IS THE WAR ON DRUGS WORTH ALL THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE?

Over many decades, my drug of choice has been alcohol, unlike Mr.
Walters, the former drug czar, who seems to be fatally addicted to
the drug of power, an addiction that leads to the fatal delusion that
we can win a century-long battle that began with the Harrison
Narcotic Act of 1914. My only direct contact with the drug war was a
half-century ago, when I found myself for almost a year on a federal
grand jury whose main function was to indict dozens of street-level
marijuana dealers.

But over many decades I have watched, incredulous, as the drug war
helped expand drug usage at ever cheaper prices, all the while
funneling generations of blacks and other minorities into the
civilized world's largest prison system. Nobel laureate Milton
Friedman contributed to our understanding with several Wall Street
Journal op-ed pieces, one in 1972, when we were deluged by heroin
imports from Marseille, and another in 1989, when the problem was
cocaine imports from Colombia. In his 1989 article, an open letter to
drug czar Bill Bennett, Mr. Walters' predecessor, Friedman wrote:
"The very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you
deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is demand that must
operate through repressed and illegal channels.
Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics
of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of
law-enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of
honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the
simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault."

William M. Burke

San Francisco