LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY: THREE REASONS TO END THE DRUG WAR

Legalizing Marijuana Would Add to State Coffers, Empty Prisons and
Reduce Violence.

In 1986 and 1987, I was one of the "masterminds" behind the
importation and sale of about 75 tons of pot from Southeast Asia in
the United States. It was the culmination of a 20-year career as a
drug smuggler, a deal that netted more than $180 million wholesale.

All that government saw, of course, was the sales tax when we spent
our illegally gotten gains. Oh sure, there were some forfeitures once
our organization was finally rounded up some years later. But had
rational minds prevailed over the last 70-plus years, government would
have reaped huge benefits -- in direct sales taxes -- from groups such
as ours. Rather than accept the fact that an estimated 30 million
pot-smoking Americans cannot possibly be criminals, our society has
seen fit to waste almost $1 trillion on its "war on drugs." Not only
has that approach not worked, the entire situation has been
exacerbated by it.

A cascade of bad outcomes follows a policy of prohibition. The worst
may be the dangerous, bloody criminal activity it promotes. In my day,
guns weren't automatically part of the picture, but they are now. The
illegal drug trade is the currency that funds and inspires a vast,
violent and well-armed gangster class.

You've heard the news from Mexico. Since the government there has
tried to rein in the drug cartels, 10,000 people have been killed.
Last month in the state of Michoacan, Mexican security forces arrested
27 elected officials who are under investigation for their ties to
narco-trafficking. In Toronto -- where I live some months out of the
year -- police in April arrested 125 people in a sweep that netted
AK-47s, sawed-off shotguns, 34 handguns and large quantities of
cocaine, marijuana and Ecstasy.

In April in Los Angeles County, 400 law enforcement personnel
conducted a "gang sweep" that officials said "dismantled" a dangerous
gang that sold methamphetamine, Vicodin, marijuana and cocaine. It
took a year of law enforcement's time to put the cast together, and
the gang was responsible for at least one killing over the last year.

Take away the currency of illegal drugs and you take away the guns,
the violence and the associated corruption.

Columnist Steve Lopez wrote about a judge in this newspaper: "I'm
sitting in Costa Mesa with a silver-haired gent who once ran for
Congress as a Republican and used to lock up drug dealers as a federal
prosecutor, a man who served as an Orange County judge for 25 years.
And what are we talking about? He's begging me to tell you we need to
legalize drugs in America."

Another Republican, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said in early May that
he was willing to at least begin a debate on our policies about
marijuana. Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) calculates that
taxing marijuana use alone would bring in $1 billion a year in
cash-strapped California.

Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, in whose jurisdiction I was
sentenced to 10 years in prison, supports legalizing marijuana and
other illicit drugs. "It's time to accept drug use as a right of adult
Americans, treat drug abuse as a public health problem and end the
madness of an unwinnable war," he wrote in these pages in 2005.

Stamper is an advisory board member of LEAP -- Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition.

According to LEAP, "After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S.
policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37
million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population
has quadrupled, making building prisons the fastest-growing industry
in the United States." More than 2.2 million of our citizens are
incarcerated on drug charges, and every year we arrest 1.9 million
more, guaranteeing those prisons will be busting at their seams. Every
year, the war on drugs cost U.S. taxpayers $69 billion.

It is time we stopped treating drug addiction, a medical condition,
with law enforcement. It's time to repatriate the vast quantities of
money that are being hidden, removed from the country and going
untaxed, and it's time we keep those same vast sums from funding
violent crime. It's time to end modern prohibition. It didn't work for
alcohol; it isn't working for drugs.