DRUGS: TO LEGALIZE OR NOT

Decriminalizing the Possession and Use of Marijuana Would Raise
Billions in Taxes and Eliminate Much of the Profits That Fuel
Bloodshed and Violence in Mexico.

The drug-fueled murders and mayhem in Mexico bring to mind the
Prohibition-era killings in Chicago. Although the Mexican violence
dwarfs the bloodshed of the old bootleggers, both share a common
motivation: profits.

These are turf wars, fought between rival gangs trying to increase
their share of the market for illegal drugs. Seventy-five years ago,
we sensibly quelled the bootleggers' violence by repealing the
prohibition of alcohol.

The only long-term solution to the cartel-related murders in Mexico
is to legalize the other illegal drugs we overlooked when we repealed
Prohibition in 1933.

In 2000, the Mexican government disturbed a hornets' nest when it
began arresting and prosecuting major distributors of marijuana,
cocaine, heroin and amphetamines. Previously, the cartels had relied
largely on bribery and corruption to maintain their peaceful
co-existence with the Mexican government. Once this pax Mexicana
ended, however, they began to fight not only the government but among
themselves. The ensuing violence has claimed the lives of at least
10,000 in Mexico since 2005, and the carnage has even spilled north
to the United States and south to Central and South America.

Some say that this killing spree -- about 400 murders a month
currently -- threatens the survival of the Mexican government.
Whether or not that is the exaggeration that Mexican President Felipe
Calderon insists it is, Mexico is in crisis.

The Mexicans have asked the Obama administration for help, and the
president has obliged, offering material support and praising the
integrity and courage of the Mexican government in taking on the cartels.

The U.S. should enforce its laws against murder and other atrocious
crimes and we should cooperate with Mexican authorities in helping
them arrest and prosecute drug traffickers hiding out here. But what
more can and should we do?

Is gun control the answer?

President Calderon asserts that the cartels get most of their guns
from the U.S. We could virtually disarm the cartels, he implies, if
we made it harder to buy guns here and smuggle them into Mexico.
President Obama has bought into this claim and has made noises about
reducing the availability of guns. However, even if the Obama
administration were able to circumvent the political and
constitutional impediments to restricting Americans' access to
handguns, the effect on Mexican drug violence would be negligible.
The cartels are heavily armed now, and handguns wear out very slowly.

Even if the Mexican gangsters lost their American supply line, they
would probably not feel the loss for years.

And when they did, they would simply turn to other suppliers.

There is a world-wide black market in military weapons.

If the Mexicans could not buy pistols and rifles, they might buy more
bazookas, machine guns and bombs from the black market, thus
escalating the violence.

Also hopeless is the notion -- now believed by almost no one -- that
we can keep the drugs from coming into this country and thereby cut
off the traffickers' major market.

If we could effectively interdict smuggling through any of our
300-plus official border crossing points across the country and if we
eventually build that fence along our entire border with Mexico --
1,933 miles long -- experience strongly suggests that the smugglers
will get through it or over it. If not, they will tunnel under or fly
over it. And there is always our 12,383 miles of virtually unguarded coastline.

Several proposals have been submitted in the Mexican congress to
decriminalize illegal drugs.

One was even passed in 2006 but, under pressure from the U.S.,
President Vicente Fox refused to sign it. The proposals rest on the
notion that by eliminating the profit from illegal drug distribution,
the cartels will die from the dearth of profits. A major weakness in
such proposals, however, is that the main source of the cartels'
profits is not Mexican but American. Mexican drug consumption is a
mere trickle compared to the river that flows north.

However laudable, proposals to decriminalize drugs in Mexico would
have little impact on the current drug warfare.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recognized the heart of the matter
when she told the Mexicans last month that the "insatiable demand for
illegal drugs" in the U.S. is fueling the Mexican drug wars. Without
that demand, there would be few illegal drug traffickers in Mexico.

Once we have recognized this root cause, we have few options.

