HERE'S HOW TO END THE DRUG WARS THAT PUT EVERYONE AT RISK

Blood sacrifice often precedes significant legislative change. We saw
blood sacrifice during the Prohibition years when prudish zealots
thought that outlawing the sale of liquor would bring an end to
drinking and the worst excesses connected to taking a nip or as many
as needed to release the demons within. Organized crime killed until
the bootleg liquor turf was slippery with fresh blood.

Now, the recent turmoil in Mexico is real proof that we have big
trouble on our hands.

The rooms and the places where people are murdered over the sale of
drugs continue to underline the fact that billions of dollars in
profit create a level of greed so addictive that its coldness is
incalculable.

We have seen all of this before in quite bloody detail. Hundreds were
murdered, from high government officials to people caught in crossfire
when Pablo Escobar ordered entire city blocks blown up in order to
defend his monstrous cocaine profits by declaring war on Colombia.

Knowing that, we should now seriously consider the very simplest way
to break the back of the international drug trade. It needs to be
broken in the same way the back of the bootlegging business was broken.

Need I say what it is? Fine. The only real solution is legalization,
which would put a permanent hole in the bucket of illegal dope dealing.

Mexico is now teetering on the verge of similar chaos because the drug
dealers, like rappers, have absolutely no other way to become wealthy.
Their greed is matched by their ruthlessness and they will not be
discouraged until the game is destroyed. If murder, torture, loss of
family members and doing prison time have not run them out of the
business, they will continue to do what they do and kill anyone who
gets in their way.

That obviously is the way that it really is.

Of course, there is always some talk from imbeciles about the
entrepreneurial skills of such criminals. Well, if they exist we will
see how effective those supposed skills prove themselves if drugs are
legalized. Then our international body of drug hustlers will have to
compete against the big pharmaceutical companies that would
immediately step in, take over the trade, lower the prices and pay
billions of dollars in taxes.

Though I have made this argument a number of times in the past, the
wolf has never been so close to the door as Mexico is now. The dealers
are trying to meet the massive American appetite for chemical fun in a
time when the market is driven not by addicts, but what the experts
call "social users." Their presence is a fact of contemporary life and
they neither rob nor steal for the money they use to fuel the trade.
Many of them, in fact, are middle-class people.

In a time when our economy can use all of the tax money it can get, we
need to look at what legalization would do for us. The tax money would
surpass the billions already spent on a drug war we never come close
to winning.

Not only would legalization bring in enormous tax money, the trade
itself would be much better organized and more efficient all around.

The tobacco companies have the machinery in place to mass produce
marijuana cigarettes on a sliding scale from light to very strong, and
the big pharmaceutical companies could handle all of the rest of the
drugs just as the liquor companies make everything from light beer to
whatever proof liquor is safe and legal.

I see no other way out of this mess and no way to stop people from
willingly spending billions of dollars to entertain themselves. But I
have long believed that once the idea is seriously considered, the
tobacco and pharmaceutical companies will create a lobbying effort
that just might rival the NRA.

The idea of profit makes almost anything possible. We all know that
one.