TIME TO FLY WHITE FLAG ON WAR ON DRUGS

This year marks the 40th anniversary of President 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.

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 to 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.

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.

"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.