WHAT ARE DRUG WAR PROPONENTS SMOKING?

For years, proponents of legalizing marijuana tended to be
easy-to-ignore cranks like me ... although the support of people like
William F. Buckley Jr. did give the movement gravitas.

Today it has growing momentum. Over the last month it has gotten
boosts from columnists as disparate as the PNJ's Reginald Dogan and
Time magazine's Joe Klein. Even the normally staid Economist
editorialized recently for legalization, writing that "the war on
drugs has been a disaster. ... By any sensible measure, this 100-year
struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless."

It's also getting a boost from Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. In proposing major
reform of our criminal justice system, he points to the waste in money
and lives involved in prosecuting and jailing nonviolent drug offenders.

Underneath it all is an undeniable force: common sense.

In Time this week, Klein wrote that, "As Webb pointed out ... the U.S.
is, by far, the most 'criminal' country in the world, with 5 percent
of the world's population and 25 percent of its prisoners. We spend
$68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being
corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about
$150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5 percent of all arrests
are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money ... that could be
spent on better schools or infrastructure - or simply returned to the
public."

We might also be the most self-unexamined nation in the
world.

Plenty of Americans believe the United States has an innate moral
superiority that justifies it acting unilaterally in the world. Many
believe God blesses our nation's actions over those of other nations.

If so, how has it has come to be that our prisons are stuffed even
tighter than those in totalitarian countries?

One of the most powerful tools of a totalitarian state is a "legal"
system so trip-wired with illegality that everyone is a criminal. The
only difference is that some have been prosecuted, and some haven't.

But is legalization practical?

It was done in Portugal, in 2001 - for all drugs, not just marijuana.
A recent study, conducted for the libertarian Cato Institute,
concluded that it has been a virtually unqualified success.

Contrast that with the violent conflict in Mexico among a variety of
drug gangs and the government. A contributing factor is that the
military, police, judicial system and politics have all been seriously
corrupted by drug money.

An estimated 450,000 Mexicans are employed by the various drug
cartels. The busiest? Those growing, selling and transporting marijuana.

That corruption is spilling across the U.S. border. Drugs gangs are
growing pot in national forests and inside houses in neighborhoods
across the West and Midwest. In Phoenix a plague of kidnappings has
hit the city, and some Americans - columnist George Will among them -
find grim optimism in the fact they primarily target those involved in
the drug trade ... and their families.

Recently, President Barack Obama ducked a question at a public forum
about the legalization of marijuana. He caught a lot of criticism from
progressives, but made the politically smart decision. As Klein noted,
"an unexpected answer on marijuana would have launched a tabloid
firestorm, diverting attention from the budget fight and all those
bailouts.

"In fact, the default fate of any politician who publicly considers
the legalization of marijuana is to be cast into the outer darkness.
. Such a person would be lacerated by the assorted boozehounds and
pill poppers of talk radio. The hypocrisy inherent in the American
conversation about stimulants is staggering."

Hypocrisy? Maybe that's what Mexican officials are talking about when
they note that the root cause of the chaos is the multibillion-dollar
demand for drugs in the United States, while opponents of legalization
object that it would mean ... a lot of people smoking pot.

They already are.