MARIJUANA AND PROHIBITION -

Live And Learn?

During the past 75 years - going back to what was the height of the
Great Depression - the US has, by any standard, grown immeasurably
stronger and richer.

But as our economic power wanes and our military supremacy is
challenged by asymmetric warfare, an entirely different issue arises:
have we grown any smarter? And in asking this particular question, I'm
not focusing on the K-12 education crisis we're suddenly all alert to,
though that's bad enough.

In 1920, after decades of struggle from a surprising coalition, in
today's terminology, of religious fundamentalists and left-wing
liberals, Congress passed into law Prohibition. By 1933, just 13 years
later, we had evaluated its incredibly negative effects - in terms of
organized crime, lost government revenues and increased government
corruption, and not incidentally, its negligible impact on alcohol
consumption - and repealed it.

Fast forward to 1970, when the US initiated our War on Drugs. Forty
years on - and the drug war is every bit as big a bust as Prohibition
ever was: drugs from marijuana to heroin are cheaper, purer and more
available than ever; pushers thrive on every street corner in every
big city; and our jails are stuffed with people, mostly minorities,
who have been picked up with pot. Yet, politicians, across the
spectrum, cling to our current policies. As Albert Einstein famously
remarked, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and
over and expecting different results.

In a speech to the Mid-Coast Forum on Foreign Relations on Monday, Ira
Glasser, longtime executive director of the ACLU and, currently,
president of the board of the Drug Policy Alliance, a nationwide
organization focusing on a more rational drug policy, outlined the
depth of the failure of our drug policy and, what's worse, the
insidious nature of how it disproportionately affects blacks and other
minorities. This column is going to be filled with a lot of
statistics, mind-boggling ones - unfortunately, not just the numbers
but the realities they represent.

Everyone is aware that by making drugs - or anything else, for that
matter, that humans are determined to get - illegal, the criminal
world flourishes. Worse, it becomes a self-reinforcing situation as
those arrested, the majority of whom are poor, less-educated black
males, find it just that much more difficult to get a job, so that a
marijuana conviction, legally a misdemeanor, contributes directly to
unemployment, petty crime, and eventual re-arrest for more serious
law-breaking.

It's a vicious circle: drug arrests since 1980 have tripled to 1.6
million annually, about half of which are for marijuana.
Significantly, about 90% of the marijuana arrests involve possession
only, not sale or manufacture. While in 1970, before the war on drugs
kicked into high gear, the number of those incarcerated in state and
federal prisons was less than 200,000, 35 years later, it was 1.4
million. More people are in jail in the US on drug charges than are in
jail in all of Europe, with its larger population, for all criminal
offenses. The most revealing statistic of all: during a period when
the US population increased by 25%; the prison population grew by 600%.

As a result, the US, which has 5% of the world's population, has 25%
of the world's prison population. Either there's something
fundamentally wrong with the behavior that our form of democracy
encourages in its citizens or there's something wrong with our
approach to drugs.