FINALLY, A NEW APPROACH

New Drug Czar Brings Fresh Common Sense To Wasteful 'War On Drugs'

Angry Americans pounced on the "Bridge to Nowhere" as an example of
wasteful congressional pork-barrel spending. The now-dead $398
million project would have connected Ketchikan, Alaska, population
8,000, with Gravina Island, population 50, and home to the Ketchikan airport.

Most are silent, however, when it comes to Washington's "war on
drugs" that costs Americans more than a 100 times that much in
public dollars. This $44 billion per year expense is just as
wasteful, but there is little political resolve to end the farce.

Actually, this so-called war costs society far more than can be
counted with a calculator, particularly in the fight to curtail marijuana use.

As we've reported earlier in this space, nearly 25 percent of the
world's reported prisoners are held in this country, even though we
have only 5 percent of world population. One in 31 U.S. adults is in
prison, jail or on supervised release, while nearly 50 percent of
all 2007 drug arrests were for marijuana offenses.

But there's a light of common sense on the horizon, seen in efforts
led by Gil Kerlikowske, President Obama's pick to run the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

For starters, the Wall Street Journal reports that Kerlikowske wants
to dispense with the term "war on drugs."

"Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on
drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them,"
he said. "We're not at war with people in this country."

Kerlikowske says he is not for legalizing drugs, but he favors
treatment programs to reduce demand instead of burdening law
enforcement, prisons and judicial systems with nonviolent crimes.

He also wants to ban the Justice Department from raiding
state-sanctioned facilities that dispense medical marijuana. That's
downright refreshing. In California, these raids featured federal
agents yanking marijuana cigarettes from the lips of senior citizens
and arresting wheelchair-bound cancer victims.

The war on drugs is an utter failure under any definition. The
nation's new drug czar favors a different approach. That's good. It
can't be any more wasteful than this national bridge to nowhere
we've been funding for more than 20 years.