END THE DRUG WAR

I'm confused. When I walk around busy midtown Manhattan, I often
smell marijuana. Despite the crowds, some people smoke weed in
public. Usually the police leave them alone, and yet other times they
act like a military force engaged in urban combat. This February,
cops stormed a Columbia, Mo., home, killed the family dog and
terrorized a 7-year-old boy -- for what? A tiny quantity of marijuana.

Two years ago, in Prince George's County, Md., cops raided Cheye
Calvo's home -- all because a box of marijuana was randomly shipped
to his wife as part of a smuggling operation. Only later did the
police learn that Calvo was innocent -- and the mayor of that town.

"When this first happened, I assumed it was just a terrible, terrible
mistake," Calvo said. "But the more I looked into it, the more I
realized (it was) business as usual that brought the police through
our front door. This is just what they do. We just don't hear about
it. The only reason people heard about my story is that I happened to
be a clean-cut white mayor."

Radley Balko of Reason magazine says more than a hundred police SWAT
raids are conducted every day. Does the use of illicit drugs really
justify the militarization of the police, the violent disregard for
our civil liberties and the overpopulation of our prisons? It seems
hard to believe.

I understand that people on drugs can do terrible harm -- wreck lives
and hurt people. But that's true for alcohol, too. But alcohol
prohibition didn't work. It created Al Capone and organized crime.
Now drug prohibition funds nasty Mexican gangs and the Taliban. Is it
worth it? I don't think so.

Everything can be abused, but that doesn't mean government can stop
it or should try to stop it. Government goes astray when it tries to
protect us from ourselves.

Many people fear that if drugs were legal, there would be much more
use and abuse. That's possible, but there is little evidence to
support that assumption. In the Netherlands, marijuana has been legal
for years. Yet the Dutch are actually less likely to smoke than
Americans. Thirty-eight percent of American adolescents have smoked
pot, while only 20 percent of Dutch teens have.

One Dutch official told me that "we've succeeded in making pot boring."

By contrast, what good has the drug war done? It's been 40 years
since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. Since then, government has
spent billions and officials keep announcing their "successes." They
are always holding news conferences showing off big drug busts. So
it's not like authorities aren't trying.

We've locked up 2.3 million people, a higher percentage than any
other country. That allows China to criticize America's human-rights
record because our prisons are "packed with inmates."

Yet drugs are still everywhere. The war on drugs wrecks far more
lives than drugs do!

Need more proof? Fox News runs stories about Mexican cocaine cartels
and marijuana gangs that smuggle drugs into Arizona. Few stop to
think that legalization would end the violence. There are no Corona
beer smugglers. Beer sellers don't smuggle. They simply ship their
product. Drug laws cause drug crime.

The drug trade moved to Mexico partly because our government funded
narcotics police in Colombia and sprayed the growing fields with
herbicides. We announced it was a success! We cut way back on the
Colombian drug trade.

But so what? All we did was squeeze the balloon. The drug trade moved
across the border to Peru, and now it's moved to Mexico. So the new
president of Mexico is squeezing the balloon. Now the trade and the
violence are spilling over the border into the United States.

That's what I call progress. It the kind of progress we don't need.