A SMOKIN'-HOT DILEMMA

Smart or stupid, prudent or foolish? What was Mexican President
Vicente Fox thinking May 2 when his spokesman confirmed that he would
sign legislation allowing individuals to possess small quantities of
several currently illegal drugs, including cocaine and marijuana?

Supporters of the law in the upper house of Mexico's Congress
included most senators from both the conservative PAN and the more
liberal PRI parties. They claimed that allowing personal use of small
quantities of drugs would free authorities to focus interdiction
efforts on larger drug traffickers.

Was Fox smarter or more foolish when he said May 3 that he would not
sign the bill into law unless Congress agrees to make substantial
changes? More foolish, in my view. But some readers might properly
wonder why I, a self-confessed conservative, would appear to favor
increased drug use.

ABC news correspondent John Stossel had it right when he observed
March 29 that we "can't even keep drugs out of prisons -- do we
really think we can keep them out of all of America?" Stossel also
correctly noted that the gangs that "drug prohibition is creating are
even richer [than Al Capone became during Prohibition], probably rich
enough to buy nuclear weapons. Osama bin Laden was funded partly by
drug money."

Consider: Why would a young man take a job flipping burgers for $7
per hour when he can make several times that much as a lookout for a
drug gang? Why would he endure the arduous 19 years of schooling
required to earn a law degree and make $100,000 when he can deal
drugs for far more money?

But forget all that. We're not going to legalize or even
decriminalize LSD, heroin or methamphetamine. In fact, our national
government is so zealous in prosecuting our insane drug war that we
threatened Fox with God-knows-what for his apparent lapse into prudence.

So today I offer a far more modest and less controversial proposal:
Let's emulate the Czech Republic, which -- according to Kirk Muse in
the May 4 Colorado Springs Independent -- "is the only country in the
world where adult citizens can legally use, possess and grow small
quantities of marijuana."

According to our FBI's crime statistics, of some 1.75 million
American drug arrests in 2004, 82 percent were for possession alone.
And 684,319 were for marijuana possession. In his book Smoke and
Mirrors, researcher Dan Baum claimed that if marijuana were
decriminalized, there would be a 90 percent reduction in drug users.

Some readers will object that marijuana is a "gateway" drug that
"hooks" users, encouraging them to try ever more powerful alternative
drugs. But the Institute of Medicine claims that there "is no
conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally
linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs."

Were it a gateway drug, we would expect large numbers of Czech
arrests for other drug use and considerable drug-related crime. There
is neither. Muse cites data showing that the Czechs' overall drug
arrest rate is 0.17 percent of our own rate and that the robbery rate
is merely 1.37 percent that of the U.S.

And if this modest improvement in our drug laws is still too much for
conservative citizens who, like me, oppose drug use (I've neither
smoked nor inhaled), let's try something even less daring. Let's
follow Great Britain's decision -- implemented Jan. 29, 2004 -- to
downgrade cannabis from a Class B to a Class C drug.

Possession of small quantities would no longer be an arrestable
offense, in most cases. More modest still: Let's allow each state to
determine its own policies regarding marijuana.

So if we don't want to be as crazy as a Fox (at least the May 2
version), we should nonetheless Czech our zeal for locking up
millions of citizens for getting no higher than they might when
imbibing California chardonnay or English ale.