IT'S TIME TO END THIS MODERN PROHIBITION

Forty years ago, President Richard Nixon used the unfortunate phrase
"War on Drugs," launching a misguided crusade that has encouraged
street violence, eaten away at state budgets and packed our prisons
with nonviolent offenders. The nation's punitive approach to drugs
has turned us into a penal colony. We lock up more of our citizens
per capita than brutal dictators like Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro.

There's an old saying about seeing the opportunity in a crisis.
Perhaps the multiple crises caused by the Great Recession - which has
bled state and local treasuries and swelled the federal deficit -
will prompt lawmakers to end this futile era of prohibition, which
has been costly far beyond the money spent.

Much of the social cost has been borne by black men, who use illegal
drugs at rates about equal to whites but are nearly 12 times as
likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men,
according to a Human Rights Watch report released last year. That's
because lazy tactics encourage local police officers to focus on
penny-ante street dealers to plump up their arrest records.

That practice can have tragic consequences, as it did in 2006, when
Atlanta police fraudulently targeted the home of an innocent elderly
woman, Kathryn Johnston, and shot her dead. More often, those tactics
yield less dramatic but equally tragic results: Prison has disrupted
the lives of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent black men, ripping
them from their families and neighborhoods, rendering them
unemployable and, therefore, unmarriageable.

(Any offender, black, white or brown, who murders, rapes or maims
deserves to stay under lock-and-key. But the streets are not made
safer when we put nonviolent offenders in prison for selling or
possessing small quantities of illegal drugs.)

If you prefer a cool-headed focus on finances, though, that, too,
shows wasted resources. Counting local, state and federal spending,
the nation fights this losing war at an annual cost of more than $40
billion. Attorney General Eric Holder implicitly acknowledged those
costs when he announced recently that the feds, with "limited
resources," would no longer punish users of medical marijuana, as
long as they follow state laws.

That was a perfectly sensible move, though a modest one. Holder
followed up with highly publicized raids in several U.S. cities,
including greater Atlanta, on a Mexican drug cartel. The message? The
Obama administration may not call it a war, but they will employ the
same tactics to halt the savagery of drug thugs.

Yet, the violence associated with the drug trade is fueled by the
illegality of the product, just as it was during Prohibition. Al
Capone wreaked havoc in Chicago, all the while making millions (even
way back then) from the sale of illegal alcohol. When the 18th
Amendment was repealed, the violence dropped off precipitously. If
customers can buy their intoxicant legally, gangsters have little
reason to get in the business.

Most lawmakers are too cautious to advocate de-criminalizing all
narcotics, and that's probably just as well. Methamphetamine, heroin
and cocaine are highly addictive substances that should be regarded
with due caution. But there is every reason for local and federal law
enforcement authorities to target only big-time dealers, measured not
by ounces or bags but monetary value. Anybody caught with less than a
thousand dollars worth of coke is not even a court jester, much less
a drug kingpin.

California, meanwhile - so often the cutting edge - is considering
legalizing marijuana outright and taxing its sale. If the state
succeeds - if it can find a new revenue stream from legal marijuana
sales without obvious collateral damage - other states will certainly
want to do the same. This era of prohibition could end one state at a time.