DRUG FORUM: LEADING THINKERS COME TO EL PASO

A public forum in El Paso early next week could well be a spark that
ignites what's now a smoldering back-and-forth on what's good, and
what may be a waste of time, on the nation's war on drugs.

It's a University of Texas at El Paso-sponsored event.

There's no better place to spark this discussion than El Paso.

We're right next door to the bloodiest drug-cartel war going, Juarez,
Mexico. Just across our ports of entry, the assassination-style death
total is more than 1,600 so far this year, and it's looking like the
two-year war total will be at some 4,000 when 2009 comes to a close.

The Global Public Policy Forum on the U.S. War on Drugs will start at
8:30 a.m. Monday at the Natural Gas Center at UTEP and 8:30 a.m.
Tuesday at the Plaza Theatre Downtown.

More information is available on the Internet. Google
warondrugsconference.utep.edu.

President Nixon proclaimed a war on drugs 40 years ago. We're not winning.

Up for discussion will be prison overcrowding due to drug crimes,
addiction and rehabilitation. There will be analysis of the
underground drug market. And according to UTEP officials, there will
be " ... Policy alternatives that better grapple with a forty-year
problem with a twenty-first century perspective."

Some 30-plus speakers will serve on panels over the two days. They
include President Obama's border drug czar, Alan Bersin, and Anthony
Placido of the Drug Enforcement Administration. One of the nation's
leading writers and thinkers on drug-policy reform, Ethan Nadelman,
is scheduled to speak. So are expert UTEP and local officials.

When El Paso City Councilman Beto O'Rourke asked that drug-policy
reform become a national discussion, he was met with mixed reactions,
even on a national level.

O'Rourke said this week, "The alternative is to sit by and watch
Juarez consume itself in an orgy of killings, tortures and Hieronymus
Bosch perversions and lawlessness."

Such a forum, with such smart minds, is long overdue in the United States.

It's good that UTEP has brought it here smack-dab adjacent to
drug-war ground zero.