TANCREDO'S NEXT CRUSADE?

What do you talk about at lunch with Tom Tancredo? I thought I knew,
but to my surprise (and relief), we spent much of the hour discussing
the wisdom of legalizing drugs rather than rehashing our disagreements
over illegal immigrants.

"The status quo isn't working," Tancredo says, meaning the war on
drugs has failed -- spectacularly. And while that's hardly a novel
insight, most people who reach it don't take the next step of
questioning the drug war itself.

Consumption of virtually all major illegal drugs in this country has
remained steady in recent years, Tancredo points out, citing figures
from the Brookings Institute. Farcically, the war on drugs hasn't even
curtailed supplies to the point of substantially driving up prices. In
fact, the price of cocaine has reportedly tanked over the past two
decades.

Meanwhile -- and you already know this from a slew of news reports --
the ferocity of international drug cartels is simply breathtaking.
Cartel-related violence and terror -- including beheadings and torture
right out of al-Qaeda's playbook -- snuffed out 6,000 or so lives last
year in Mexico alone, with 1,600 murders just in Ciudad Juarez.
Tancredo worries about this corruption seeping northward if we don't
de-fund the drug lords by legalizing at least some narcotics.

Ah, so that's it, Tancredo bashers will surely say: His obsession with
illegal immigration and the supposedly baleful influence of Mexico is
always at the foundation of his motives. They'd have a plausible case,
too, except that the former congressman distanced himself from this
nation's drug war long before his name became synonymous with border
security.

Back in the early 1990s, for example, I recall him speaking out
against police abuse of asset forfeiture laws aimed at fighting drug
trafficking. Gung-ho drug warriors almost never did that.

For that matter, why shouldn't he worry about the corrupting influence
of the drug cartels when even the Justice Department calls them "the
greatest organized crime threat" to this country?

Although Tancredo has never been a drug-war enthusiast, he's taking
his skepticism to a new level with the recent opening of The Rocky
Mountain Foundation. Besides energy policy and immigration, one of
this fledgling think tank's main concerns will apparently be
decrediting the war on drugs. The foundation will have its work cut
out for it, of course, given the reluctance of most public officials
to even grant arguments for legalization a respectful hearing.

Tancredo says he's personally "gone back and forth on the legalization
of the hard stuff" and doubts that he'd favor it in Colorado (I
certainly wouldn't). But why not let individual states decide, he
asks, and then enforce their own drug laws? Aren't states supposed to
be this nation's "laboratories of democracy"?

Good questions. The alternative to reining in the war on drugs is to
adopt the position of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: Declare the
decades-long campaign a thoroughgoing failure, apologize for the
United States' role in sustaining a huge demand for these illicit
goods, and then pledge to do more of the same in enforcement.

Einstein once said that "the definition of insanity is doing the same
thing over and over and expecting different results." I'm far from the
first to apply that observation to the America's never-ending war on
drugs -- but then there's a very good reason that it so readily comes
to mind.