SOME COUNTRIES ARE SCALING BACK WAR ON DRUGS

It's too early to say that there is a general revolt against the "war
on drugs" that the United States has been waging for the past 39
years, but something significant is happening. European countries
have been quietly defecting from the war for years, decriminalizing
personal consumption of some or all of the banned drugs in order to
minimize harm to their own people, but it's different when countries
like Argentina and Mexico do it.

Latin American countries are much more in the firing line. The United
States can hurt them a lot if it is angered by their actions, and it
has a long history of doing just that.

But from Argentina to Mexico, they are fed up to the back teeth with
the violent and dogmatic U.S. policy on drugs, and they are starting
to do something about it.

In mid-August, the Mexican government declared that it will no longer
be a punishable offence to possess up to half a gram of cocaine
(about four lines), 5 grams of marijuana (around four joints), 50 mg
of heroin or 40 mg of methamphetamine.

At the end of August, Argentina's supreme court did something even
bolder: it ruled that, under the Argentine constitution, "Each adult
is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the
state, and dismissed a case against youths who had been arrested for
possessing a few joints.

In an ideal world, this ruling would have a powerful resonance in the
United States, whose constitution also restricts the right of the
federal government to meddle in citizens' private affairs. It took a
constitutional amendment to enable the U.S. Congress to prohibit
alcohol in 1919 (and another amendment to end alcohol Prohibition in
1933), so who gave Congress the right to criminalize other
recreational drugs nationwide by the Controlled Substances Act of
1970? Nobody - and the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on the issue.

A million Americans a year go to jail for "crimes" that hurt nobody
but themselves.

A vast criminal empire has grown up to service the American demand
for drugs. Over the decades hundreds of thousands of people have been
killed in the turf wars between the gangs, the police-dealer
shootouts, and the daily thousands of muggings and burglaries
committed by addicts trying to raise money to pay the hugely inflated
prices that prohibition makes possible.

Most users of illegal drugs are not addicts, let alone dangerous
criminals. Legalization and regulation, on the pattern of alcohol and
tobacco, would avoid thousands of violent deaths each month and
millions of needlessly ruined lives each year, although psychoactive
drug use would still take its toll from the vulnerable and the
unlucky, just as alcohol and tobacco do.

But there is little chance that American voters will choose to end
this longest of all American wars any time soon, even though its
casualties far exceed those on any other American war since 1945. The
"War on Drugs" will not end in the United States until a very
different generation comes to power.

Elsewhere, however, it is coming to an end much sooner, and one can
imagine a time when the job of the history books will be to explain
how this berserk aberration ever came about. A large part of the
explanation will then focus on the man who started the war, Richard
Nixon. So let us get ahead of the mob and focus on him now.

We can do that because of the famous Nixon tapes that recorded almost
every word of his presidency. It turns out that he started the war on
drugs because he believed that they were a Jewish plot. We know this
because researcher Doug McVay from Common Sense on Drug Policy, a
Washington-based NGO, went through the last batch of tapes when they
became available in 2002 and found Nixon speaking to his aides as follows:

"You know, it's a funny thing, every one... out for legalizing
marijuana is Jewish. What... is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What
is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are
psychiatrists."

Nixon had much more to say about this, but one should not conclude
that he was a single-minded anti-Semite. He was an equal-opportunity
paranoid who believed that homosexuals, Communists and Catholics were
also plotting to undermine America by pushing drugs at it.

The reason for this 39-year war, in other words, is that President
Richard Nixon believed that he was facing a
"Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope" conspiracy, as Washington
Post writer Gene Weingarten put it in a gloriously deadpan article in
2002. But that is just plain wrong. As subsequent developments have
shown, it is actually a
Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope-LATINO conspiracy.