibition: in a market economy supply will always increase while there is
demand. Prohibition, by shifting the production and distribution of drugs
to the black market, thus generates the criminality it purportedly combats.

There is no escape from this reality. Over time, the illicit returns from
the illegal American drug market have grown so vast that the rate and
levels of corruption threaten to engulf entire nations. Colombia is not the
only country so affected: Mexico, Burma and Afghanistan come easily to
mind, and the addition of the states of the former Soviet Union to this
list means than the attendant destabilization will have vast implications
for the global drug trade.

At the same time, the domestic drug war has been a catastrophic failure,
producing a criminal justice system run rampant and an ever-increasing
number of drug users. The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of
its citizens than any other country in the world, save Russia. Nearly 1 in
3 black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are in prison or on probation or
parole on any given day. Police brutality and corruption are widespread,
and a recent U.N. human rights report criticized the conditions at several
U.S. prisons as 'inhuman'. Meanwhile, the addict population continues to
increase: the number of hard-core heroin users, for example, has grown from
68,000 in 1968 to 700,000 today and is still going up.

If the United States government is serious about reducing the international
supply of illegal drugs, it must first address the issue of domestic demand
through a series of policies more effective than the failed program of
prohibition.

Sincerely,
Joseph Gabriel,
Haydenville, MA