We can try to eliminate demand, we can attack the suppliers or we can
attempt a combination of both. Thus far, the Obama administration,
like every other U.S. administration since drug prohibition went into
effect in 1914, seems bent on trying to defeat the drug traffickers
militarily. Hopefully, President Obama will soon realize, if he does
not already, that this approach will not work.

Suppose the U.S. were to "bail out" the Mexican government with tens
of billions of dollars, including the provision of military
personnel, expertise and equipment in an all-out concerted attack on
the drug traffickers. After first escalating, the level of
cartel-related violence would ultimately subside.

Thousands more lives would be lost in the process, but Mexico could
thereby be made less hospitable to the traffickers, as other areas,
such as Colombia, Peru and Panama, were made less hospitable in the
past. That, after all, is how the Mexicans got their start in the
grisly business. Eventually, the traffic would simply move to another
country in Latin America or in the Caribbean and the entire process
would begin anew. This push-down, pop-up effect has been demonstrated
time and again in efforts to curb black markets.

It produces an illusion of success, but only an illusion.

An administration really open to "change" would consider a long-term
solution to the problem -- ending the market for illegal drugs by
eliminating their illegality. We cannot destroy the appetite for
psychotropic drugs.

Both animals and humans have an innate desire for the altered
consciousness obtainable through drugs.

What we can and should do is eliminate the black market for the drugs
by regulating and taxing them as we do our two most harmful
recreational drugs, tobacco and alcohol.

Marijuana presents the strongest case for this approach.

According to some estimates, marijuana comprises about 70% of the
illegal product distributed by the Mexican cartels.

Marijuana will grow anywhere.

If the threat of criminal prosecution and forfeitures did not deter
American marijuana farmers, America's entire supply of that drug
would be home-grown. If we taxed the marijuana agribusiness at rates
similar to that for tobacco and alcohol, we would raise about $10
billion in taxes per year and would save another $10 billion we now
spend on law enforcement and imprisoning marijuana users and distributors.

Even with popular support, legalizing and regulating the distribution
of marijuana in the U.S. would be neither easy nor quick.

While imposing its prohibitionist will on the rest of the world for
nearly a century, the U.S. has created a network of treaties and
international agreements requiring drug prohibition. Those agreements
would have to be revised.

A sensible intermediate step would be to decriminalize the possession
and use of marijuana and to exercise benign neglect of American
marijuana growers.

Doing both would puncture the market for imports from Mexico and
elsewhere and would eliminate much of the profit that fuels the
internecine warfare in Mexico.

After we reap the rewards from decriminalizing marijuana, we should
move on to hard drugs.

This will encounter strong resistance. Marijuana is a relatively safe
drug. No one has ever died from a marijuana overdose nor has anyone
gone on a violent rampage as a result of a marijuana high. Cocaine,
heroin and amphetamines, on the other hand, can be highly addictive
and harmful, both physically and psychologically. But prohibition
makes those dangers worse, unleashing on vulnerable users chemicals
of unknown content and potency, and deterring addicts from seeking
help with their dependency. There is burgeoning recognition, in the
U.S. and elsewhere, that the health benefits and the myriad social
and economic advantages of substituting regulation of hard drugs for
their prohibition deserves serious consideration.

A most impressive experiment has been underway in Portugal since
2001, when that country decriminalized the possession and personal
use of all psychotropic drugs.

According to a study just published by the Cato Institute, "judged by
virtually every metric," the Portuguese decriminalization "has been a
resounding success." Contrary to the prognostications of
prohibitionists, the numbers of Portuguese drug users has not
increased since decriminalization. Indeed, the percentage of the
population who has ever used these drugs is lower in Portugal than
virtually anywhere else in the European Union and is far below the
percentage of users in the U.S.. One explanation for this startling
fact is that decriminalization has both freed up funds for drug
treatment and, by lifting the threat of criminal charges, encouraged
drug abusers to seek that treatment.

We can try to deal with the Mexican murderers as we first dealt with
Al Capone and his minions, or we can apply the lessons we learned
from alcohol prohibition and finish dismantling the destructive
prohibition experiment. We should begin by decriminalizing marijuana now.