WE SHOULD RECONSIDER WHAT'S DRIVING OUR DRUG POLICY

Bravo to Mary O'Grady for focusing on the economics of U.S. drug
policy ("The Economics of Drug Violence," Americas, Oct. 11).

In 1975 I was the lead Office of Management and Budget person on an
interagency drug interdiction task force involving the White House
Office of Drug Policy, the OMB, Justice Department (Immigration
Service-Border Patrol and Drug Enforcement Administration) and
Treasury (Customs Service). We presented conclusions to White House
staff and to Treasury and Justice leadership based on estimates that
we were interdicting about 5% of marijuana and about the same
single-digit percent of "hard" drugs coming across U.S. borders.

Resources devoted to the drug interdiction strategy were already
enormous at that time. Officers of the U.S. government (Border Patrol,
Customs and DEA) were actually involved in incidents of shooting at
each other, in connection with claiming the enforcement "turf" between
the ports of entry. Moreover, we estimated that a doubling of
resources devoted to this interdiction task would yield a negligible
increase in seizures and interdiction effectiveness, with a then
unknown increase in profit margins to traffickers.

U.S. drug enforcement policy has been tragically wrong-headed for more
than a generation for several reasons. Foremost is the failure to look
at drug policy with an economic, rather than an ideological, lens. Our
policies of increasing investment in interdiction have raised profit
margins for narco-terrorists, state-terror groups and criminal
syndicates. Our policies of increasing "investment" have been driven
by federal agency union leadership interested in increasing membership
and the scope of their mission. Our inability as a nation to look at
the deteriorating world of drug-financed terrorism and lawlessness may
be the result of our policy of incremental increases. We are like the
frog in the pot slowly being boiled to death. It is certainly a result
of our failure to think seriously about supply and demand effects of
U.S. drug policy.

Like another conservative economist and observer of our failed policy,
George Shultz, I favor legalization of marijuana. I will vote in favor
of Proposition 19 on Nov. 2, as one step in the right direction.

John A. Fisher

Menlo Park, Calif.