THIS WAR WAS LOST LONG AGO

PEKIN, Ill. -- What do Peoria and Mexico have in common?

A whole heap of violence in both places is connected to the drug war,
which we are losing worse than we've ever lost any war before.

The phrase "war on drugs" has never been so apt. It used to be just a
turn of speech, but make no mistake, it is today a very real war with
a high body count.

Just across the river, Peoria has counted 17 homicides this year as of
this writing, and 89 shootings, according to media reports. It's
impossible to pin down exactly how many of those were drug-related,
but it's certainly fair to say that drugs and the gangs that sell them
have played a role in many of these shootings.

In Mexico, according to The Associated Press, 28,000 people have been
killed in drug violence since late 2006.

Many people living in pleasant neighborhoods like those in Pekin,
Morton, East Peoria and Washington like to feel they are insulated
from the drug trade, but that's rot. Pay attention to arrest records
and you'll notice it's not uncommon for a person living in a nice
neighborhood in Tazewell County to travel to the south side of Peoria
to buy drugs. This is not just a south side of Peoria issue. It
affects all of us.

Drug users who go home to their nice safe neighborhoods to do the
drugs they just picked up on the south side ought to know their
patronage helps fuel the drug and gang war, both in Peoria and in Mexico.

As drug customers, they have the blood of thousands on their
hands.

So the solution would seem to be to impose severe penalties for drug
use and to throw billions of dollars at law enforcement to just stamp
out this drug problem once and for all. Right?

Well, we tried that, and it worked even less well than Prohibition
worked against alcohol use.

It's time to try something new.

First, let's decriminalize marijuana and let people grow their own.
That will take a good deal of the profit out of it. Let people who
want to use this drug use it without contributing to the finances of
bloody gangs.

Stop treating marijuana as if it were the same as meth or crack or
heroin. It just isn't and anybody who insists it is ought to just be
ignored. It's that kind of backward thinking that has helped get us
into the mess we're in now.

The second thing we should do is address the issue of harder drugs by
opening far more substance abuse treatment centers.

Those caught for the first time with a small amount of hard drugs
could get outpatient treatment. Anyone arrested subsequently, or those
caught with larger amounts, would get sentenced to long-term inpatient
treatment. Yes, I know that's expensive. But the cost of letting these
folks ruin our society is so much higher.

I'm not so naive as to think a stint in a drug treatment facility is
going to cure every drug user. But it will surely work better than
just locking them up for a while.

We all pay the price one way or another. Right now we are paying an
enormous cost for drug crimes in the form of taxes to pay for police,
courts, jails and prisons, not to mention the human costs of broken
families and ruined lives.

All this, and we don't seem to be making a dent.

You don't have to be a drug user or soft on crime to come to the
conclusion that what we're doing just isn't working. You just have to
open your eyes.

What we need is a major shift in thinking, one that will allow us to
spend millions of dollars on drug treatment so that we can later save
millions on prisons. One that will allow us to see that trying to get
people off drugs isn't coddling them. It's making all of society healthier.

Or we can keep doing what we're doing, and we can keep getting the
same results.