U.S. DRUG POLICY IS VIOLENT AND DOGMATIC

Fed Up Countries Quietly Defect From 'War On Drugs'

It's too early to say that there is a general revolt against the "war
on drugs" that the U.S. 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 U.S.
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), five grams of marijuana (about 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
U.S., where the 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.

One million Americans last year went 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 psycho-active
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 U.S. 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.

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 of the bastards that are out
for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ 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.

"Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors
were fags....You know what happened to the popes? It's all right that
popes were laying the nuns, that's been going on for years, even
centuries. But when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to hell
in, I don't know, three or four centuries ago, it was
homosexual...."

"Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no....You see,
homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the enemies
of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers
are pushing it. They're trying to destroy us."

The reason for this 39-year war, in other words, is that 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.