REALITY INTRUDES ON THE DRUG WAR

In the story of the emperor with no clothes, it took someone whose
observations are rarely heeded--a child--to point out the obvious
fact that no one else could acknowledge. In the case of drug policy,
it takes people who are usually ignored by Washington
policymakers--Latin Americans--to perform the same invaluable service.

Last week, a commission made up of 17 members, from Peruvian novelist
Mario Vargas Llosa to Sonia Picado, the Costa Rican who heads the
Inter-American Institute on Human Rights, did nothing but admit the
truth: The war on drugs is a failure.

"Prohibitionist policies based on the eradication of production and
on the disruption of drug flows as well as on the criminalization of
consumption have not yielded the expected results," the panel said in
a report. "We are farther than ever from the announced goal of
eradicating drugs."

The panel was co-chaired by three former heads of state--Ernesto
Zedillo of Mexico, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Fernando Henrique
Cardoso of Brazil, all of whom were once leaders in the crusade. In
1996, Zedillo won attention for escalating the crackdown. But they
have learned from experience that the old strategy doesn't work.

The mere failure to stamp out drugs is not the only result. Worse
still, particularly for Latin Americans, is the plague of unintended
consequences. Among them, the commission noted, are the expansion of
organized crime, a surge of violence related to drug trafficking and
pandemic corruption among law enforcement personnel from the street
level on up.

Normally, these regrettable side effects are sufficiently distant
that Americans can ignore them. But at the moment, Mexico is in the
throes of a virtual civil war. Last year, some 6,000 people died in
drug-related violence, and already this year, an additional 2,000
have perished.

Illegal workers are not the only migrants across our southern border.
"U.S. authorities are reporting a spike in killings, kidnappings, and
home invasions connected to Mexico's murderous cartels," The
Associated Press reports. "And to some policymakers' surprise, much
of the violence is happening not in towns along the border, where it
was assumed the bloodshed would spread, but a considerable distance
away, in places such as Phoenix and Atlanta."

The commission report highlights that we have been fighting this war
for some four decades, with no end--much less victory--in sight. No
one in Washington even talks in such terms anymore. As the Brookings
Institution pointed out in a recent study, drug use in the United
States has remained stable over the last two decades, with a million
people using heroin and 3.3 million using cocaine.

"Despite some of the world's strictest drug laws, combined
hard-core-user prevalence rates for hard drugs are four times higher
than in Europe," it noted. If tough law enforcement at home and
abroad were choking off the supply of illicit substances, prices
would be soaring. In fact, the retail cost of cocaine has dropped by
more than two-thirds since 1990.

The U.S. government has sent a lot of money south to eradicate fields
of cannabis and coca. But this amounts to plowing the sea. Where
there is demand, there will be supply.

Latin America is a large place. Stamp out production in one area and
it will sprout somewhere else. Drug users in this country show a
stubborn indifference to whether their preferred vice comes from
Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay or Pluto, as long as it
comes from somewhere. It always does.

The Latin American commission suggests using education and treatment
to reduce the demand for illegal pleasure in consuming countries. But
between the lines lurks a more important and radical idea, namely to
treat recreational drug use (like drinking or smoking cigarettes) as
a vice, not a crime.

"The enormous capacity of the narcotics trade for violence and
corruption can only be effectively countered if its sources of income
are substantially weakened," it argues. Unsaid is that the only way
to drastically reduce the profitability of drug production and
trafficking is to make them legal--as we did with liquor after Prohibition.

Most people, here or in Latin America, may not be ready for that
remedy. But facing the truth about the drug war is a step toward
salvation. If you want to change reality, it helps to abandon your fantasies.