WE'VE LOST THE DRUG WAR

It's Cost Countless Lives And Done Nothing To Reduce Drug Use

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 driven by America's insatiable
appetite for narcotics. I come by way of watching Olympian Michael
Phelps do the usual song and dance after being outed smoking weed, the
usual ritualized farce. Most of all, I come by way of personal
antipathy: I don't like and have never used illegal drugs.

But I'm thinking maybe we should legalize them. Or at least begin the
discussion.

I find myself in august 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 said 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 that 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 Mr. Cole, "it's not only that person whose life is crippled. It
drags down their whole family." A 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 Mr. Cole, about 2 percent of the population over the age
of 12 had at some point used an illegal drug. As of 2003, 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 to reduce drug use?

So yeah, maybe we should legalize them. (I use the weasel word "maybe"
only to cover myself in the event somebody raises an objection I had
not considered. I doubt anyone will.)

I leave you one last statistic.

Mr. 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 Mr. Cole, "is the only statistic that's never changed at
all."