MAYBE WE SHOULD LEGALIZE DRUGS

I come neither eagerly nor easily to that maybe. Rather, I come by way
of spiraling drug violence in Mexico that recently forced Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton to acknowledge the role America's insatiable
appetite for narcotics plays in the carnage. I come by way of watching
Olympian Michael Phelps do the usual public relations song and dance
after being outed smoking weed, and knowing the whole thing was a
ritualized farce. Most of all, I come by way of personal antipathy: I
don't like and have never used illegal drugs.

But yeah, I'm thinking maybe we should legalize them.

Or at the very least, begin the discussion.

I find myself in august -- and unexpected -- company. Ronald Reagan's
secretary of state, George Schultz, former New Mexico Gov. Gary
Johnson, the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and
the late conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. have all said much
the same thing.

And then, there is Jack A. Cole, who spent 26 years with the New
Jersey State Police, 12 of them as an undercover narcotics officer. In
2002, he founded LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
(www.leap.cc), which now claims 12,000 members -- FBI, DEA, cops,
prosecutors and judges united in the belief that the War On Drugs has
failed and that the solution to the drug problem is legalization,
regulation and taxation.

''So we want to end drug prohibition just like we ended alcohol
prohibition in 1933,'' he says. ``Because as law enforcers we
understand that the day after we ended that terrible law, Al Capone
and all his smuggling buddies were out of business. They were no
longer killing each other, they were no longer killing us cops
fighting that useless war, and they were no longer killing our
children caught in the crossfire.''

The War on Drugs came into being under President Richard Nixon, whose
chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, once quoted the president as saying,
''You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the
blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while
not appearing to.'' Small wonder blacks account for 13 percent of the
nation's regular drug users, but over 70 percent of all those jailed
for drug use.

Then there's the collateral damage. ''When somebody gets arrested,''
says Cole, ''it's not only that person whose life is crippled. It
drags down their whole family.'' This, because the conviction makes it
nearly impossible to get a job, go to college, even rent an apartment.

And for what? This ''War'' has been an exercise in futility. In 1970,
says Cole, about 2 percent of the population over the age of 12 had at
some point or another used an illegal drug. As of 2003, he says, that
number stood at 46, an increase of 2,300 percent -- yet we've spent
over a trillion dollars and imprisoned more people per capita than any
country in the world in order to reduce drug use?

So yeah, maybe we should legalize them.

By the way, I use that weasel word ''maybe'' only to cover myself in
the event somebody raises an objection I had not considered. But I
doubt anyone will: Cole makes a compelling case. He has agreed to take
a few of your e-mailed questions and comments, so we'll continue this
discussion on my blog (http:/blogs.herald.com/leonard_ pitts/) and, if
warranted, in this space.

In the meantime, I leave you one last statistic. Cole says that in
1914, when the first federal drug law was enacted, the government
estimated 1.3 percent of us were addicted to illegal drugs. In 1970,
when the War on Drugs began, the government estimated 1.3 percent of
us were addicted to illegal drugs. Thirty-nine million arrests later,
he says, the government says 1.3 percent of us are addicted to illegal
drugs.

''That,'' says Cole, ``is the only statistic that's never changed at
all.''