FACE REALITY - LEGALIZE DRUGS

A FRIEND was recently at Houston City Hall talking to a high-ranking member
of the city administration when the Pee Police arrived.

The city official's name had just come up in the computer. She had to go and
have her precious body fluids checked under the city's random drug testing
program.

Another shot fired in America's War on Drugs .

It reminds me a lot of the Vietnam War. In both, we simply didn't want to
pay the price of victory.

In Vietnam we were opposed by people who had been at war since the 1940s -
fighting the Japanese, the French and then us.

The United States feared that doing what it would take to decisively beat
the North Vietnamese would bring the Soviet Union and China into a wider
war. So we tried limiting the action - hoping our enemy would give up.

They didn't. We did.

In the war on drugs , the huge profits available - the cost of production
ranges from 1 percent to 5 percent of the street price - means there will
always be plenty of people willing to take the risk of producing, importing
and selling illegal drugs . Consider that despite years of this war, the
street price of illegal drugs continues to slowly drop. If we were winning,
the resulting scarcity would raise prices.

Our will lags our rhetoric

The only way to win the War on Drugs is to turn it into a real war.

We would need massive random drug testing for all Americans, coupled with a
policy of draconian punishment for the sellers that would cost billions more
for police and prisons. We would have to bomb and occupy production sites -
all without regard to damage to innocent bystanders or our international
image.

Sooner or later - like the Vietnam War - we're going to run out of patience
and decriminalize drugs .

Which will, of course, bring its own set of problems.

Doubtless thousands of Americans will die of drug overdoses.. As callous as
it is to say this, at least they won't take the rest of us with them in a
drive-by shooting in a dispute over drug-selling territory. Nor are they as
likely to knock us in the head to get enough money to buy their no-longer
high-priced poison.

And we certainly will have more room in our overburdened prisons for the
violent criminals without the thousands there for either selling or using
drugs .

Pariahs forever

Just because drugs might be decriminalized doesn't mean they would become
socially acceptable.

First of all, drug users would be treated like cigarette smokers are today -
as social pariahs.

We would put tight controls on drugs - restricting their sales probably to
certain bars as the Dutch do. Like that country, we would also have
differing controls on sales of drugs , depending upon their effect. Softer
drugs like marijuana would not be as severely restricted as cocaine and
amphetamines.

Users of drugs would be encouraged to enter treatment programs but would not
qualify for protection under disability laws. Businesses, schools,
landlords, insurers and the government could legally refuse to hire, accept
or grant benefits to them.

We would still keep and enforce laws for selling drugs outside controlled
sites, or to minors.

Drugs would be taxed and the money use for both treatment and anti-drug
advertising aimed at those who might use them - just as California has used
similar advertising from the proceeds of a tobacco tax to successfully
decrease the use of cigarettes in that state.

Would drug addiction increase under decriminalization? Probably, although
the Dutch have found that just the opposite occurred there. Would more
people die of addiction? Again probably.

But consider that illegal drugs cause about 4,000 deaths in the United
States annually. Compare that with the 400,000 deaths (including traffic
accidents) from the perfectly legal drug, alcohol, and the 320,000 deaths
each year from the legal drug, nicotine.