AFTER 40 YEARS OF FIGHTING, ILLEGAL DRUGS HAVE WON THE WAR

This year marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon's
start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

"We've spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs," Norm
Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. "What do we have
to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and
higher levels of potency. It's a dismal failure."

For that reason, he favors legalization of drugs, perhaps by the
equivalent of state liquor stores or registered pharmacists. Other
experts favor keeping drug production and sales illegal but
decriminalizing possession, as some foreign countries have done.

Here in the United States, four decades of drug war have had three
consequences:

First, we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in
prisons. The United States now incarcerates people at a rate nearly
five times the world average. In part, that's because the number of
people in prison for drug offenses rose roughly from 41,000 in 1980
to 500,000 today. Until the war on drugs, our incarceration rate was
roughly the same as that of other countries.

Second, we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad.
One reason many prominent economists have favored easing drug laws is
that interdiction raises prices, which increases profit margins for
everyone, from the Latin drug cartels to the Taliban. Former
presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia this year jointly implored
the United States to adopt a new approach to narcotics, based on the
public health campaign against tobacco.

Third, we have squandered resources. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard
economist, found that federal, state and local governments spend
$44.1 billion annually enforcing drug prohibitions. We spend seven
times as much on drug interdiction, policing and imprisonment as on
treatment. (Of people with drug problems in state prisons, only 14
percent get treatment.)

I've seen lives destroyed by drugs, and many neighbors in my hometown
of Yamhill, Ore., have had their lives ripped apart by crystal meth.
Yet I find people like Stamper persuasive when they argue that if our
aim is to reduce the influence of harmful drugs, we can do better.

Stamper is active in Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, an
organization of police officers, prosecutors, judges and citizens who
favor a dramatic liberalization of American drug laws. He said he
gradually became disillusioned with the drug war, beginning in 1967
when he was a young beat officer in San Diego.

"I had arrested a 19-year-old, in his own home, for possession of
marijuana," he recalled. "I literally broke down the door, on the
basis of probable cause. I took him to jail on a felony charge." The
arrest and related paperwork took several hours, and Stamper suddenly
had an "aha!" moment: "I could be doing real police work."

It's now broadly acknowledged that the drug war approach has failed.
President Barack Obama's new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, told the
Wall Street Journal that he wants to banish the war on drugs
phraseology, while shifting more toward treatment over imprisonment.

The stakes are huge, the uncertainties great, and there's a genuine
risk that liberalizing drug laws might lead to an increase in use and
in addiction. But the evidence suggests that such a risk is small.
After all, cocaine was used at only one-fifth of current levels when
it was legal in the United States before 1914. And those states that
have decriminalized marijuana possession have not seen surging consumption.

"I don't see any big downside to marijuana decriminalization," said
Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology at the University of
Maryland who has been skeptical of some of the arguments of the
legalization camp. At most, he said, there would be only a modest
increase in usage.

Moving forward, we need to be less ideological and more empirical in
figuring out what works in combating America's drug problem. One
approach would be for a state or two to experiment with legalization
of marijuana, allowing it to be sold by licensed pharmacists, while
measuring the impact on usage and crime.

I'm not the only one who is rethinking these issues. Sen. Jim Webb of
Virginia has sponsored legislation to create a presidential
commission to examine various elements of the criminal justice
system, including drug policy. So far, 28 senators have co-sponsored
the legislation, and Webb says that Obama has been supportive of the
idea as well.

"Our nation's broken drug policies are just one reason why we must
re-examine the entire criminal justice system," Webb says. That's a
brave position for a politician, and it's the kind of leadership that
we need as we grope toward a more effective strategy against
narcotics in America.