The bipartisan Council on Crime in America, whose most conspicuous
spokesman is William Bennett, does fine work, but when it touches on
the matter of drugs its analytical powers simply decompose, as though
the writer were high on crack cocaineor the legal stuff.

Last week the Council exploded in opposition to the call for an
approach to the legalization of drugs made by seven writers (myself
included) in this journal. To the title of the symposium -- "The War on
Drugs Is Lost'' -- the Council replies that that is most certainly not
so. To the end of proving this, it cites the reduction of drug use by
non-addicts. It declined by 50 per cent between 1979 and 1992. The
planted axiom of course is that that decline is owing to the war on
drugs. But what is it that accounts for the decline in the number of
users of tobacco during the same period, from 33.5 million to 26.5
million? The use of tobacco is not illegal. But since 1979, and
beginning even before that, the deleterious effect of cigarettes was so
persuasively argued that even William Bennett gave up smoking.

A look at the formal side of the war on drugs is required. If something
is illegal, then the law that makes it so is effective to the extent
that it imprisons those who violate it, thereby hypothetically reducing
the number of lawbreakers.

That would seem obvious, but isn't to the distinguished members of the
Council on Crime in America. In 1985, 811,000 arrests were made for
drug offenses. In 1994, 1.35 million arrests were made for drug
offenses. Does that mean that the war on drugs is effective? Well, no.
An effective law diminishes, rather than increases, the number of
violators who have to be arrested.

And then of course one asks, If 1.35 million drug users were arrested
in 1994, how many drug users were not arrested? The Council informs us
that there are more than 4 million casual users of cocaine (defined as
people who use it less than once a week). How so? Why haven't they been
arrested? And goes on to say that there are over 2.2 million heavy (at
least weekly) users. That makes a total of 6.2 million who violate the
law from once a week, to every two weeks or so. How effective is the
war when such figures can be cited? Now take the big one. There are
over 70 million Americans who have smoked marijuana, and about 10
million who continue to do so. Why aren't they in jail? Does the
Council on Crime in America really wish that they were in jail?

It must have embarrassed the Council that the same week it sputtered
forth on the great success of the war on drugs, The Economist cited
another Council report on crime in America which gainsays its entire
position on the drug war. We learn that only one criminal is jailed for
every hundred violent crimes committed; that over one-half of America's
convicted felons are not sentenced to prison (because, in part, the
prisons are full); that the most violent criminals serve less than
one-half their sentences, and the average murderer released in 1992
from a state prison had served only 5.9 years.

The Economist cites the experience of a patrolman in Haughville, a
scruffy area of Indianapolis. ``He drives up and down in the evenings,
past anoraked figures who stand outside liquor stores and turn their
faces from him. He can guess what they are; few people apart from drug
dealers stand around on nights like this, when the puddles in the
potholes freeze hard. Besides, Patrolman Reichle knows most of them: he
reckons he has arrested one in five of these young men.''

City prosecutors "do not even bring charges against drug dealers until
they have been arrested several times. Those who do get charged and
found guilty will not go to prison, unless they have other
convictions. President Bill Clinton's call for a crackdown on drug
dealers sounds pretty hollow in Haughville."

Such is overcrowding in state prisons in Indiana -- notwithstanding
that the national increase in prison space is threefold since we
decided to wage hard war on drugs -- that even a relatively new
American prison might have merited describing by Charles Dickens.
``Prisoners pass their days in narrow, ill-lit cages; there are no
chairs or tables, so the men pace up and down like zoo animals or
slouch upon the floor.''

So what has the war done? It has made a mockery of an anti-drug law
that is simply ignored by millions; it has induced violent felonies in
pursuit of drug profits; and it is self-evidently powerless to do
anything about the recent increase in marijuana use by reckless
adolescents. It is a pity that men and women of the moral and
intellectual character of William Bennett treat drug legalization as
the equivalent of moral acquiescence in drug abuse, when other reasons
for repealing our stupid laws are so clearly articulated, primary among
them to relieve non-drug users from the heavy load they bear in the
phony and ineffective war. One forgets -- who won the Hundred Years War
back then? Was it really necessary to take it on for one hundred years?