THE DRUG WAR: MORE WASTED MONEY AND LIVES

The Drug War

Has a mission;

'Bout as smart as

Prohibition.

The Associated Press recently reported on some exhaustive research,
undertaken by the nonprofit International Centre for Science in Drug Policy.

These tireless scholars examined 300 studies covering the past 20
years, evaluating the public good arising from police crusades
against drug peddling.

The result of all those beefed-up crackdowns? Increased violence! It
seems that whenever you finally nab the top drug lords, a deadly
struggle erupts to replace them. Gang wars explode, body counts rise,
and new openings arise for upwardly mobile young thugs.

This is capitalism in its purest form, visible just now in Mexico. Of
course, these results are obviously tainted.

As you can guess from the spelling of "Centre," the research is
British and Canadian, and thus somewhat suspect. It's not necessarily
sensitive to America's special culture.

We once did our own research about this approach to stamping out a
widespread vice, and it was exhaustive to say the least. Remember Prohibition?

Its results were published daily on the local obituary page. Those
results were so violent that the nation eventually decided to let
citizens drink rather than require everyone to live any longer under
the shrapnel cloud of liquor wars.

Alcoholics Anonymous grew to treat the victims of the resulting
self-indulgence, who, as it turned out, were not markedly more
numerous than before repeal.

But the United States today doesn't yet seem quite ready to repeal
our pot prohibition. Only 44 percent of us are prepared to fully
legalize marijuana, and this doesn't include most politicians.

They often prefer to hang on to the opportunity to demonize
legalization's opponents as "soft on drugs."

Mexico, meanwhile, is way ahead of us. That's not a big surprise in a
country where just one city, Juarez, counted 2,200 murders last year,
mostly of the drug war variety. Mexico has decriminalized small
amounts of marijuana for personal use--its citizens having suffered
from drug-related violence. But unfortunately for them, drug
syndicates don't in fact make their financial killings from selling
to Mexicans.

Their serious money comes from our side of the border. Mexico is
merely the convenient highway where massive turf battles are fought
to control the trade route to El Norte.

Relief for burdened Mexican citizens may, however, be in sight.

Their gangs have now taken to growing the stuff on hidden farms right
here in the United States.

California's notably remote national forests are a favorite site, as
are lonely portions of obscure Texas ranches.

Smuggling in immigrants to do the farming is a whole lot easier and
safer than smuggling the dope itself. Large-scale operations also
allow for more product variety and quality control.

Indeed, quality control is one of the consumer's greatest dangers. In
America's illegal drug economy, there's no such protection. The FDA
isn't involved.

Thus an essentially mild product can occasionally do great harm to
unsuspecting users, as moonshine once did in the old days. But a bad
trip is just one of the social hazards inherent in prohibition.

Other big ones include gunshot wounds, towering incarceration rates,
fractured families, higher taxes, destruction of the commercial hemp
industry, denying many patients effective pain relief, and fuel for
crime syndicates.

In this light, it would seem to make sense to treat marijuana much as
we already do alcohol and tobacco; that is, as a widespread vice
subject to regulation and taxation. In fact, it may well turn out
that the promise of a totally new revenue source is what finally
brings our nation around to reform.