THERE'S MORE COLLATERAL DAMAGE THAN VICTORIES IN THIS WAR ON DRUGS

Just a random sampling of headlines should be enough to convince the
average reader that there's no winners in the war on drugs. At least,
not on the side of the alleged good guys.

This week, pot activist Marc Emery was to surrender himself to
Canadian authorities, who will in turn transport him to their
counterparts in the U.S., where he will serve five years in prison for
selling millions of dollars worth of marijuana seeds by mail.

One can debate the rightness or wrongness of Emery's business, or the
wisdom of marketing anything drug-related in the States, where even
puffers can end up doing hard time.

But it was legal in Canada, and ultimately, it took the complicity of
the Canadian government to bring about Emery's arrest, and it required
some pressure to elicit a guilty plea, in exchange for allowing two
co-defendants to go free. The DEA got their man, at what cost to our
legal sovereignty?

When U.S. president Ronald Reagan famously declared the War on Drugs,
it's not like we didn't have a good historical template for what to
expect. When the U.S. government declared Prohibition shortly after WW
I, several things happened. First, people who wanted to drink alcohol
went to great lengths to get it. To supply their thirst, a haphazard
collection of semi-organized criminals became increasingly innovative
and ruthless. Drinkers made it fashionable to flout the law, everybody
knew a bootlegger and rum-runners became respectable
businessmen.

What society learned was that you cannot cut the supply if the demand
is still there. Somebody forgot to tell the politicians that, when you
declare war, the bad guys just get badder.

According to some statisticians, alcohol consumption actually did
decline slightly during Prohibition, but the social consequences of
that war are still with us. It's hard to believe anyone is going to
try to sell us on the idea that drug consumption has gone down since
the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan got tough on drugs and Nancy Reagan told
us to Just Say No.

This week, in a hail of gunfire, the Royal Navy intercepted a drug
boat carrying five tons of cocaine. The street value is estimated at
over $400 million. If the bust has any tangible effect on the street,
it will only be to increase the price on the coke that did make it
through. But that's unlikely.

Five tons? Think about it. If any single dealer can put together five
tons of the stuff in one shipment, one can only imagine the sheer
volume that's moving around out there. Think of the demand that makes
the risk worth it. Because if we learned anything during Prohibition,
it's that the demand will be filled, massive profits will be made and
consumers will learn to thumb their noses at the law. Yes, a few
unlucky folks will go to jail. Just the price of doing business.

In the mean time, the combatants in the War on Drugs continue to wreak
havoc, oftentimes on the innocent. Just check out the death toll in Mexico:
six thousand and counting just in the last year or so. In short, we've
successfully outsourced the death and destruction intrinsic to our own taste
for illicit drugs. That's not something we can point to with pride.

As mankind has learned over the centuries, it's usually easier to
start a war than it is to stop one, short of total destruction. At
some point, we're going to have to admit that this whole campaign was
ill-considered, and that it's time to come up with an exit plan. But
don't hold your breath.