AMERICA'S WAR ON DRUGS MINDLESS

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
minimise 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 US
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 gramme 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 US 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
US 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 shoot-outs, and the daily crimes committed by addicts
trying to raise money to pay the 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 it s 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.

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. The tapes also showed that he
believed homosexuals, Communists and Catholics were 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 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.